Strengths and Weaknesses part 2 Strengths

 Your strengths are combinations of your knowledge, skills and talents. You need them all to bring out the best in you. Of these three, the most important part and the one that clearly sets you apart from the rest is talent, i.e. repetitive thinking patterns. They are your unique talents. You are different because the impulses of your brain are brought in different ways. Acquiring knowledge and skills are essential, but they can also be acquired by others. It is impossible to copy your personal filter. You are different from others, so find your own strengths. They have common features.

I use four different parts in the book. The last three are more or less psychic similarities and success tells about how well the strengths come out:

1. Success

2. Instinct

3. Growth

4. Need

Success is the most obvious feature. Success tells you that you have some ability. There is still a long way to go from ability to strength. I can drop anything and catch any item myself before it hits the ground better than most people. It is difficult for me to refine this ability into a strength. If you know how I can do this, please tell me. The mere ability to do something and succeed in it is not enough if certain psychological criteria are not met.


Utilizing strengths based on instinct is more common than conscious action. This says a lot about the uniqueness of the strengths. You act strongly on your instincts. It is a condition of your existence. Instincts make you volunteer for things you're good at.


Growth means the ability to learn things very quickly and to refine one's ability to do things quickly. Abilities are things that seem easy to you. They do not require your special concentration but feel natural. You can lose track of time during them. This means the so-called flow state. In this case, you will be happy and you will accomplish a lot without realizing it. Growth takes place by utilizing strengths.


A need means how you feel a moment after an action. You are e.g. satisfied, happy and you feel that you have reached a peaceful state of being. Strive for the same state over and over again. You feel mentally strong even though you are physically exhausted. Your need to do something was stronger as a child. Then, you mostly try to do things that feel good. As an adult, you will have many mental obstacles that reduce the need. Strengths are the things you do that make you feel strong, and your weaknesses are the things that make you feel weak. You can be good at something, but still feel mentally drained. This is a sign of your weakness. Use your strengths because they work with less effort. Utilizing them gives you an edge over those who don't.

Strengths and weaknesses part 1. Knowledge, skill, and talent

 You have strengths and weaknesses. Their meaning for you is personal. You might focus on doing things through your strengths, while others focus on improving their weaknesses. For some reason, most of us believe that developing our weaknesses is more important than our strengths. You can get the performance of a Skoda by successfully tuning your truck, but you should focus on tuning your Ferrari. The latter is a wiser option, because in today's world, you cannot do without your strengths.

Knowledge, skill and talent


You can learn the first two. Talents are natural abilities that you cannot learn. You can refine them. Your talents refer to your natural and repetitive thinking patterns and cannot be taught. A talented accountant has e.g. the noble skill of being , i.e. he wants to get all the numbers right. Due to different levels of talent, students starting from the same starting point produce different results. The top level can only be reached if the talent coincides with what one does. This does not mean that learning is not useful for the gifted. Of the strengths, talent forms the essential parts. Knowledge and skills can be acquired, but unique thinking patterns cannot be acquired.


Knowledge means things you are aware of. You can gather information yourself and it can be taught to you. Information can be divided into two parts: facts and information based on experience. You have read the facts and your knowledge based on experiences are the things you have learned along the way. Facts can and should be taught. Knowledge based on experiences is learned by thinking about what was done and how the action has affected either you or others or by following the actions of others. A skill is how you do something. The best way to learn a skill is to break it down into pieces and put them together. The best way to learn is to practice by doing it consciously. Each skill and its parts should be learned in the right way at the right time in the right order.



Talent can be divided into three different categories. Motivational talent explains why you do something. It tells you the reason why you do what you do. Thinking talent tells you how you think, i.e. how you consider options or how you draw conclusions. The unifying talent tells you who you trust, who you work with and who you reject. Talent is made up of the connections in the brain that control its activity. Thinking patterns are different from others because all brains have billions of connections that work in different ways. They are different for everyone. Connections are mostly formed during the first three years of life, and by sixteen years, half of your connections are dead. Connections form mental networks that filter the information the brain receives. The network decides how to react to certain situations.


If you don't know about your talents, find them by following your natural reactions. They are reactions you cannot learn. They are at their best in stressful situations. In addition to natural reactions, you can think about things that you constantly miss. In addition, you can think about things that give you satisfaction and things you learn quickly. The things you were interested in as a child are probably the ones you are talented at. You have felt an attraction to them even at an older age. You'll learn faster the skills you're good at. Embracing them comes more naturally to you than to others. Satisfaction is also a sign of your talent, because those things have the strongest connections in your brain. Think about the things that make you happiest. It is one of the best tips for finding talent.


Anders Ericsson made a study that proved that talent alone is not enough for success. The end result was that getting to the top requires an average of 10,000 hours of focused and purposeful training. The average does not tell about individuals. In reality, the number of hours varied from a few thousand to twenty thousand. The need for hours depends largely on talent. When the number of hours in question is so large, it is clear that without talent, few people can cope with that amount of work. Since the amount of talent tells about repeated thought patterns, such an amount of hours is almost impossible to perform without talent. The interest in doing something ends quickly without the satisfaction of doing it, which is one of the hallmarks of talent.

Critical thinking

The importance of critical thinking increases as the amount of information increases. The result is a difficulty in thinking critically. We should not directly think of the text of any book as such. Instead, we need to think about how well the text is true. We work on instinct most of the time. It works well most of the time. We need to think more about important things. The role of critical thinking is emphasized. There are many obstacles in its way and their impact can go beyond making sensible decisions. Critical thinking means examining things and our careful reflection on their various aspects. This requires us to ask the right questions. Critical thinking is a competitive advantage today. Many current university degrees do little to encourage this. What, why, how, etc. are questions we should be asking all the time to think critically.

The increase in modern day´s stress, workload, and amount of information affects our ability to think critically. Improving critical thinking includes prioritizing, maximizing the utilization of our working memory, and informational flexibility. We have a lot to consider. Resolving priorities makes it easier for us to focus on the essentials. When there is too many things to consider, things are handled at half capacity and the outputs are decreased. We constantly have to increase the use of our working memory and we need to focus better despite the disruptions. Informative flexibility means that we are able to change our patterns of behavior according to the situation and the facts.

Critical thinking has changed recently and its demands on us have grown. Ways to get information have changed. That’s why it’s good to think about how our environment affects us. Today, the pursuit of propaganda and self-interest by influencing the information fed to others is constantly increasing. Anyone can publish their own opinions and their own facts. Our criticism of the source must be intensified. We need to think more about the publisher’s intentions. Google doesn’t always bring out the facts. Our life situations change faster and adapting to a new situation may require a new reflection on the facts, displacing the old facts. Finding out the essentials requires more of our thinking. The exploitation of our critical thinking suffers from many obstacles. They can cause errors in our rational thinking that lead to wrong conclusions

One of our most common mistakes is our natural way of focusing on sources that support our own views rather than trying to think things from different perspectives. Blaming others for our own mistakes and focusing on the mistakes of others instead of looking in mirror. The other mistake is our belief in authority which means that we do not question the facts of someone because we consider him or her infallible. This can apply to our family members, bosses, and politicians. Our pride can also be an obstacle to critical thinking because we find it hard to admit that we don’t know all the facts. Following a herd can also lead to distorted thinking.

We can develop our critical thinking and our brain capacity. There are many ways. Some of them seem self-evident. By questioning our assumptions and examining the information from many perspectives, we get to think more critically. However, we cannot examine too many perspectives, because this can paralyze our thinking into too many perspectives.

We can interpret things differently. We should not just hang out in one way that suits us. We need to learn to think differently. One way is to do things between them out of the ordinary. This helps us to outline different perspectives. We must always think that we are also wrong. We should also ask ourselves “what do we not know?” Self-development and honesty in our skills also help improve our thinking.

Let’s set aside time for critical thinking so we can respond to an ever-faster world. Even the wisest of us are sometimes wrong. The better we accept this fact, the better our critical thinking develops. It will become increasingly important in the future. While critical thinking may seem like an increasing burden to us, it becomes a habit of avoiding unnecessary deeds and thinking of unnecessary things. As a result, we will have more time in the future.

Critical thinking helps when you have to separate the useful facts, actions, opinions, behaviors from the less useful ones and the waste from brilliance . In other words, less is more thinking requires critical thinking.

-TT

Less Is More Thinking is non-linear

Less is more thinking is non-linear. It means that using small investments in it brings great benefits. It increases the time used for thinking, but it creates benefits for our lives. It is important for us to be able to think about things that are important and interesting to us. People are individuals. We cannot do everything as others do, producing fun and benefits for both ourselves and our environment. The core idea is that only a small portion of our efforts yield us most of our benefits. Ratios vary by subject. The number can be 80/20 or even 99/1. 20% of the products can generate 80% of the company's sales. An even number is just a number. Actual ratios can be as high as 50/1 or 97/20. The latter could mean that 20% of authors sell 97% of books in the United States. Radical fluctuations are due to the non-linearities of life and the world. This is important in social outcomes.

The difference is very large, which means that by exploiting the great effects, we can maximize the power of small things. We should start by thinking about the small core issues, those that produce the greatest benefits in relation to their size. After that, we can reduce our workload by focusing only on core issues, or we can try to keep our workload the same by increasing their share, thus increasing our benefits. We must not just focus on them. It is equally important to get rid of harmful things from our lives. The less is more principle also works in terms of negative effects. A small part of our lives produce the biggest negative effects. Eliminating them is difficult. We need to pay close attention to those efforts.

Focusing on core issues and eliminating unnecessary things requires constant thinking. We can’t avoid it if we want to get more out of our lives. Detecting them requires independent action and the use of your own thinking. On average, we are wrong all the time, even in important things. This is done by following the herd. It is sometimes right, but not nearly always. Cause-effect relationships are key. Often the consequences are considered to be the causes, even if they are not. For example, when one muscle is sore, the pain may radiate to another that is treated without failure. Pain is usually corrected with an analgesic that takes away the pain but does not eliminate the problem. The most important thing to think about is to find the main cause that will be put in order and through it we will get great benefit with less effort. We do not have to solve all our problems at once, but we can think of those that will bring the greatest benefits.

This way of thinking is much different from how we often see things as linear, that is, one by one. A small portion of actions will always be of the greatest value to us and others. We need to think about which action produces the most value. It is not found in mediocrity but under a deeper layer. We need to think new and get under the surface. The surface is our way of thinking linearly and traveling with the herd. Focusing on the same insignificances as the others, we create the same outcomes. To quote Mark Twain, “When you find yourself doing or thinking like the majority, it’s time to stop and think again.” For us, the best way to get to the highest value is to create a mindset where we often reject the opinions of the majority. They include dominant states of mind, consensus thinking, traditional wisdom, and easy answers. These obscure the reality from us, that is, the things that bring the greatest benefits. Giving up mediocre wisdom brings great benefits, but it is difficult. Changing our thinking is the hardest thing for us because it is hard for us to admit to ourselves that we are wrong.