Do Hard Things. I have a rather uncommon mantra for my life: Do the hardest thing you can. Uncommon, because I’ve met exceedingly few people who agree with it. In fact, almost everyone suggests the opposite. When I started my MIT Challenge, one of the most common warnings was, “don’t burn yourself out.” Yet, despite taking on bigger projects, I’ve found this mantra to be increasingly valuable. Building Strength If you lift the heaviest weight you can lift, then you become stronger as a result. A synonym for this kind of strength might be confidence, although that also has implications of irrational self-assessments as well, so I prefer the word strength.
When I did my first course for the MIT Challenge, it was stressful. I’d also say I have fewer negative preoccupations during this challenge than before it. What if You Burn Out? Implicit in the mantra is the hardest thing you can do. Burnout shouldn’t be the goal, but it might be a side-effect. But even in that case, how bad is burnout really? Developing an Appetite for Hard Ideas.
Richard Feynman, professor and Nobel-prize winning physicist purportedly only had an IQ of 125. Smart, but hardly in the rarefied spectrum we normally consider for genius. This trivia is usually brought up to show the ridiculousness of IQ testing. If an obvious genius doesn’t qualify for Mensa, how valid can it be for normal people? After reading Feynman’s memoirs , a different idea struck me.
Perhaps genius isn’t best defined by raw intellectual ability. Intelligence as Endurance The two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. Despite this, intelligence-as-endurance has empirical support. . Dweck contrasts the two groups of students as fixed-mindset and growth-mindset. In my own experience working with students, I’ve seen how appetite for hard ideas translates to success.
Hunger for Hard Ideas When I was a kid, I liked books by Brian Greene . A hunger for hard ideas is a specific subset of curiosity. People who believe in superstitions lack this hunger. Developing Your Appetite. How to Self-Educate pt. 1 « Self Educating Times. Study Guides: Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking. By Ralph Dumain “Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same.
To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination. . . ” — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1987), end of section 5 (p. 26) “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.
I, Chapter 15. “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. This web site as a whole could be considered essentially a guide to critical thinking (including specimens of erroneous steps along the way). See also my Reason & Society blog, esp. under the rubric “critical thinking”. EXTERNAL LINKS. Self-Education Resource List.