Stupidity often goes hand in hand with laziness. You. People who have a fixed opinion on many subjects without having studied the matter are generally what you might call imbeciles.
Thinking Requires Effort, Which Is Why Most People Don’t Think.
It’s easier to adopt the preconceived thoughts of others than to resolve to do one’s own investigation. It’s tempting to outsource brain activity. You’d think it would save you time, but it doesn’t. If you get into the habit of borrowing other people’s conclusions, you’ll be limiting your life.
Life Is A Cerebral Activity
Life is all about solving puzzles. If you abandon the activity of thinking, you’ll find it harder and harder to solve increasingly difficult problems.
The Ego Problem
Our main problem is that we can’t stand uncertainty, and we won’t admit that we don’t know something.
In fact, we know very little
Our field of expertise is extremely limited. There are very few subjects that we have really investigated and thought through in depth. Most of the time, we don’t know anything, we’re ignorant and we ignore it – that’s the problem. The first requirement for learning to think properly is to recognize that we know very little. Before filling our heads, we need to calm our hearts: humility is one of the keys to learning. To embrace humility, we must begin to cherish this value and develop an identity that gives it its rightful place.
How Can I Become More Humble?
Hubris guards us and makes us stupid. The truly wise man is the one who knows that he doesn’t know. To develop this quality, you need to confront yourself with difficult things, such as trying out new professions or activities (sporting, intellectual, etc.). In doing so, you’ll soon realize that you don’t know very much. Once you’ve had your dose of humility, you can go about your business again. It’s a good idea, however, to confront difficult things on a regular basis, so as to maintain this level of humility at all times.
Once You’ve Acquired Humility, Start Developing Your Work Ethic
Anything that requires a cerebral effort is good for developing the quality of your thinking. There are thousands of ways to develop your cognitive capacity. The key is to develop the right habits. Thinking well is not an isolated act, but the result of a series of actions built up over time, known as habits. Here are a few important habits designed to develop your brain:
Reading :
Reading is a complex exercise, since it involves unabashedly exposing yourself to the depths of a consciousness (that of an author) and immersing yourself in his or her thought. In everyday life, it’s hard to put up with monologues; you want to participate and respond, and thus establish a dialogue. That’s why reading is a difficult exercise: you have to listen to a thought and keep quiet about it. Yet this is not the way to gather new ideas, because to think, you need the raw material of ideas. Just as a locomotive needs coal, if you stop supplying it, the train stops. It’s the same for thoughts: if we stop confronting ourselves with new ideas, we go round in circles and stop thinking, even if we often believe the opposite.
Writing (or Teaching):
Writing allows you to do two things in particular: clarify your ideas and store them for future use. If you can write about a subject, you’ll be better able to remember it, and you’ll find it easier to talk about. Writing or teaching consolidates knowledge and even gleans new, related ideas. It’s often through writing or teaching that new ideas come to us, and that we can explore other perspectives. Writing is a habit that has to be learned, but the benefits are appreciable in the long term.
Take On Challenging Projects:
A project is the desire to achieve a concrete result. The more difficult the result, the more it forces us to become a better person, especially in our ability to think. There are so many possible projects, there are virtually no limits. Let’s look at two examples that seem to me to be difficult, and which require us to deploy above-average mental resources because of the difficulty involved. The first is online entrepreneurship, and the second is understanding human psychology. In many situations, people can be bafflingly absurd or stupid, which can lead us to want to abandon our understanding of people and simply say: “nature simply explains the difference between people”. This assertion is not totally meaningless: there are indeed differences in nature that explain differences in human psychology. However, nature alone cannot explain everything, and a more holistic approach is needed to better understand people. This means taking an interest in subjects such as history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and even spirituality to try and develop a more intimate understanding of a person who seems foreign to us. To learn to understand is to learn to become compassionate, to learn to love. That’s why loving is difficult; it’s a far more demanding act than hating, requiring a search, perseverance, patience and intelligence that hatred doesn’t need. Hate is easy, which is why so many of us prefer to hate: laziness once again!
Online entrepreneurship (and not just online, either) is a tough business. You have to master countless skills and know-how before you can hope to start earning a living from it: website creation, digital marketing (sales tunnel, social networks, e-mail marketing etc.), content creation, product creation, etc. Entrepreneurship is a world in itself, and requires a real mental complexity. It’s a bit like understanding people: you can’t improvise overnight. You could say that anything that requires a certain complexity to succeed is necessarily good for developing the brain. The trick is to be able to develop the skills over time, and to be able to see the connections between the areas in question.
Think With Your Heart Too
The heart is where a person’s noble qualities lie. To think from the heart is to bring light and love to your thinking. It’s by shedding a little light on a subject that we’re able to understand it. Developing one’s virtue is a way of distancing oneself from stupidity, because virtue imposes effort and a form of belief in intelligence and a form of justice. Virtue takes many forms, all of which help to steer us away from laziness and therefore stupidity: courage, patience, perseverance, self-sacrifice, truth, honesty, forgiveness and benevolence.
