Designing your life

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CHAPTER 8 Design Your Life

The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the ac- quisition of specialized knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

Fate or Freedom: Which Do You Choose? Many people talk about their lives as if the events in them were prede-

termined, as if some force in the universe had issued a timeless decree by which the order of all things (including their lives) was prescribed and all events were controlled by inevitable necessity. If you think about your life as a predetermined product of forces over which you have no control, you lose the chance of controlling your life.

The Very Idea of Freedom The idea of designing one’s life comes from two primary insights: 1)

there is a significant difference between life as it is typically lived and life as it might be lived; and 2) by deliberately changing your thinking, you can live in a manner closer to your ideal than if you uncritically allow your thinking to be shaped by the forces acting on you.

Lifelong learners are skilled thinkers who recognize the different roles that learning can play in life. There is a significant difference between being passive and being active as a learner. For the passive learner, the primary end is that of establishing habits that “work,” that enable the individual to “get by.” Passive learners tend to be stagnant as thinkers, for once they

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find something that enables them to get by, they then lack the motivation to change. What they seek in their learning is confirmation of their pres- ent beliefs, their present judgments, their present behavior patterns. They defend their status quo.

Test the Idea : To What Extent Are You a Passive Learner?

Think back on the learning experiences you have had in your life, as well as the opportunities for learning you have had. Answer the follow- ing questions: To what extent would you say you have been a passive learner? To what extent have you actively sought out opportunities for learning? To what extent have you taken responsibility for your own learning? To what extent do you see learning as something that happens to you rather than something you make happen? To what extent do you see value in learning?

For critical thinkers, active learning is a tool for continually bridging the gap between what is and what could be. Critical thinkers recognize the role learning can and should play in their lives. They establish for them- selves habits of continual improvement, of always reaching for the next level of skill, ability, and insight. Critical thinkers are lifelong learners and take charge of their experiences, their learning, and the patterned behaviors that define their lives. They, in essence, “design” how they think and feel, and hence lay the foundation for how they live. They recognize that their think- ing will shape their emotions and that their emotions impact their thinking. They use this recognition as a tool in self-deliberation ( Figure 8.1 ).

Lifelong learners design their lives by becoming clear as to their goals, problems, and options. They carefully think through decisions. They give thoughtful consideration to options. They give explicit priorities to goals. They do not simply react to immediate imperatives, the predictable and unpredictable distractions that occur in all of our lives. Instead, they cre- ate their own imperatives by bringing their foremost goals into the center of their thoughts and actions, and they create their own calendar of actions.

Though our choices are always limited, we usually have a much larger range of choices than we generally recognize to be so.

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To conclude, a scanning of the history of critical thought heightens our awareness of the power and necessity of critical thinking as well as of its rar- ity in human experience. Nowhere is there, as far as we can see, a developed community of critical thinkers. No society systematically teaches it to its young. Every society teaches its view of the world as the TRUTH and invests a good deal of effort into justifying itself to itself. The only community of critical thinkers, to date, exists across cultures and disciplines, across ethnic groups and orientations, across belief systems and lifestyle agendas.

Test the Idea : Committing Yourself to Reading Backward

Try to commit yourself to reading one book per month that is on our “reading backward” author list, or books by other highly reputable authors from different periods in history. Choose books that represent differing perspectives, differing ways of looking at the world. Should you make such a commitment, as time passes you will experience consider- able development in your ability to see things from multiple perspec- tives, and your worldview will significantly broaden.

Implications for the Design of Your Life If we become committed to designing our own lives, and recognize that,

in doing so, we are resisting social forces, and, to greater or lessor extent, act- ing outside of the expected behavior patterns of the social groups of which we are a member, we also learn to keep some of our thinking private. We learn that others must undergo their own evolution, their own development as critical thinkers, and that we cannot give to others the products of our thinking, when it is unorthodox, without their going through a process simi- lar to the one we experienced.

Chapter 8 Summary Summarize the key ideas you have learned from this chapter and previ-

ous chapters. Write your answers as follows:

1. The main ideas I have internalized from working through this chapter are...

2. These ideas are important because...