Day 007 Mull over It before You Do it

The Logical Thinking Process

One of my favorite teachers, a history teacher, taught me a rare and precious lesson in senior high school. To me, it's not only about the way of passing the exam with high scores, but also a proper and effective way to get things done.

Back in the senior high school, most of kidds were still unconcious of their potential prowess and weakness, knowing little about the concept and the huge hidden influnce of being logic and clear in thinking and being concise in writing. (of course, there's ceration exceptions if you protest, however, it's a widespread phonomenon regardless the change of time.) The reason why it nettled our history teacher is that our answers to short-answer questions in the test were, 9 out of 10, a mess because of the lack of clear thinking and succinct writing. Besides that, the school subject's nature as a liberal art pulled its weight as well - the answers usually require a lot of ink and most students thought that the more words they put on the paper, the higher the scores they could get in the end. "Too young, too naive." a quote from our history teacher. His philosophy to the answer of a question was that it's not the number of words that matter, but the quality of them.

He admonished us that we should spend more time on thinking about the answers than writing dowing on the answer sheet which reminds me of a line from Einstein - " If I have one hour to figure out a life-threatening question, I will spend 55 mintues to get the bottom of the true essence of the question - what this question is really about. Because once I make it clear, the left 5 mintues would suffice to answer it."

I think, to a large extent, my teacher's philosophy and Einstein's words share in common. They're all about the significance of polishing the thoughts of both the inquirer and inquiree. We need to get hold of the the true meaning of the question and lay out the correct content our answers contain and the right order our answers unfold first. And it also applies well to the way we act on things, too. If we want to take the next logic and right step to the best of our abilities, the first thing on the list should be to ruminate on the matter, to dwell on it, sleep on it, have second or even, if the time's rich, tenth thought on it.

Of course, sometimes, it's our emotions instead of our logos that lead us. But either requires enough dose of considerstion. Here, your eyebrows may arise and ask how to ponder over matters if we are under control of our emotions. That's the art of thinking, too. You must learn to keep your emotions in check, not the other way around.

Anyway, armchair thinking is the gate to every possible destination. May the words from my history teacher and Einstein could contributes their share in your life, making it even more rich.