Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Changing thinking

I have been recently obsessed with TED talks:

From Elizabeth Gilberts' nurturing creativity to Jill Bolte Taylors' stroke of insight to Malcolm Gladwells'  tale of Spaghetti Sauce.

http://www.ted.com/talks?orderedby=MOSTFAVORITED

They all have a unique perspective that transforms the way they view the current culture of thinking. In essence, they adopt the opposite point of view of the currently held belief (for lack of a better term). This isn't fair to Jill since she had no choice and neither was it fair for Elizabeth since she was pestered into a corner.

The people that make the biggest gains in thinking seem to be able to critically observe what we do now and evaluate if that model fits now. Observe is the operative word. Like a good joke by a comedian. "We" get so used to doing things one way that we start choosing to do things incrementally in that same way. (Yin and Yang) Until someone looks around and changes the game instead of changing the rules.

Which leads my strange mind into the last TED talk about what leads to success. Which if you need a link you really aren't that motivated to hear the talk. Being smart was not one of the 8. So I decided to be clever:
Good Ideas Persist. Focused Work Serves. Push your Passion.
Passion Pushes Good, Focused Ideas with Persistent Work to Serve.

So, take a step or two back and look around.

UPDATE:
My line of thinking did not include saying incremental science is bad. rather, incrementally, the science improved to the extent that it could before it required a new direction. Often it seems these transformations in thinking are natural ... but "we" have no way of comparing these transformations to the changes in thinking which went nowhere.

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