Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Well, guys, today, I want to talk about critical thinking. And more than just critical thinking, I want to talk really about our ability to think.

And One I know I say that there, I’ve mentioned several times that this is a lost art. But I’m going to say that that thinking is a lost art. And the ability to critically think is a lost art is something that is not done. It’s interesting how, as a society, we’ve gotten more and more educated. And the inverse has happened when it is comes when it comes to thinking and thought processing. And actually having logical and critical thought to work through things that has radically decreased.

The availability of information is not a bad thing. And that’s not What I’m saying. And neither is education. But What happens is we substitute our ability in our skill sets to think and to work through problems to work through solutions. And to work through situations in life, we substitute that for education, or we substitute that for the right answer, or we substitute that for knowledge. And then we actually outsource one of the most important aspects, one of the most important skill sets and vital skill sets we have in life, which is the ability to think. And so I think, I think this has been very detrimental in some ways. And in a lot of ways it has because when you outsource your ability to think at that point, you are actually just legitimately at the whims of the world or whoever you’re outsourcing your thinking to, you place them in control. And then you simply became a person who become a person who follows orders.

And I’m not saying that orders are intrinsically bad, right? When you have somebody telling you What to do, depending on the relationship and the status and things like that, that’s not intrinsically bad. But when you’re outsourcing your thinking, and when you’re outsourcing your ability to think because somebody else is more highly educated, I’m err, quoting here and there, y’all can’t see me. Or somebody else has a certificate or degree and you outsource your thinking to that individual, you outsource your ability to read, learn, and critically walk through problems or solutions, it really becomes very dangerous. Because you’re giving a vital part of your life away, it’d be like trying to outsource your ability to breathe, or you outsourcing your heart, you know, to pump blood like you, you’re now hooked up to machine pumping it for you. And you know, in different times and spaces, that machine is great, it’s going to keep you alive. But when we do it without needing to do it, that’s when it becomes dangerous.

And so as a result, you know, you can see this happens a lot like, we’ll just hire people cool, I’m gonna hire a CPA in business. Why? Because he knows more about money than I do. I don’t know about that. Yes, he has a degree, he knows different things with the tax code, he knows different stuff, and he can educate you. But just because he has a certificate doesn’t mean he actually critically thinks and walks through things. My wife has actually talked to me a lot about this. She said, you’d be a great lawyer. I’ve never been to law school. But she said you’d be a great lawyer, because of your ability to walk through problems. And to think and my parents raised me to critically think about a lot of things, they really raised me to pause and think about What was being told to me and said to me, and I’m not talking about being skeptical of everything, or and I’m also not talking about being a conspiracy theorist, but What I am talking about, is using your innate ability and your logic to walk through things in most times, or not. And this goes back to my wife saying I’d be a great lawyer is you can come to a solution without having education in it. And I’m, err, quoting education and or certificate into it, because you’re able to critically think, and you’re able to critically walk through things. And so as a result, most of the solutions are simply in front of us. We just don’t want to think about them.

Most solutions to our problems or most solutions on What I should be doing next with my life. They’re normally directly in front of us, but we miss them, because we’re not thinking about them. This is one reason why you hear a lot of business guys talking about reading. They’ll talk about hey, really good self educate. Hey, read, read read. But the point behind the reading, reading does you no good by the way. Unless you’re going to actually think about the information you’ve taken in, reflect on it, and then use it it’d be able to extrapolate What you need, and then apply it later in life. It’s not going to do you any good. But this is why a lot of businessmen and successful businessmen talk about reading, it’s to better your ability to think and it’s better your ability to walk through and reflect with different things in life. But all this is just predicated on thinking. And the dangerous thing is just to outsource your thinking. Yes, you may need a CPA. But if you haven’t done your due diligence to really learn and understand how money or taxes or those things work, you’re giving away a very valuable part of your life that they might not be the right person for.

Anyways guys, I’m out of time so I’ll catch y’all later. Peace.