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Friday, May 25, 2012

Think wrong and you will be right

I am not here to write a romantic story or peeling off some political agenda or blowing off some of my petrous feeling, pointing at the idiosyncrasies or peccadilloes of any particular mortal.
It is just about a thought, which haunted me since I took the right street out of my arena.
I remember once someone told me, "think wrong and you will get the 'right' answers".
At that point of time, I was also unable to understand the abstruse meaning of this recondite line.
I wondered while searching for the answers, does adamant thinking bounds one from reaching the farthest point? What generally we call 'thinking right'. Common saying, do what you think is right. Completely Agreed. But doesn't that stops one from seeing the underlying secrets, rather I must say opportunities which he/she would have came across by thinking other way round.
There is no absolute right or wrong( I hope readers will agree to me on this). What's right for you, maybe wrong for others, and vice versa.
First of all, thinking, ummmmmm, it clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions. It can be based on preconceived notions and learnings. Can it be fully rational? One word I came across recently is fluid reasoning, the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. However commonly what we do is Crystallized reasoning, the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience, relying on accessing information from long-term memory.
Coming back to flight plan, 'thinking wrong', I interpret it to as a thought process where one puts his/her thoughts aside and thinks out of box rationally, logically. Still there is a glitch! Rational thoughts are again based on pre-acquired ideas and experiences. When something is rationally reasoned, it seems to be bounded. Think about it.
According to leading economists, 'thinking wrong' generates new ideas , seeds the new way to analyse problems and helps in brain-storming. 'Thinking wrong' sometimes interpreted as thinking in the way others think, coming from the previously quoted line "what you think is right, others may think it's wrong" . But how do others think, again is bounded by our own experiences with so called "others" .
The way I figured it out, put your feet into others shoes, place every bit of you in his/her position, now think if I would have been in his position, what I would have thought and done to this. I tried and got some of the answers right, but luckily I went wrong too, because people differ, their traits differ, they maybe not as selfish as you are, they may not be as thoughtful as you are and finally the perfect alibi "Randomness".
Why it helps, as most of the times we argue about other's wrong decisions, their wrong doing affect our lives, but if you would have been in their place, you would have done something different, that's the question. So don't exculpate them, respect their thinking, and let it go.
After all this philosophy, if I see about a technical problems, thinking wrong(keeping aside the unidirectional approach) will surely give an optimal solution.
Summarizing the above story,
We ought to do what we think right, which makes us the author of our decisions. Faced with the choice between doing what we think right and what we think wrong, of course with the perfect sense of pride, we ought to do what we think right.
What we need to know is, not whether we should do what we decide to be right, but how we should decide what is right.