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Passages Of The Day |
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| The Intelligence Trap (ii) |
Highly intelligent people are often inclined towards negative thinking. This is because they know that they are clever and they want to get a sense of achievement from that cleverness; the quickest form of achievement is to criticize someone else and prove that other person wrong. This is an immediate and complete achievement that makes one feel superior to the other person. To put forward a constructive idea is less satisfactory because you have achieved nothing until you can actually show that the idea works - and that can take time - unless it is a mathematical problem for which you can demonstrate the answer. Negative thinking is, of course, an important part of thinking but it is never enough by itself. You cannot grow a garden just by wielding the shears.
Intelligent people who are not masterthinkers do not like being wrong. Their ego and sense of personal worth has been built around their intelligence so it becomes very difficult to admit and error. This means that such people do all they can to avoid admitting an error. This makes for inefficient thinking. A masterthinker admits an error at once since his or her concern is for objective thinking. The fear of making a mistake keeps some intelligent people from putting forward speculative or creative ideas because these might turn out to be wrong. Such people do not like taking risks with their thinking. Taking risks is at times a necessary part of thinking.
Because an intelligent person's mind works very quickly such a person may jump to conclusions very rapidly. At times this can be useful. At other times it may be dangerous. A slower thinker may need to take in more information before jumping to a conclusion and so may actually come to a better conclusion.
Perhaps the biggest danger is that many highly intelligent people (especially when young) tend to be very arrogant about their thinking. This is unfortunate since there are no grounds for arrogance about thinking at any time.
I want to make it clear that not all intelligent people are caught in the intelligence trap. Nevertheless the danger is there. If you are driving a powerful car you have to be even more careful as a driver than someone driving a less powerful car. So the intelligent thinker may have to pay even more attention to thinking skills. Certainly, he or she should not assume that being intelligent is enough.
An intelligent person going through this book may find some of the techniques and exercises quite easy to do. In that case that person should do them superbly well. |
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Passage taken from: "Edward de Bono's Masterthinkers Handbook" by Edward de Bono, ISBN 0-14-014594-X Copyright © Mica Management Resources Inc., 1985
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