Critical Thinking is rare
If I have to begin with one regret about the world it will be this — we are giving up the will to improve and therefore avoiding, or worse, hating all forms of feedback.
We don’t accept feedback so we cannot give feedback thereby destroying the loop of self-improvement.
We no longer have to observe the world because we cannot pass judgment. Fat people aren’t fat anymore. Dumb cannot be called dumb. Masculinity is toxic and femininity is systematically destroyed. Intelligence has become a sign of evil.
Eminem wrote in one of his songs — “In the land of the killers a sinner’s mind is a sanctum”. You can choose to either blend with the world, succumb to the times of today or you can rise and rebel.
Being able to take feedback, provide feedback, and modify your surroundings that help you grow is rebellious in today’s time.
Your ability to take feedback from every step of life enables you to develop critical thinking. If you meet someone like you at a party, would you want to date them, drink with them, or be friends with them? Are you someone, with your flaws and your skills, good enough to help someone grow?
If you are someone who is into self-loathing then you are taking the feedback too seriously and not getting the point of feedback.
That’s where critical thinking plays an important role.
You are aware of your surroundings because you observe everything, you are aware of your internal biases and insecurities because you observe within too, and when you are aware to this point you can never fall, you can only grow.
This is a process that requires internal cleansing of thoughts, biases, and judgments. You only take the judgments, feedback, and opinions based on deductions. This deduction is empowered by evidence, facts, personal biases, and past observations.
When you take feedback, you need to do a postmortem of that feedback, strip it of all the negative things, and only focus on the thing that can help you grow.
While you do that you also need to be aware of your own biases.
All the great people have one thing in common — they can take feedback, figure out what’s important from that feedback, and improve. They leave the negative criticism out of their mind.
I write stories. I love feedback and it’s not just good reviews. I genuinely love feedback not to change my stories to accommodate users but to learn how they feel when they read it. Sometimes I get a review that the story reads like a “Bollywood” movie. It’s supposed to hurt me but it doesn’t.
I don’t take this feedback seriously because Bollywood movies aren’t bad. Not all of them. This specific feedback doesn’t have any precise points that I can review and improve.
There could be feedback telling me that they deduced the suspense from the beginning. Now that’s something that I have to take seriously. Such feedbacks mean that I failed at my storytelling somewhere.
If you take every feedback coming your way with aggression, intending to respond to the attack then you are closing the door on self-improvement. This is how most of the people in the world and on the internet behave.
If something feels wrong about a person ask yourself “What’s exactly wrong about her?” Is it your bias about others? Is it your own insecurity? Are you masking your inabilities by labeling others?”
Go through this process and at the end there’s nirvana because at the end you will have a thinking model that will prevent you from getting hurt and being wrong.
You can see why such a thinking process is rare because it makes you reflect upon your choices and confront your fallacies. Rise above this.