Your talent lies in your choice - Stella Adler
>> 29 December 2008
Asking questions are the most important first steps to positive changes in the development of your talent, your career. The act of asking questions sets our course to investigate, explore, wonder, and do.Questioning stimulates action.
Questions enhance our choices, and our results.
So find out what's on your mind. Look at a problem, a path you consider, a goal you are looking for and ask yourself many questions. Look at it from many different angles, points of view.
Pretend to be someone else, say your complete opposite, and think about what such a person would choose. How does that make you feel? Does it confirm your choice or make you doubt?
Pretend to be someone else, say your complete opposite, and think about what such a person would choose. How does that make you feel? Does it confirm your choice or make you doubt?
Choice is nothing else than the chisel we use to sculpt our life. Every choice we make takes us closer to or further away from our goals.
As Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote, "He who chooses the beginning of a road, chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end."
Sometimes, when we get to a fork in our road, we will find that one of the paths is easy to take. But that may be the only good thing about it. Is it a path of temptation? Or is it a noble path?
Besides smart versus stupid and good versus bad choices, there is also the choice of non-action. If we don't make a choice, we do nothing. And we have to be aware that it is our decision to do nothing. We give over to fate to sculpt our life instead of shaping it ourselves.
We have to ask ourselves whether we can do this or whether we just want it because we are tempted? We have to always look for the good. No life is so difficult that it cannot be made better by changing and improving our attitude. Because if we cannot change the circumstances, we can always change ourselves.
When we make a choice, do we make it out of habit, for instant rewarding or is it really a conscious choice, made especially for that occasion and reason? It is not always easy. The journal Nature suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain has to override the desire for immediate profit. Do you want to wait 10 minutes to eat two cookies or do you want one cookie now?
Having a cookie now caters to the immediate desire for pleasure, but waiting a little bit for the two cookies may be the more logical, most rewarding option.
"By exploring, we are forgoing the comfortable option in order to do something that might be better in the long run." says Nathaniel Daw, co-author of the study.
Read also an earlier post of mine on Choices are luxuries - or are they?
4 comments:
On my first visit to your site via entrecard, I find this article well written. Keeps me involved and thinking. Think will revisit.
What we ask ourselves is very important, it will make us who we are. So I always say, "ask better question!?"
The choices you make in life, dictate the life you lead.
Great post! Thank You.
Giovanna Garcia
You definitely got it right here. If we dont ask questions, then we just follow the crowd. Like a herd of sheep we dont ask why we are doing what we are doing or consider if things could be different. Asking questions opens us to a lot of options and possibilities, and I believe that is making the maximum use of our thinking faculties. Great post!
@ Pushhyarag: Glad you like my site. I do hope you come back often.
@Giovanna: there are of course no 'stupid' questions. Sometimes the questions that seem the most stupid are actually the ones to ask! But we often hold them back because we are afraid to look stupid. We should not be afraid! Let's step out of our comfort zones!
@ Sharon: yes we should think things through. And sometimes we need to let it rest for the thinking machine can make us crazy. But asking questions from different angles in order to 'step out of the box' is a good way to step out of our comfort zones.
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