There’s a story about Isaac Newton. I don’t know if it’s true and I have no inclination to find out if it is or not because I like the story. Newton had invited guests for dinner. His housekeeper came to his study and suggested he might want to go upstairs to dress dinner before his…
Tag: thinking
The Abilene Paradox
The Abilene Paradox refers to the practice of people in a group going along with a decision believing that it is what everyone around them really wants, even if it goes against the outcomes the group are aiming for. Put another way, it’s when you believe your preferences don’t align with everyone else’s in the…
Draw what you see, not what you know
I’ve heard this sentence used many times, especially in art classes. Draw what you see, not what you know. If you ask most people to draw an eye they’ll draw a rugby ball shape with a circle in it – a conceptual model of an eye. However, if you look closely at an eye you’ll…
Writing online – and writing that matters
The g-spot is a distraction. That’s what I’ve been telling myself for the past six months, which is when I last published an article here. I’ve been focusing on completing the third draft of the novel I’m writing, on writing that’s ‘important’, which implied that the articles I wrote here were frivolous. However, if I’m…
Thinking and living
I have COVID, again. This is my second dance with the ‘Rona, and on this spin, it hasn’t hit me as hard as it did a year ago. But being home and avoiding people has given me time to think about things. I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking and what we get from thinking,…
Check for teeth before deciding not to throw the baby out with the bath water
I drive to work most days. I always take the same route. On my commute I listen to audio books and don’t concentrate much on the road or the traffic. I’m on autopilot for most of the way. Everything is muscle memory. My brain is so used to the drive that it has decided my…
How to think for yourself
I started my advertising career at Berry Bush BBDO, in Cape Town, a couple of weeks after Rory. Rory was in account management with me, and we serviced the same client. Thing is, Rory didn’t like me, and I can’t blame him as I wasn’t all the fond of myself at the time either. Rory…
We can all be Great Thinkers
People rarely quote their next-door neighbour or their barista in a book or a speech. We (myself included) like to quote people with gravitas. Women and men who have achieved things, who are great thinkers, whom we look up to as persons with wisdom. Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Darwin, Hume, Earhart, Sartre, Woolf, Einstein,…
On seeing the world
“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.” Ernest Hemingway Hemingway calls it ‘seeing’. I like…
A time where everyone became the ‘other’
COVID-19 has changed our lives. Some of the changes I hope endure, however, most of them I’d be happy to never experience again. And there will be side-effects to what we’ve been going through the past few months. One of these effects is the erosion of trust. The world’s response to COVID-19 was to train…