As I read the definition of intellectual
perseverance, I can’t help but see many facets that are applicable in one’s
daily life. From Critical Thinking
Community, the definition of intellectual perseverance, “Having a consciousness
of the need to use intellectual insights and truths in spite of difficulties,
obstacles, and frustrations; firm adherence to rational principles despite the
irrational opposition of others; a sense of the need to struggle with confusion
and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve a deeper
understand or insight.” How I interpret
this is having the desire to learn things at levels other than face value even
when it is not convenient to do so.
When thinking about how this
applies as a student, I would say it applies to life in general and not just a
student. One of my favorite quotes is
from Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the
learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no
longer exists.” The earth is constantly
changing and as a result you should be constantly learning – learning about
yourself, your job, your life in general – it doesn’t matter really what you
are learning as long as you are actively pursuing it. At times this mentality can be incredibly
challenging - Lord knows I have learned many things down several hundred feet
below the waterline or while getting rocketed in downtown Baghdad, but the
point is you must always be actively pursuing your baseline level of knowledge.
And these obstacles are not just physical ones.
Some questions can be very hard to just define not even including an attempt
at answering them. However if you are truly
committed to learning about the subject, you will bear down, determine what the
problem is and truly learn about the solution.
Think about the art of philosophy in general: many of the problems are
so hard to even attempt to answer due to all of the ethical/moral
considerations that play into the problem.
I would compare many good philosophy questions to a Pandora’s box – one solution
opens the door to many more questions. Couple
this with every possible answer having multiple pros and cons, and you can find
yourself falling quickly into a quagmire of scattered thoughts and disjointed
outcomes. If you push through these
problems however, you will learn that even though many questions in philosophy
have no right answer, just knowing the multiple different responses make you a
better person.
Also in
the definition is firm adherence to rational principle. If Americans in general took this line and
applied it to their everyday lives, our country would be in a much better
place. Most of modern politics play
solely towards ones emotions. If you
kept a rational mind and asked questions like “does this really make sense”
when the typical rhetoric started, you would find that often politician’s
statements are greatly exaggerated and make little sense. For example, take tax and spending cuts. Every politician from now till the world’s
end will say they want to increase funding in certain programs while cutting
spending in others and do this all while cutting taxes. Sounds great until you stop and think about
the statement. How are they going to
increase spending without raising taxes none-the-less cutting them? Sounds like they want you to have your cake
and eat it to. These people play to your
emotions in order to get the vote – if one stops and thinks about their
comments, you can quickly see through the smoke and mirrors that they try to
pull over you. These emotional points
also cause people to get quite irrational about their political beliefs. It just so happens that there is a Family Guy
episode dealing with this. Brian meets
Rush Limbaugh and first yells at him for his right wing beliefs. When questioned as to why Brian felt that
way, it ended up that he was going off what he had heard from other people who
had heard things from other people vice formulating his own opinion based upon
his own thought processes and fact finding.
I am a strongly opinionated person but only on topics that I have
knowledge on – opinions I have developed using my own thought process and my
own research. How I wish more Americans
would do the same.
When
thinking about how intellectual perseverance applies to a good leader, I would
fall back and restate my original idea.
As a leader, you must always be looking towards the future and
predicting change. In order to formulate
an appropriate response to this change, you must learn about it, its outcomes,
and then formulate the best way for you to deal with the change. If a leader does not do this, he will be a
purely reactive manager traveling to put out fires vice driving the company in
a unified direction. Again, the world is
always changing therefor you must always be learning to deal with the
change. A great example of this is Kodak
– had they anticipated the digital revolution in photography (after inventing
it), they very well could have paved the way for Kodak to remain at the
forefront of photography sector. Instead,
they did little as the world changed around them; now they are a much smaller
company catering to a small niche within a much larger market.
No comments:
Post a Comment