'Action comes out of thought'
"The intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressures and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems ... and for this reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that might be assigned to him ... and essentially doesn't belong anywhere: he stands out as an irritant wherever he is." - Aung San Suu Kyi
Feb. 8, 2012A Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS
We are 39 days into this New Year of 2012. English writer Gilbert Chesterton said, "The object of the new year, ... is that we should have a new soul" -- a new beginning.
For the nearly 5 million Cambodians who live below the nation's poverty level, and the nearly half a million who have been forcibly evicted from their homes, a new beginning cannot come soon enough.
Human beings are creatures of habit. We think and act as we have always done. In time, our habits become fossilized and we are on auto-pilot. I am reminded of the saying, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got," and of Albert Einstein's oft-quoted definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
The quality of anything we do, and our future, are determined as much by how we think as by what we know. Individuals can store countless data in their heads, but how each person integrates that information -- the quality of one's thinking -- varies greatly from person to person. Still, the skill of engaging in quality thinking can be taught, can be learned.
Ingrained in quality thinking are: Creativity (assimilating and reframing information to develop concepts and patterns, goals and objectives) and criticality (assessing and evaluating how creative thought has, or hasn't, led to achievement of a goal).
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