"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well."

I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.

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FloorEgg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For what it's worth, most of the pennies I've earned definitely came from my ability to think and communicate well.

I can't help but wonder whether the person who gave you advice "to think critically wasn't for [you]" didn't have YOUR best interests at heart, and/or wasn't a wise person.

I also worked jobs where I was actively discouraged to think critically. Those jobs made me itchy and I moved on. Every time I did it was one step back, three steps forward. My career has been a weird zigzag like that but trended up exponentially over 25 years.

We all have our anecdotes we can share. But ask yourself this: if you get better at making decisions and communicating with other people, who is that most likely to benefit?

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dyauspitr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Critical, individualistic thinking is what the west does best. The east seems to be better at implementation and improvement once provided with a new idea. That’s where we currently stand atleast, who knows how China will do in the future. Maybe they’re the total package but that remains to be seen.

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FloorEgg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Why conflate critical thinking with individualistic values?

It seems you are unnecessarily muddying the water.

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dyauspitr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In my opinion there is a correlation there. I think individualistic societies are better at thinking of new paradigm shifting ideas.

	▲	FloorEgg 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm. I'll think more about this. It makes sense to me that a culture that values collectivistic cohesion would shy away from paradigm shifting ideas (disruption). I also see the correlation between disruptive ideas driven by principled critical thinking over conventional thinking. I guess on some level my assumption is that they are adjacent. Those embedded in a collectivistic culture can think critically but can run into walls within a sandbox of convention. This is how they can be great at iterative improvement and engineering but struggle with paradigm shifting ideas. I think you have a point, but there's definitely some nuance here I'm still untangling.

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bitwize 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen.

/s if not obvious