Be As Good As You Can
If you have read “good to know”, you understand that “Be As Good As You Can” has the thinking as its guiding light.
Here follows a short introduction and appetizer!
2022, about 8 billion people will live on the Earth, each with their DNA and a unique brain. So theoretically, our total ability to think is enormous.
Our thinking, exploring, and learning have kept us alive for around 300,000 years. But despite our ability to think in the past, present, and future, we often limit our thoughts and act destructively towards ourselves and others
Thinking and knowledge are powerful tools. This is one of the reasons why the upper class (a group of individuals who occupy the highest place and status in society), through all times, has limited the opportunity for learning for the general public.
How do we think about this? Handing over thinking and decisions to others is good, or is it better to increase learning conditions for everybody?
We have created many structures to delay thinking and learning, but regardless, no one can stop us from doing so. There is always a possibility outside the public system’s traditional framework.
No one will ever be perfect, but everyone can have a goal to become as good as possible.
Be As Good as You Can is a development and education concept whose goal is to understand thinking through the same method as children use for learning: TO EXPLORE. Children do not look for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; they want to understand, not primarily get an answer.
We want to do the same!
Twelve different modules to explore thinking.
Module 1 – Motivation
We get motivated in two ways. One is called autonomous and is a private motivation. The other one is controlled motivation; you get inspired to do something that leads to something else, often with expectations from others in the form of encouragement or punishment.
If you are interested in how we think, you will probably be autonomously motivated to work with these 12 modules.
If you need proof of your knowledge and refer to this course, you have a controlled motivation because your main goal is not the learning process.
You can have more or less of both, and you can have both at the same time.
Module 2 – Identification
Without identifying people, things and situations, we cannot understand. And we need to understand! And you will understand!
No matter the situation or questions, your brain will always provide you with an answer. Sometimes it will be correct, sometimes it will be wrong.
To identify is also to value. How we value is influenced by inherited behaviors, stories, and experiences. Most of how you look at people, things, and situations are formed in your earlier years. As you can understand, creating false images of people and situations is easy if they are based only on storytelling. If you identify a person’s characteristics negatively linked to an appearance, it is tough to change your attitude (remove your feeling) even if facts prove you are wrong.
Module 3 – Linear thinking
We think in a straight line from top to bottom. At the absolute top is an unknown world with gods, promises, and dreams like walking the streets of gold, light, and happiness forever.
At the bottom, there is also something unknown, but with threats and punishment, darkness and suffering for eternal times.
You probably think this is a simplified picture. Still, most of us live our daily lives with this religious thinking, from top to bottom with two main entrances and between these complex descending hierarchical lines.
Even democracy chooses the main leader!
How many football teams do you know that have two head coaches?
Module 4 – The brain and body
Think of your brain as your best friend. A friend with enormous capacity that continuously receives and handles volumes of information. Most of them you will never know anything about.
The brain sorts through the information, spices it up with emotions, packages it into bite-sized pieces, and gives a simplified version back to you that it thinks is appropriate for the situation.
But why does the brain limit the information? Two reasons:
1. It is impossible for our daily thinking to handle all the information we receive by seeing, listening, and communicating. We simply need a center in the brain for sorting.
2. The brain’s primary mission is to keep us alive, and it is satisfied if it can do so.
The brain’s focus on survival rewards selfish thinking. At the same time, thousands of years of evolution have taught us that cooperating with others is the best way to survive.
Meeting a lion alone on the savannah and running is less likely to survive than if six people can challenge, scare, or even kill the lion.
Thinking, therefore, lives continuously with the paradox between selfishness and cooperation.
Module 5 – Learning
Learning is something we do from the day we are born to the day we die, and it is linked to our life situation and often controlled by pedagogues.
A good pedagogue is not always an excellent teacher with good intentions, it can also be a person who wants us to think in a specific direction, and because of that, sometimes learning can be like falling into the trap of one-way thinking.
Module 6 – I, WE, and THEY
Thinking is like a galaxy, an extensive collection of billions of pieces in a cohesive structure simultaneously separated into different parts. We can also see the thinking in a context, but at the same time, we think differently about ourselves, those we know, and people on the periphery.
If we look at both daily situations and history, we can understand that people we do not know very well, even politically and scientifically formulated, can be identified as “non-human”, which allows for inhuman treatment.
Module 7 – Listening, thinking, and conversing
Listening is being interested in what other people are saying. Easy? No, because we often prepare a question while listening.
Thinking is not a one-way activity. Real thinking is brave and can challenge difficult questions with many feelings and thoughts.
Conversing can be divided into three parts; (Anders Enquist 1984)
A. Parents – B. Adults – C. Children.
You can find yourself in any role, regardless of age or background.
A. When a parent talks to a child, they encourage behavior that they expect the child to follow.
B. A meeting between adults usually allows us to handle the situation constructively.
C. When a child meets their parent, they are at a disadvantage and protest. A protest that can be silent or verbal.
Module 8 – Money, Valuation, and Morality
How do we think about money and benefits linked to morality? Could it be so that we value money and benefits more than people’s lives?
Money is an essential tool for living and gives us enormous possibilities and flexibility. But money is also a tool used for polarization.
Module 9 – Easy thinking
The most accessible thinking is to see us as a part of the evolution. That we still have a lifestyle closely connected to animals. An eye for an eye.
Our brains love easy, and easy thinking leads to easy solutions.
There are many real-life situations for exciting discussions about this. Here is one about the strongest right:
A soldier working under a contract has decided to terminate the agreement prematurely. He explains that when he did sign the contract, the information he got was that his army was the strongest and most significant in the world. To occupy a part of another land would be very easy and a natural thing to do. But it did show up that the resistance became strong and that their equipment and weapons were not as superior as he thought. So he quits!
Module 10 – Storytelling
A good story is most exciting to listen to and far more interesting than facts.
Someone said: If you hear a good story, never check if it is true.
We all like stories because they affect our feelings. They make us laugh, cry, get angry, or happy, which is the main reason for a good story; it makes us react.
We love a good storyteller, and your interest and reaction are, more or less, a thank-you to the storyteller. The greater reaction from us, the bigger confirmation for the narrator.
Module 11- Self-esteem and fear
Fear is an inherited behavior and an essential part of survival. Although we live in a less dangerous time in terms of a direct physical threat today, we still evaluate every situation based on fear.
Fear also affects your self-esteem because no one appreciates an unpleasant situation. An unpleasant situation can be daily recurring when we are together with others. For example, if you expect that a teacher or a coach might ask you to show something you feel unsure about, it can put you in a situation where you block your thinking and self-esteem because of fear. Fear has different levels of strength, which is why we often underestimate the “invisible fear.”
Module 12 – Hack your brain
Our brains are programmed from a long ago but under constant pressure from information, stories, and educators that influence how we see things, value, and act.
But at the same time, we, humans can decide who and what we are and want to be.
We have both, HUGE CAPACITY AND OPPORTUNITIES.
But what previously required thinking focused on daily terms is now being shifted more and more to a global focus on our own and others’ survival. Our time requires thinking about how we can shape a global future. No financial resources in the world can buy us a viable planet. The only way is a new way of thinking and acting. We need to focus on how we want the future to be, starting from now.
Looking in the rearview mirror to understand the history and our time is enjoyable; to copy it is a catastrophe!
- You will receive a video and written material at the end of each month. (Sometimes a little later)