ere's
a sure-fire recipe for amiserable, unhappy life. It's
based on an idea I found in one of Emmet Fox's books, which I reflected
upon for a while before producing the following.
Choose
a group—racial, religious, ethnic, political, whatever—and submerge
your individual identity to it. Let the leader of the group do your thinking
for you. And make sure that you never outgrow your colleagues. They wouldn't
like that.
Knock
everything systematically. No matter what you hear and read,
deprecate it.
Never
wait to hear the other side of anyone's story. Knowing both
sides will only unsettle your mind.
Never
learn from experience. Keep on doing the same fool things again
and again.
Parrot
all the expressions that are in vogue. Don't take the time to
think through what they say. When new ones come along, adopt them right
away. And be sure to drop the old ones. After all, you wouldn't want your
peers to think that you're different from them; they may not like you anymore.
Be
a slave of statistics. Completely ignore the fact that every
situation and every set of circumstances is new. That way you won't have
to make an effort to think anything through. Why bother? The probable outcome
has already been determined statistically by someone.
Always
take the word of an expert. Forget that the human brain, one
of which you've got in your cranium, is the most awesome mechanism in the
known world. Convince yourself that you could never know as much an expert.
After all, that's why he or she is called an expert.
Get
into the habit of asking others for input whenever you have
a problem. Doing that will cause your own problem-solving mechanism to
deteriorate and eventually disappear. Which is just as well. Why carry
excess baggage through life when you don't have to?
Think about it. |