Simply Smart One—Learning for Your Life

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

Preface: Why and How to Get Smarter

Most of us, most of the time, believe that we are smart—smart enough to get on with our lives reasonably well. There is little reason to doubt that we are largely right about this. And yet we may also recognize that there is much we don’t know, and many things we don’t do well, if at all.

Being smart is that it’s not something given once and for all. Smartness is not innate. You can learn to become smarter, not only more knowledgeable about things that interest you, but also a more capable and confident thinker. You can become smarter about making decisions.

Recent findings in brain plasticity confirm the brain’s ability to develop latent capacities lost through illness and injury. Having a growth mindset—a mind that believes it can get better at learning—is essential for developing your powers of thinking and communicating. Henry Ford once said, “if you think you can and if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

However smart you are already, what if you could become smarter? How might getting smarter improve your thinking, increase your confidence, and enhance your life in other ways?

I suggest that you will find it useful (and pleasurable) to get smarter in a few key ways—becoming a more confident thinker, a more critical reader and writer, and a more accomplished oral communicator. I believe that it will be worth your while to invest in improving these intertwined skills. Improving your capacity for productive thinking, critical reading, and effective writing and oral communicating will serve you in many ways.

How, you might ask?

Becoming smarter can enrich your life intellectually, emotionally, and socially. Becoming smarter can improve your ability to relate to and work with others. It can increase your enjoyment of life and help you flourish.

Becoming smarter keeps your mind sharp as you age. It provides an antidote to the accelerating deluge of disinformation. It will make you more discerning.

Critical thinking aids judgment, clarifies values, and deepens understanding. It will make you wiser.

An ability to think creatively, with imagination, will help you generate ideas and solve problems that don’t yield readily to critical thinking. Creative thinking is a basic human capacity, one we possess in abundance when young, but allow to atrophy as we age. But this decay of our imaginative capacity is not inevitable; it does not have to happen.

OK, you might say about critical and creative thinking. But why critical reading? And why writing, too? Although we learn in many ways, from looking and listening to following instructions in learning all manner of things, reading and writing remain relevant to our intellectual development. Reading critically through questioning texts and relating them to our experience deepens our thinking. It makes us smarter. Writing enables thinking; we can’t write anything without thinking. As we write, we discover ideas we didn’t know we had. Simply Smart explains how to get better at these crucial ways of learning.

In the opening chapter, I explain why it’s worth developing both your critical thinking and your creative thinking abilities. I explain why quality thinking matters to us all, today more than ever. In Chapter 2, “Four Ways of Thinking,” I explore the following thinking strategies: dialectical reasoning; combining and connecting; blending art and science; and embracing ambiguity. Each of these strategies can enrich and deepen your thinking.

Chapter 3, “How to Become a Creative Thinker,” explains how you can make creative thinking a regular part of your life, and how to develop a flourishing imagination. We need imaginative thinking to generate fresh ways to solve increasingly wicked problems.

After a brief interlude, “Critical and Creative Thinking in the Workplace,” Simply Smart shifts from thinking to critical reading. Chapter 4 “How to Gain More from Your Reading” illustrates ways to increase your understanding of what you read. “Reading Toward Thinking” (Chapter 5) stresses how reading, like writing, is inextricably linked with thinking—and how you can benefit from that powerful connection. Chapter 6 offers advice about how to read great books that span languages and cultures across millennia—advice you can begin applying immediately.

Following a second interlude, on improving your listening and speaking skills, are three chapters on writing. Chapter 7 focuses on how writing extends and deepens learning; chapter 8 explains the elements of the writing process; and chapter 9 shows you how to develop the habit of writing; it also offers guidelines for exploiting the synergies between reading and writing.

An Appendix explores various types of future thinking. These include interdisciplinary thinking, systems thinking, institutional and architectural design thinking, innovative thinking, and social innovation.

Simply Smart is designed to help you improve your reading, writing, thinking, and oral communication skills—and apply them to challenges you confront personally and professionally.

Let Simply Smart—Learning for Your Life enrich your life, beginning today.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface—Why and How to Get Smarter

PART ONE               Establishing Smart Skills—Thinking, Critical & Creative

Chapter One               Why Thinking Matters

Chapter Two               Four Ways of Thinking

Chapter Three            How to Become a Creative Thinker

Interlude 1                  Critical and Creative Thinking in the Workplace

PART TWO              Cultivating Smart Skills I—Critical Reading

Chapter Four              How to Gain More from Your Reading

Chapter Five               Reading Toward Thinking

Chapter Six                 How to Read Great Books

Interlude 2                  Eight Smart Habits for Listening and Speaking

PART THREE          Cultivating Smart Skills II—Writing Well

Chapter Seven            Writing to Learn 

Chapter Eight              Understanding the Writing Process

Chapter Nine              Developing the Habit of Writing

Appendix                     Future Thinking

References 

Index