To think or not to think

I read something today that a friend of mine had re-posted on her Facebook wall. It was part of an article that suggested that if you want people to think, you should give them an end goal to work towards and let them use their own creativity to figure out how to get the job done.

The article pointed out that, instead of doing this we tend to give people instructions on how we want something to be done and then they just blindly follow the instructions on autopilot until the task is complete. Both ways gets the job done. But only one of them actually engages the minds of the people doing the work.

This caused me to be reminded of the Matrix trilogy. While there are tons of allegories, philosophical lessons and religious overtones, those movies drive home for me how most people live nearly their entire lives without doing any active thinking at all, once they get out of school.

People tend to make a few basic decisions that drive their life in a certain direction and then just tune out for the rest of their lives. The routine becomes all there is.

Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Spend some time with the wife/kids/computer. Go back to bed. That's all there is to Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday are for getting drunk with the buddies/homegirls, watching sports  and forgetting about the trials and tribulations of the week. And then its back to Monday to start the whole thing all over. This goes on for a handful of decades and then we retire. Shortly after we die of old age.

It has been said many times and many different ways that all that truly separates man from the animal kingdom is our capacity for rational thought. If that is true then why is it that 99 out of 100 of us insist on spending nearly our whole lives as zombies, just following along with the masses.

We have the ability to look at our lives objectively, to see the things that we like and do not like about them. We have the power to change the things that we do not like, to craft the life we have into the life we want. Why don't we? Why don't you?

I believe that giving people a task and letting them find their own solution is a tremendously good idea. It saves you the trouble of needing to figure out every little finite detail. Besides, someone else is bound to think of different things than you do, perhaps even better solutions than what you would come up with. And very few people, if any, enjoy being micromanaged.

Encouraging others to come up with their own way of getting a thing done, gives them the opportunity of warming up their little used mental capacities and then allows them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they want to continue thinking for themselves or go back into the Matrix and let their thinking be done for them.