Thinking Style

Cultural Week 3 Blog

How do I style my thinking?

Well accoriing to Dr. Anthony Gregorc I have a good balance of Abstract Random and Concrete Random thinking as I scored 40 and 36 respectively on his test.

Abstract Random Thinkers,

says Dr. Tony, organise information through reflection and thrive in unstructured, people oriented enviroments.

-he's got me there!

And further:

Abstract: This quality allows you to visualize, to conceive ideas, to understand or believe that which you cannot actually see. When you are using your abstract quality, you are using your intuition, your imagination, and you are looking beyond “what is” to the more subtle implications. "It is not always what it seems."

to which I would add:

"mind before matter", "imagination is the ONLY key" and "the commonist of human follies is believing that the limits of their perception is the limit of all there is to percieve"

Concrete Random Thinkers,

-Are experiemnters.

Again this is very close to the mark and I have previously aknowleged that all the knowledge and imagination in the world is of no use if it's of no purpose. One of the priciples of Alchemy is that enlightenment must come from the ground up, that if it is not possilbe to do in your everyday life, while we chop wood and carry water - then it is not really of any use - Things, Tricks and Temptations have to be lived through in orfer to gain further insight. So, yup, I'm an experimenter - the Doc's right.

How does this knowledge help fuel the fire of learning?

Here it get's interesting, taking this knowledge and making it real. For the lack of people interaction through-out phase zero, I have been exposing myself to as much youtube video's as I can get away with. I am normally entirely distracted by the kids while this is going on and it definetly play a part in my unstructured learning, but, I fins that the deliberate immersifivation in the geekdom of developers so free avalible help get that "person" side of things down and makes alot of the terms, concepts and thoguht patterns not so forgein and therfor scary when I get into my more formal study.

I learn alot by going back over stuff and crunching it, mucking around with variables with a light on for expected results and how those results pan out. This can be a bit time consuming, but I do indeed rely on this process to trully understand and therefore retain information and knowledge.

This has been more than a bit tricky and possible the biggest hurdle overall that I've faced so far in the first three weeks. My concept for dealing with so far is to have the problem in front of me for no more than an hour trying to figure it out, and when I can't to immediately seek a true and complete answer to the exact problem I've been working on.

I then I go throught the solution with a fine tooth comb, breaking everything up into as small as bits as I can and see how they react to one another,

Who are you, what are you, where are you, what do you want, where are you going and I try to spend no more than half an hour doing it.

This system is far and away from being perfect and there are still alot of things I haven't managed to grasp, but feel that I have got through a much larger amount of the work this way. If I was working as I normally do, I would peopbably have one really awesome answer and a whole bunch of DNF

The Growth verse Fixed Mindset

The Growth veres fixed mind set is a nice summary of the thought processes that successful people seem to share. I hope that I am in growth, not fixed mode and am starting to have a challenge keeping that way as I get older and find I have done some things the same way forever and can't quite recall the reason I got fixed into that way of doing things. It is always a welcome challenge being called on these situations by my friends and family, as, with all learning, it can lead to some pretty intense bouts of hilarity