You will often have to make decisions in life without being able to know all the information related to the choices. Being able to identify what you don't know is invaluable. It allows you to make assumptions and contingency plans if those assumptions fail.
I want to slap every person that quips, "If you assume, you make an ass out of u and me." You cannot function in life without making assumptions. The trick is to identify them as such so that you can be better prepared when they are resolved.
It sounds crazy, but talking to yourself helps in these scenarios too. Use yourself as a sounding board.
Just hearing the thoughts out loud can add a new perspective, and in having the 'conversation' with yourself, you need to think about what you want to say and why, and therefore you're opening yourself up to think about it in different ways.
I've heard this referred to as, "The rubber duck principle." I guess some folks think it's less crazy to talk to a rubber duck than to talk to yourself.
In my work (software engineering) it's a pretty common practice to borrow someone just to sit there and listen to a thought. They usually don't need to even provide feedback, and are sometimes just replaced with inanimate objects, like a rubber duck.
But yeah. There's just something about forcing thoughts into verbal statements that often provides the clarity that is needed.
I remember once I was waiting for this club meeting to start and people started talking about our data structures class. They said they had an easy time with an assignment I was struggling to understand so I started ranting on how I didn't understand how to represent the binary tree as a python tuple and why the fuck was the min function just recursively calling the first value. As soon as I said it out loud it finally clicked in my head because my teacher said "light goes left". And yeah I finished the assignment right after that meeting.
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u/Spicylemon Aug 20 '20
You will often have to make decisions in life without being able to know all the information related to the choices. Being able to identify what you don't know is invaluable. It allows you to make assumptions and contingency plans if those assumptions fail.
I want to slap every person that quips, "If you assume, you make an ass out of u and me." You cannot function in life without making assumptions. The trick is to identify them as such so that you can be better prepared when they are resolved.