Why you need to become an “elastic” thinker

Much has been written about the accelerating pace of change and the globalization and rapid technological innovation that have fueled it. What’s not often discussed: the new demands on how we must think to thrive in this whirlwind era—for as rapid change transforms our business, professional, political, and personal environments, our success and happiness depend on our coming to terms with it.

There are certain talents that can help us, qualities of thought that have always been useful but are now becoming essential. We must learn to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction; to rise above conventional mindsets and to reframe the questions we ask; to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms. We must rely on imagination as much as on logic and generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas. And we must be willing to experiment and be tolerant of failure.

We use ordinary analytical/logical thinking to apply rules, but we use elastic thinking to...continue here.

-- Leonard Mlodinow