eBook Cover

From free to full-service, CreateSpace offers on demand self publishing options to meet your needs and budget. Sign up free now.

Tripcover Car Rental Excess Insurance

A Test of a First Rate Intelligence
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Rethink Perfect is a “test of a first-rate intelligence”. I like to think it is the combination of the “glass half full” AND “glass half empty” thinking. Or, the art of being pragmatic AND a dreamer, able to hold both opposing or contradictory outlooks at the same time. Being able to find the balance, however fleetingly, between false dichotomies such as right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate, perfect and failure is the goal of Rethink Perfect thinking.
What is new, I think, is my application of Rethink Perfect on relationship theory and the tools that have been spun off by being able to plan for perfect relations and prepare for the failure.

Seeking Dissent and Diversity
In Think Twice, Michael Mauboussin’s book on harnessing the power of counter intuition, talks about on page 34 seeking out dissent by finding data from “….reliable sources that offer conclusions different than yours. This helps avoid a foolish inconsistency”. And “when possible, surround yourself with people that have dissenting views. This is emotionally and intellectually very difficult but is highly effective in exposing alternatives.”
Rethink Perfect is designed to reduce the emotional and intellectual difficulty of having relations with people with dissenting views.

In Guy Kawasaki’s book Enchantment, he talks about having a diverse team.
” A diverse team helps make enchantment last, because people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills keep a cause fresh and relevant. By contrast when a naked emperor runs a kingdom of sycophants and clones, the cause moves towards mediocrity.”
Rethink Perfect is my way of encouraging and maintaining diverse views, together.

Rough Breakdown of My 45 Minute Talk

Introduction
The goal of this talk is to get some agreements on rules of engagement, so that we can have a conversation on a subject that is near and dear to me, The mating cycle.

1. Perfect Thinking

• Certainty
• Self organising systems (path of least resistance)
• Our desire to be always right
• Seeking descent and diversity and our own worst enemy

2. Rules and Rethink Agreements

• Commitment & Compromise

• Enemy to defy
• Rules of golf and road
• Rules too hard
• Parallel talking
• Agree on agreements

3. Prepare for the Failure

• Negativity of this
• Grow apart
• Fear of failure
• Preventative maintenance
• Phase transitions

4. Complain responsibly

• What is a complaint
• The most obvious lost
• Go directly to the source
• If you lose it we’ve lost it

5. Six Rules of Engagement

• Speaking
• Responding
• Moderator a counterbalance

6. Conversations and Conversions

• Conversing lost treasure
• From the start
• Conversations build upon agreements
• Converting our own concepts
• Creativity on steroids a quantum leap
• Feedback loops
• Truce

7. The mating cycle (the conversations and dispute)

• Golden rule
• Who should initiate
• Social trend, does the greatest number rule
• Cause of divorce and marriage
• Cost of sexual relationships
• Conclusion – Matrimony, commitment, & compromise

Whose Child is it?

My comment to Richard Fidler:

Hey Richard, I like your program but was a bit surprised by your intro today. That Tolstoy’s wife, Sonya was "the bearer of HIS children".

Come on! That may have been the case 150 years ago but today surely there is a better way of stating this.

More like "he was the inseminator for HER children and subsequent financial provider. To me, this is how our legal system perceives the male contribution to child birth today, and rightly so, in my view.

They are her children, we (us males) are mere assistants. I do believe that if we changed our language today to suit the true status of male and female in ‘matri-mony" ie "Mother Condition", we would assist in the education of all to adapt to 21st century thinking not 19th century.

The Agreed Truth Will Set Us Free

I heard a psychologist on Big Ideas on the ABC 24 stating the following:

“People tell the truth to hut others but can also tell the truth to help others”

She reckons we should tell the truth to help someone. But what if the someone does not want to hear the truth and calls us a trouble maker for hurting them with
my truth?

I say we need to first get an agreement upfront from the other as to what they want to hear from me as they may not wish to hear anything that they don’t like and then how are they going to treat me if that is so?

Time to get some agreed rules of engagement, I think.

Saying the Wrong Thing

Can someone say the ‘wrong’ thing?

A small question but one that could change our lives, I think.

If you answered yes, then there is a good chance that you think that we can also say the ‘right’ thing. Applying this type of ‘right and wrong’ thinking, with people, is not ‘wrong or right’, but can lead some problems and is the reason that I have written Rethink Perfect.

I do not believe that there is a ‘right and wrong’ way to speak. That if I did not happen to like what or how you said something to me, I would simply let you know what and why. This would be great if you could do the same with me and we both would not have to worry about or fear getting it exactly or perfectly ‘right’.  This would encourage more ‘open’ and ‘honest’ conversation and hopefully result in resolving issues before they became disputes.

Frustrations, by their very nature, seem to involve small issues that occur repetitively over a period of time. Nipping, such issues, in the bud, reduces frustrations, I think.

This is one of the first premises or agreements of Rethink Perfect. If this did not sound too strange then we could move on to the next premise whis is a more detailed way of carrying out the first premise above.

Love and Hate

The oppisite to love is not hate, it is indifference or ignorance.

Three Reasons for the “Illusion of Control”

The Dance with Chance authors suggest that there are three reasons that we should be aware of the
“illusion of control”:

1. Beliefs are usually proven wrong, eventually

2. Human Error

3. And Vested interests

I say:

“Science is not an exact science!”

The “illusion of certainty”

Gerd Gigerenzer, Author of Calculated Risks: how to know when numbers deceive you,

explains that we cling to our “illusion of certainty” because the medical industry, insurance companies, investment advisers, and election campaigns have become purveyors of certainty, marketing it like a commodity.

For example, it is said that a mammography screening reduces the risk of breast cancer by 25 percent. But in absolute risks, that means that out of every 1,000 women who do not participate in screening, 4 will die; while out of 1,000 women who do, 3 will die. A 25 percent risk reduction sounds much more significant than a benefit that 1 out of 1,000 women will reap.