72. Being More Rational

Today, Seth Godin published a blog post about word clouds. (By the way, he is the king of the daily blog and has changed my life several times. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!) He made a word cloud of his blog, so I thought I should do the same.

I was happy to see words of possibility like "can" and "way" take prominence. I was even more excited about "explanations" and "know". If you are a regular reader of this blog you know knowledge creation is at the center of my mind. In the spirit of knowledge creation, I asked what words were missing. What ideas should show up that are not visible? I know this word cloud does not accurately represent the ideas I write about, but it may reveal something.

Every day I try to write something new and hopefully original. It takes an enormous amount of time. It is fun to offer new ideas but I want to evaluate existing ideas more. The words I think are not apparent in this word cloud are "criticism", "fault", "incorrect", and "wrong". The following quote comes to mind:

“A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others - not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others”

― Karl Popper

I want to think more critically about my ideas and the ideas of our culture. I want to improve how I think critically too. Correcting our errors is so important because there may be unknown ideas limiting the growth of knowledge in our lives. And they will remain until we root them out. Taking a few steps back and looking at the bigger picture even if it is a bit blurry is valuable. This word cloud was one way of doing this and it has helped me recognize where to direct my energy. If you write often make one and see what is missing.