“IT’S THE MIND, SILLY!”

In the 1990s when Bill Clifton was running for President, James Carville came up with a campaign slogan that began an ad and theme for the campaign, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” In those short four words, Carville summed up the whole reason for people to vote for Cliton. And they did. It put him into the White House.

Similarly when it comes to Thinking for Humans as a Brain Camp for enabling people to move beyond being told what to think, to truly being able to learn how to think for themselves, the most compelling argument that I can think of is, “It’s the mind, silly!” [I thought about using the words ‘stupid,’ but decided that might be a bit too much. Anyway, silly is much more kind and gentle.]

“It’s the mind, silly!” because everything important, everything human, and everything that counts in our world comes from the mind and how the mind thinks. Everything important and human in your world comes from your mind and how you think. Everything! How you communicate, how you relate, the ideas you get about what to do, how to solve a problem, what to say to someone, what to create, and on and on.

“It’s the mind, silly!” because success (and failure) arise from how you think! John Maxwell in Thinking for a Change, (2003) asked this question: “Why are some people successful and others not?” He answered his own question in this way: Successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. Thomas Stanley in his book, The Millionaire Mind, wrote something very similiar: “To become a millionaire, you have to think like a millionaire.” And that would be a principle in every field: To become a doctor, you have to think like a doctor; to become an expert coach, you have to think like an expert coach. Simple yes; and profound.

“It’s the mind, silly!” because this is the heart of education, of learning and development, of creativity and innovation. Albert Einstein put it this way: “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” He added: “The problems we face today cannot be solved on the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Jordan Peterson has added one more aspect of this: “Learn to think so you don’t be stupid, so you don’t fall for stupid things that will ruin your life.”

“It’s the mind, silly!” because on the surface, thinking seems like a simple and obvious thing. It is not. None other than Henry Ford knew that when he wrote, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probably reason why so few engage in it.” After he invented the assembly line, its brilliance was obvious to all. But no one had thought that into existence before him. He did the thinking.

“It’s the mind, silly!” because it is the key to change, to personal transformation, and to becoming the architect of your own future. William James identified this just b efore the turn of the 20th century when he wrote: “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing their inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” Gregory Bateson confirmed this in his book, Toward an Ecology of Mind: “We must change our whole way of thinking about mental and communicational processes.” And, “The most important task today is to learn to think in a new way.”

“It’s the mind, silly!” because this is what NLP and the updated version of NLP, Neuro-Semantics is all about: “NLP is a revolutionary study of the process of human thought. It’s a study of what’s actually going on when we think. ... Learning the operating principles of NLP is about how you think and how others think.” Tom Dotz, NLP: The Essential Guide. “The quality of your life is the outcome of your thoughts.” Laureli Blyth and Heidi Heron 30 Days to NLP. Joseph Yeager went even further and wrote a book, Thinking about Thinking with NLP, writing, “NLP is the science of thinking about thinking.”

So yes, “It’s the mind, silly!” And it is the way your mind (and mine) thinks. After all, thinking is what your mind does. Given that, how well do you think? What is the quality of your thinking? How proud are you of your critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills? How skillful are your problem-solving thinking skills? How quickly can you identify the kind of thinking that’s creating your problems or someone else’s problems?

And finally, there is now a training on how to think so that you can do your own thinking, learn the multitude of thinking skills which are available to you and become an excellent thinker. Learning for Humans is the training, it is a ‘Brain Camp,’ for upgrading your thinking skills. And when you upgrade your thinking skills, then you upgrade the very quality of your life and all that you do. That’s because the quality of your thinking is the quality of your life.