150 Wisdom Stories to Build Good Habits

Chapter 25 Diligent in Thinking, Dare to Question (1)
Inventory of Bad Habits
Don't like to ask questions in class;

superstitious authority;

Don't think about things, just follow what others say;

Do things according to the rules, without their own thoughts;

Lack of curiosity, no interest in anything...

The ancients said: "Study is expensive and doubtful", "Study is worth doubting".If you want to succeed, you must be good at thinking, and if you want to be excellent, you must dare to question.If you don't develop such a habit, then success and excellence will never be with you.

Success requires thinking, excellence is due to "doubt"

The famous French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre performed an unusual experiment with small animals known as "religious procession caterpillars."These caterpillars like to blindly follow the one in front, hence the name.

Faberer carefully arranged them in a circle on a frame outside a pot, so that the lead caterpillar actually touched the last caterpillar, completely forming a circle.In the middle of the pots, he put pine wax, which is the caterpillar's favorite food.

The caterpillars started circling the pot.They go round and round, hour after hour, day after day, night after night.They circled the flowerpot for seven days and seven nights.In the end, they all died of starvation and exhaustion.

One by one they were starving to death with a huge pile of food within 6 inches of them.The reason is simple, just because they act blindly in the way they used to.

There is a sentence in Faberer's notebook: "Among so many caterpillars, if one is different, it can change its destiny and bid farewell to death."

Many people have made the same mistake of reaping only a little of the great wealth that life has to offer.Although unknown riches are at hand, they gain little, as they blindly and unsuspectingly follow the crowd in the circle aimlessly.

They go with the flow simply because "that's the way it's always been done."In this regard, their behavior is about as ridiculous as anything "old boy" has ever encountered.

"Old Boy" was sent by his wife to buy ham at the butcher's, and when he got back she asked him why he hadn't asked the butcher to cut off the end of the ham.

"Old Boy" asked her why she had to cut off the end of the ham, and she replied that her mother had always done it that way, and that was a good enough reason.When the wife's mother came to visit, they asked her why she always cut off the end of the ham, and she replied that it was because her mother always did it.

Mom, daughter and "old boy" decide to call grandma to solve this three generation mystery.The grandmother replied that it was because her barbecue was too small for the whole ham, so a piece had to be cut off.

good habit gas station
Blind obedience is the lack of thinking and the performance of not daring to question.Nowadays, many teenagers have done or are doing some unreasonable things. They don't know why they are doing it, and they don't know what to do tomorrow. Their routine of doing things is: acting blindly and aimlessly.As everyone knows, if you want to be successful, you must be good at thinking, and if you want to be excellent, you must dare to question.If you don't develop such a habit, then success and excellence will never be with you.

trust your own judgment

The world-renowned Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa participated in a conducting competition held in Europe.He was the last of the three players to take the stage when he reached the final.The jury gave him a score.With the demeanor of a world-class conductor, Seiji Ozawa waved his baton with all his concentration, commanded a world-class orchestra, and performed movements with international standards.During the performance, Seiji Ozawa suddenly found that there was a dissonance in the music.

At first, he thought that the performers had made a mistake, so he ordered the band to stop and play again, but he still felt unnatural.At this time, the composers present and the authorities of the judging committee all solemnly declared that there was no problem with the score, but it was Seiji Ozawa's illusion.He was very embarrassed by everyone.In this solemn concert hall, facing hundreds of international music masters and authorities, he inevitably wavered in his judgment.However, after he considered it again and again, he still firmly believed that his judgment was correct, so he yelled: "No! The score must be wrong!" As soon as his shout fell, the proud judges on the judging platform immediately stood up Give him warm applause and congratulate him for winning the competition.

It turned out that this was a trap carefully designed by the judges to test whether the conductors could stick to their judgment when they found mistakes but the authorities refused to admit them.Because only those with this quality can truly be world-class music conductors.The first two contestants also found the problem, but they thought that the judges were all authoritative, and their own judgment must be inaccurate. Only Seiji Ozawa believed in his own judgment and did not blindly follow the authority, so he won the championship.

good habit gas station
The so-called authority was originally an ordinary person. After a period of painstaking research, he became an expert in a certain field.Yet he is still human, and it is impossible not to make mistakes.

People who believe in authority are often because they are not confident enough. In fact, many times, when you suspect that something is wrong, it may be that you are really wrong.Speak out your doubts and don't be intimidated by the halo of authority, so that you will be one step closer to the truth.Teenagers should start cultivating this kind of self-confidence without superstitious authority from now on.

Think what others dare not think, ask what others dare not ask

Einstein loved to use his brain since he was a child. He often thought about what people dare not think about, and what people dare not do.

One day, Einstein was reading a book with relish.And his father asked him to hang a newly bought oil painting on the wall.He leaned the ladder against the wall absent-mindedly, carried the oil painting, and climbed up the ladder by himself. Because his mind was still on the book, he accidentally fell off the ladder, and his buttocks fell painfully.Suddenly his eyes lit up: Why do people fall vertically instead of obliquely when they fall from a height?He pestered his parents to keep asking, but his parents couldn't answer, so this question kept turning in his mind, prompting him to observe, experiment and think constantly.When he grew up, he came up with an epoch-making theorem in physics: "Objects always move along the path of least resistance."

Not long after Einstein entered elementary school, the teacher taught addition in the classroom.He took out an apple, took out another apple, and asked the students: "How many apples is one apple plus one apple?"

"Two." The students replied without hesitation.

The teacher wrote 1+1=2 on the blackboard.

Einstein raised his hand and stood up and said: "Teacher, 1 plus 1 is also equal to 1." The students roared with laughter.Einstein calmly took out two small pieces of soft candy from his bag, squeezed them together, and said, "Look, isn't 1 plus 1 still equal to 1?"

The students were taken aback for a moment, and then they all laughed happily.

The teacher said kindly: "Two pieces of candy stick together, it is one piece, but it is a big piece."

Einstein said, "A big piece is a piece."

The teacher was stopped by the question, spread his hands, shrugged, and just muttered softly: "Yes, a big piece is also a piece..."

Once in a manual labor class, the students tried their best to show their ingenuity and wisdom in their homemade items. When the get out of class was about to end, some handed over ducks made of clay, and some handed over ducks made of rags. Some handed over dolls made of colored wax, but Einstein handed over nothing.

The next day, under the teacher's questioning, Einstein handed over a simple and crude stool.The teacher was very unhappy when he saw it, shook his head and said, "There is no uglier stool than this one in the world." The students also cast mocking glances at Einstein.

Einstein stood up and replied firmly: "Yes, there are worse ones than this!" Then, he took out two very ugly small benches from under the table, and explained: "These two stools are my first. I made it the first time and the second time. The one I handed over is the third time I made it. Although it is not satisfactory, it is better than the first two."

The teacher picked up the three small benches and looked at them for a while, and he thought to himself: This child is not simple, he has a valuable quality that ordinary people do not have.

good habit gas station
The ancients said: "Study is expensive and doubtful", "Study is worth doubting".Questioning is an important way to acquire knowledge, so think positively and ask questions proactively.To learn to ask questions, one must go through a process from dare to ask to be good at asking.

For a teenager, learning to ask questions is an active expression of learning. Asking questions and thinking from them is conducive to cultivating innovative spirit and creativity; on the contrary, if you can’t ask questions, it means that your learning process is not enough In-depth, the cultivation of one's own abilities is not in place.

If we are good at using our brains and thinking like Einstein, thinking what others dare not think, asking what others dare not ask, and acting what others dare not do, then we can also stimulate our inner potential and achieve unexpected gains.

A question mark achieves brilliance
In 1921, Raman, an Indian scientist, made a research report on acoustics and optics at the Royal Society of England, and returned home by boat via the Mediterranean Sea.Among the crowd strolling on the deck, the conversation between an Indian mother and son caught Laman's attention.

"Mom, what's the name of this sea?"

"Mediterranean!"

"Why is it called the Mediterranean?"

"Because it's between Eurasia and Africa."

"Then why is it blue?"

The young mother was at a loss for words for a while, and her eyes for help happened to meet Laman who was listening to their conversation with great interest."The water is blue because it reflects the color of the sky," Raman told the boy.

Before that, almost everyone agreed with this explanation.It comes from the British physicist Lord Rayleigh, a great scientist who is famous for discovering noble gases. He once explained the color of the sky with the theory that sunlight is scattered by atmospheric molecules.And from this, it can be deduced that the blue color of the sea is caused by the reflection of the color of the sky.

But for some reason, after bidding farewell to the mother and child, Laman always had doubts about his own explanation. That childish child full of curiosity, those big eyes seeking knowledge, and those "whys" that kept coming out made him Raman felt deeply guilty.As a well-trained scientist, he found that he had unknowingly lost the boy's curiosity of pursuing the "unknown" in all the "known", and he couldn't help being shocked!
After returning to Calcutta, Raman immediately started to study why the sea is blue, and found that the experimental evidence for Rayleigh's explanation was insufficient and unconvincing, so he decided to conduct research again.

Starting from the interaction between light scattering and water molecules, he used the fluctuation theory of Einstein and others to obtain sufficient data on the scattering phenomenon of light passing through clean water, ice cubes and other materials, proving that the scattering of light by water molecules makes The mechanism by which sea water appears blue is exactly the same as the mechanism by which atmospheric molecules scatter sunlight to make the sky appear blue.Furthermore, in solids, liquids and gases, a ubiquitous light-scattering effect was discovered, collectively referred to as the "Raman effect", which provided strong evidence for the scientific community to finally accept the particle theory of light in the early 20th century. .

In 1930, the question mark of the boy on the Mediterranean ship led Raman to the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first scientist in India and Asia to win this honor.

good habit gas station
All great and accomplished people tend to like to think, and they must not blindly follow authority when they have doubts about themselves, but must conduct in-depth thinking and research until they get a satisfactory and convincing answer.

If young friends want to achieve something, they must dabble in as much knowledge as possible, gain a variety of experiences, and broaden their horizons.On the basis of extensive hunting and profound knowledge, it is necessary to sort out and summarize from time to time to form a reasonable cognitive structure and establish various connections between knowledge.In this way, we can guide ourselves to think and ask questions in many ways, so as to motivate ourselves to find answers and achieve achievements.

Keep more "why" in mind

Taiichi Ohno, general manager of Toyota Motor Corporation, believed that the fundamental reason why he was able to invent the "Toyota Production System" was that he was never satisfied and was good at "finding problems without problems."In the eyes of the world, "dissatisfaction with the status quo" is always bad, but there is a slogan in the Toyota factory: "Dissatisfaction is the mother of progress." Toyota factories encourage employees to be dissatisfied with the status quo.But it is required to combine this dissatisfaction with reform, not with complaints.Ohno himself is a person who is good at discovering problems from dissatisfaction and improving them.Ohno once summed up the secret of his discovery of problems, which is to "ask why 5 times?"

Once, there was a machine on the production line that kept stalling, and it didn't work after repeated repairs.Ohno asked: "Why did the machine stop?" The worker replied: "Because of overload, the fuse was blown."

Ohno asked again: "Why overload?"

Answer: "Because the bearings are not lubricated enough."

Ohno asked again: "Why is it not lubricated enough?"

Answer: "Because the lubricating pump cannot absorb oil."

Ohno asked again: "Why can't the oil be absorbed?"

Answer: "Because the oil pump shaft is worn and loose." So Ohno didn't let it go, and asked: "Why is it worn?" Answer: "Because no filter was installed, iron filings were mixed in."

So Ohno ordered a filter to be installed on the oil pump, and finally the production line returned to normal.If you don't break the casserole and ask the end in this way, you are only satisfied with changing a fuse, or changing the oil pump shaft, and the same failure will still occur after a while.Ohno said: "Toyota Production System is created by accumulating and using this kind of scientific exploration question of asking 'why' repeatedly five times."

good habit gas station
"Ask a few more reasons", although it is an old saying, but as long as we ask more about many things, we will not lose our direction in action and go astray; benefits to come.

everything starts with doubt

Jenner is a doctor who has lived in the English countryside for a long time and has a deep understanding of the sufferings of the people.At that time, smallpox broke out in some parts of the UK and claimed the lives of many children.Seeing those lively and lovely children contracted smallpox and died because there was no specific medicine, Chenna felt very painful in his heart.

(End of this chapter)