WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT?

Many years ago, my motivational guru Earl Nightingale stated that “You become what you think about most of the time.”

My question is, “What motivates our thinking? How and why do people form and motivate their views and beliefs?” I decided to write about this subject after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions” written by Jason Zweig. Apparently, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of the international blockbuster “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (Read it!), spent his career studying what makes people make decisions, and ended his life (at the age of 90) a year ago, through a doctor’s assisted suicide.

He made a comment to Mr. Zweig that “people are neither rational nor irrational, they are simply human.” Mr. Kahneman is gone, he made his choice, but what about us who are still living? The answer might be in the moral compass each of us possesses. I would like to finish this essay with the words of the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, who lived in Jerusalem about two thousand years ago.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?”

This is why every Monday you will be able to join me on my new blog, “Manny Kagan’s Retirement Solutions”, to which you can subscribe. Please send me your comments.

These three images of water, which, like our thoughts, are in perpetual movement and colored by outside sources.

Care and Share!