YOUR CAPACITIES

Objectives and strategies 

The heart of intelligence

Try to think about a person who has no objective, purpose, project, desire, dream, nothing. What he/she will do? He/she will do nothing or will go watch TV. When we have objectives, then we are acting to achieve them: a new car or house, a course, a companion, to drink water, to relax, to acquire some knowledge and develop some skill. And to achieve our objectives, we use sequences of actions called strategies: to study this or that way, to practice some time, to go here and there, to search the internet, there is virtually infinite options and combinations. Another option is to combine a main strategy with some support ones, that aren't essential but makes us go faster or more pleasantly.

This is possible because we are equipped to have mental representations of what we want (and maybe of what we do not want) and the intermediate steps we're going to follow to make what we want happens.

This is what intelligence is all about, in the vision of Stephen Pinker, a professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT and author of How the Mind Works. According to him, intelligence is to imagine that the present situation could be different, that is, the objectives or desired results, and choose combined actions that will materialize what has been imagined. Here we explore this definition by presenting possible objectives and strategies related to intelligence, like learning, memorization, creativity and other areas.

But sometimes the strategy we're trying is not appropriated to the objective or compatible with our capacities at the very moment. Or maybe we don't know which strategy to use. It might simply be that something can be done but we don't know that. It could happen also that we are already done and haven't noticed it. All these possibilities are opportunities of improvement, of expanding intelligence: to discover a new strategy, to adapt an existing one, to stop trying one and try another, use other's strategy.

What about the strategies we use to think? Thinking, we understand things, define and evaluate our objectives and strategies, we make decisions. Do we have choices on this? "Let's see, the best thinking strategy to apply to this situation is Consider All Factors". Before you are a man or woman, a father or a mother or anything else, you're a thinker. There are many alternatives here, too. Change what, when and how you think and you will be changing your experience, your behavior and how you feel about all that.

In this site you will find thinking strategies to achieve certain results. Some of them were inspired by people who were able to think well about something and were modeled by others (using NLP).

That's all we need: attractive objectives and effective strategies to get there. As expressed in the book Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Dilts, Bandler, Grinder and Delozier):

"The magic of success is a matter of employing the most effective strategy. Most strategies can be easily learned or modified to accomplish goals of our own choosing".

Examples of articles containing strategies:

Communication: Smiling at 3x4

Creativity: How to generate different ideas

Learning: Teaching a kid how to sing intoned

V. V. Vilela

Editor

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