Joe Budde Jr.

Recently, my wife and I have been having discussions about critical thinking and the ability to chose words and responses.  Our discussions started after a dinner at Chick-fil-A.  We noticed all employees at this fast food restaurant respond to a customer’s “thank you” in the same way by saying “My pleasure.”

“My pleasure” is a response that doesn’t elicit a feeling of favor from the receiver.  This makes all the difference in customer service and enables their employees to learn why it is so important to chose words carefully.  Now people who learn this may not understand immediately, but having the knowledge that it is possible and justified to spend time thinking about what words to chose provides the ground work for structuring the thinking of a person.

Then this morning, I woke up to find an email from a co-worker with the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically… Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

The first time I heard the words “structure” and “thinking” in the same sentence was via a finance professor who provided two semesters worth of my education at Miami University.  Thus, with my collegiate experience and this quote, I couldnt agree more with the purpose Dr. King provides for education.

My experiences and discussions with friends and coworkers are continually challenging me to structure my thinking – because as I have learned, it is just as valuable to learn how others think as it is to learn what others think.

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