Business Forum | take care of your thoughts

Reading feeds the mind; and when the mind is tired of study, reading gives it strength, not without putting it to work, moreover. I would have liked to be the author of this beautiful sentence, but I had the chance to access the wisdom and intelligence of Seneca in 2008.

The story is… banal since I bought a book, took a note and put it in a safe place. The rarity of books two millennia ago was of great benefit to the reader, since he focused his attention and mobilized all his energy on discovering the central message of the author and possibly integrating a contrary opinion into his way of seeing things.

This reader took some notes to be certain that what he thought will remain for him… as well as for posterity. It seems that our society places little value on taking care of one’s thoughts by reading books as well as taking systematic notes.

Knowing my penchant for this method, a training school had asked me a few years ago to prepare a conference on the subject, but changed its mind two weeks before the event: not fashionable!

I therefore recently decided to reflect on this question during a solitary cross-country ski outing, where I drew the following conclusion: regardless of the medium (book, magazine or internet), the essential thing is to learn to direct their attention to a specific subject. Jean Guitton compares attention to a point and this attention is all the stronger as it mobilizes and concentrates.

This is the only way to improve one’s ability to reflect and conclude. You just have to find a subject that really motivates you since motivation is the trigger for the sense of effort. You’ll develop your ability to actively read and research the author’s concepts faster than you think.

You will probably want to take notes to remind yourself and integrate certain principles into your daily life. While waiting for a cutting-edge search engine, your brain is well placed to understand, tame and integrate complexity on questions such as: how to improve judgment or how to make better decisions?

Robert Lepage has already explained that he nurtures his creativity through short but intense brainstorming sessions. Can’t we feed our thoughts in the same way? And if few people do it, a maxim says that to have things that others don’t have, you have to do things that others don’t.

Let me tell you about my experience. It was at the age of 25, newly appointed manager of 15 people, that I read my first non-school book to help me do my job better.

I took notes to prevent a small victory against ignorance from falling into oblivion. I had the support of five people in choosing authors who are experts on specific topics and whose comments would be of immediate use. After 15 years of such work and armed with a monster of relevant notes, I began to write down my own summaries on various subjects. These one-page texts, with few exceptions, were shared and therefore invariably improved. This article is inspired by one of these syntheses.