Discerning Truth

12 Mar 2022

“Once an idea has taken hold in a brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks.”   —Dominick Cobb, Inception (2010)   Have you ever stopped to really consider how absolutely magical and fantastical an idea is? In some ways, ideas resemble microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses and fungi. Like those microorganisms, ideas can spread; like their biological cousins, ideas can change and mutate; and perhaps most significantly,

Some Things You (My Students) Need to Know About Asking Questions

2 Jan 2022

Many have said that wisdom does not consist in having the right answers but in asking the right questions. This means that the highest expression of wisdom is the perfectly formed question. We remember Socrates for this. Similarly, Confucius once said wisdom is not having knowledge but knowing that you do not know—the natural starting point, one would think, for being an “asker” rather than an “answerer.”    Perhaps for this reason, this essence of wisdom—that