Critical Thinking Application Paper

Critical Thinking consists of the mental process of analyzing or evaluating information and forming judgments about the facts (Wikipedia.org). This can literally apply to every aspect of our lives. Everyday we make decisions that affect in either big or small ways. For instance picking what we have for breakfast can be critical thinking. If you decide to eat that bear claw from the corner donut shop then that would mean a contribution to your waistline. It would also give you a morning rush with the sugar and they you would come down hard. The other choice would be a banana and some strawberries. This would be the better choice since your body is better at digesting these foods and they are natural sugars.

Everything we do in life is determined by the quality of your thinking and the decision that it leads to. However, there exists a lack of awareness how one should think and make decisions. Absence of clear thinking will lead to failure both in personal and professional life. Decisions resulting from unclear thinking will lead to frustration, ineffectiveness, and financial loss and ultimately to failure. Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of life. It will lead to perform more effectively both in personal and professional life by empowering oneself. It will ultimately lead to avoiding disastrous mistakes, and gaining clarity, and discovering new opportunities.

Critical thinking is important wherever the quality of human thinking significantly impacts the quality of life (of any sentient creature). For example, success in human life is tied to success in learning. At the same time, every phase in the learning process is tied to critical thinking. Thus, reading, writing, speaking, and listening can all be done critically or uncritically. Critical thinking is crucial to becoming a close reader and a substantive writer. Critical thinking is “a way of taking up the problems of life.

The process of critical thinking requires you to ask more questions of both others and of yourself before a decision or determination is made. In order to successfully evaluate data in a critical manner, you must have a system in place to assess information as it is presented. In any situation whether you are having a conversation, observing others, or material you have read, you must be ready to probe deeper and ask the right question at the right time.

The problem with thinking is that we have begun to discover that thinking is hard work, and we tend to avoid confrontations with it whenever possible. This is pretty obvious whenever we must face something new, say a piece of electronic equipment that is nothing like anything that we've used before. Every time this happens we find ourselves at the bottom of what has come to be called a "learning curve." What this means is we have a long laborious climb up a hill of analysis. Sometimes the situation is even worse: we may have a choice of two, three or even more pieces of electronic equipment, and not only do we not know which is better, but we do not understand their similarities and differences. Most of us manage to make the climb, but there is an amazing number who defer such decisions to others and those of us who learn to make such decisions are often not sure