TOLERANCE FOR MUNDANE TASKS

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ARP 42

A tolerance for mundane tasks is fundamental to greatness, according to leadership transformation expert John Amaechi OBE.

"If you want to do these brilliant, exciting, dreamy things … you suddenly realise how much absolute boring dull grind goes into it," he writes.

"When I first started playing basketball my first coach had me doing pivot drills – when you stop, grab the ball, turn, turn back, pass the ball – I did that endlessly and I could never understand why this boring thing was important."

That all changed when he entered his first game and realised how vital pivot skills are.

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"Shri Guru Charan Saroj Raj, Nij Manu Mukuru Sudhari Barnau Raghubar Bimal Jasu, Jo Dayaku Phal Chari"

Meaning: I clean my mind with the remembrance of the lotus feet of my revered Guru. I narrate the pure glory of Lord Rama, who bestows the four fruits of life: righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and liberation.

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Another set of constraints on what counts as good thinking derives from features of the agent’s own mind. Agents differ in their cognitive capacities, and what counts as good thinking will depend on the contours of those capacities. An exercise of thought that is remarkable in a six-year-old might be completely routine when carried out by an adult, for example. A good example of the need to keep these considerations in mind concerns the oftmade claim that one should not have inconsistent beliefs. On the face of things, this prohibition would seem to be unproblematic given that inconsistent claims cannot both be true. But in order to comply with this injunction a creature must have some way of searching through its store of beliefs so as to check for inconsistency between them, and for creatures like ourselves who have hugely complex belief structures and limited processing capacities this is a hugely daunting task.

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Like the notes of an old violin, Thoughts talk to me within My mind, that shuttered room. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Old Music’, in Rhymed Ruminations

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A dog can believe his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow? Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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‘How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?’ ‘Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,’ came the answer. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

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