eQuipsadvanced.com – like espresso for your brain – strives to pack a punch and catalyze not only your critical faculties but your sense of humor, adventure, and awe. The aim of this project is to inspire and help nourish advanced modes of thinking, for business and day to day life.

Advanced thinkers are courageous – and skeptical.  Yet they do not rely on logic alone as a singular tool for navigating their lives. They are never without a bit of whimsy, never without hope, or laughter, or irony.

Advanced thinkers embrace creative play too. They are at liberty to frolic (in a literal or a figurative sense). They use their imaginations, whether to fantasize only or to conduct targeted thought experiments.

That is the quixotic!

QUIXOTIC

The William Blake piece in the image above invokes a profound insightfulness and openness. It calls us to a radical depth of view that unfolds into an expansive perception of the extraordinary, by way of the ordinary. Such is beyond anything we can readily conceive of or put words to.

That is the quixotic! It’s as grand as poetic vision or as modest as a day dream. The quixotic is the very temerity to dream, big or small. It may be irreverent – or taken as such. Because it is to play with ideas, and the so called “given facts” of a situation. It is to explore new meanings, possibilities, or value structures.

This notion became a powerful dynamic in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Though he does not use the term ‘quixotic,’ Nietzsche conveys this precise idea in the preface to his seminal work, The Gay Science (“Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”). – He describes it as “foolishness, exuberance and joy.” For Nietzsche, it is the antidote to a great many ills, psychological, philosophical, moral, and so on. He goes so far as to equate a quixotic “art of transfiguration” with philosophy itself!

The key word there is “transfiguration.” To put it a different way, it is re-thinking our thinking. What creativity, innovation, or divergent thought processes have in common is an ability to re-think, reform, transform, and extrapolate. This, whether we’re talking about ideas, products, services, laws or procedures! What works? What works even better?

Now, while the simple definition of quixotic is ‘fanciful’ or ‘impractical’, there is something of a paradox here. Because the most impractical thing we can do is to get stuck in outmoded ways of thinking about or doing things! But what is more practical – indeed vital – than the ability to elevate ourselves, to liberate ourselves, from the merely apparent, the routine and the obligatory? This is our quixotic ambition!

The struggle, as they say, is real. Drudgery – irrelevance even – need not be.

The Three Legged Stool of Advanced Thinking

If you will, advanced thinkers must see beyond the tip of their intellectual nose. Our task is always, of course, to first understand the reality of our situation, to seek clarity regarding what is. From there we want to enable ourselves to see what could be. And, as circumstances dictate or the spirit moves us, we then dare to work with what is to build what could be, proceeding with stout hearts and prepared minds.

eQuipsadvanced.com therefore exists to propagate this spirited, yet simple premise:

Advanced thinking stands on a conceptual three legged stool. Balance and stability necessitate all three:

One leg is the COURAGEOUS (see eQuips – Part 1). This is the readiness to step up and stand out. This is the willingness to try and to learn. This is the fortitude to make mistakes and then to try again and learn some more.

Another leg is CRITICAL THINKING (see eQuips – Part 2). That is the work done to understand. That is the effort to ask questions and listen to the responses returned from various perspectives. That is taking ownership for the consequences of our decisions and actions.

The third leg is this sense of the QUIXOTIC. It is the song you hum to yourself to calm your nerves. It is a campfire story or a poem. It is the fantasy – that may or may not become a vision of a future that does not yet exist. It is the world in a grain of sand. It is the journey to life’s “YES!”

Courage is essential. Critical thinking is must. Quixotic vision is indispensable.

Advance your mental game. eQuips yourself daily!