These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 6: Criticizing.

Refining Your Critical Sense

• Openness is one of the most important qualities for anyone, regardless of the approach the person prefers, to sharpen and refine their critical sense.

• Sharpening one’s critical senses and skills is a lifelong process. It is important to be active and attentive in this regard from early in life to allow for better and smoother progress throughout your lifetime.

• Reading is an important source of stimulating and enriching the critical sense, but it is important not just to memorize critical theories and laws to apply them. Rather, it is necessary for the reading to be insightful to penetrate to the critical spirit behind any relevant theory or law.

• Always consider the possibility of accepting opinions that differ from your regular view in criticism. This will open up great avenues for you to understand and accept some of the critical points of view that you previously may have underappreciated.

• Continuously reflect on your critical thoughts and opinions in which you changed your point of view, as well as the circumstances and factors that accompanied that change. This will give you the opportunity to accurately identify the factors that influence your critical judgments and then help you to deal with those influences in the best way.

• If you stop criticizing for a long time, your critical sense will weaken and become lethargic. Strive to continue the process of criticism at any level, to one degree or another, no matter how discouraging the circumstances are.

• Be sure to diversify your critical experience across different cultures, and consider, in particular, the wildly different and exotic viewpoints of those cultures.

• In criticism, there is no final opinion. Be always daring, and do not hesitate to change your opinion, even more than once, in front of any critical topic, as long as there are good reasons to do so. The most important thing in criticism is not the judgment itself but how you present the motives that led you to the judgment.

• In criticism, don’t just judge how something looks when you see it; also consider how it might appear to others when they see it.

• To achieve the best of what you aspire to about openness in any critical process, be sure to start your criticism with the question, why not?