Fareed Zakaria: Which thinking habit do you wish you could break?

The question

Which thinking habit do you wish you could break?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Fareed Zakaria

Journalist and author; host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 20 May 2017 source ↗

Others on this question

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Adam Gopnik Staff writer at The New Yorker; essayist

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.

Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 16 September 2017 source ↗

Celeste Ng Novelist

I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.

Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 5 August 2017 source ↗

Winston Churchill Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964

They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet. I do not at all excuse myself for this foolish neglect of opportunities procured at so much expense by my parents and brought so forcibly to my attention by my Preceptors.

Recorded Chapter of his autobiography, written at Chartwell in 1930, Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), Project Gutenberg Canada, October 1930 source ↗

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Novelist and essayist