As you set about to write, it is worth reminding yourself that while you ought to have a point of view, you should avoid telling your readers what to think. Try to hang a question mark over it all. This way you allow your readers to think for themselves about the points and arguments you're making. As a result, they will feel more involved, finding themselves just as committed to the arguments you've made and the insights you've exposed as you are. You will have written an essay that not only avoids passivity in the reader, but is interesting and gets people to think.

Nothing is trash by nature. Anthropologist Mary Douglas brings back and analyzes the common saying that dirt is "matter out of place." Dirt is relative, she emphasizes. "Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave pots and pans in the bedroom, or food all over clothing; similarly, bathroom items in the living room; clothing lying on chairs; outdoor things placed indoors; upstairs things downstairs, and so on." Sorting the dirty from the clean ― removing the shoes from the table, putting the dirty clothing in the washing machine ― involves systematic ordering and classifying. Eliminating dirt is thus a positive process.

It's important that you think independently and fight for what you believe in, but there comes a time when it's wiser to stop fighting for your view and move on to accepting what a trustworthy group of people think is best. This can be extremely difficult. But it's smarter, and ultimately better for you to be open-minded and have faith that the conclusions of a trustworthy group of people are better than whatever you think. If you can't understand their view, you're probably just blind to their way of thinking. If you continue doing what you think is best when all the evidence and trustworthy people are against you, you're being dangerously confident. The truth is that while most people can become incredibly open-minded, some can't, even after they have repeatedly encountered lots of pain from betting that they were right when they were not.

Vegetarian eating is moving into the mainstream as more and more young adults say no to meat, poultry, and fish. According to the American Dietetic Association, "approximately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, are nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases." But health concerns are not the only reason that young adults give for changing their diets. Some make the choice out of concern for animal rights. When faced with the statistics that show the majority of animals raised as food live in confinement, many teens give up meat to protest those conditions. Others turn to vegetarianism to support the environment. Meat production uses vast amounts of water, land, grain, and energy and creates problems with animal waste and resulting pollution.

Diversity, challenge, and conflict help us maintain our imagination. Most people assume that conflict is bad and that being in one's "comfort zone" is good. That is not exactly true. Of course, we don't want to find ourselves without a job or medical insurance or in a fight with our partner, family, boss, or coworkers. One bad experience can be sufficient to last us a lifetime. But small disagreements with family and friends, trouble with technology or finances, or challenges at work and at home can help us think through our own capabilities. Problems that need solutions force us to use our brains in order to develop creative answers. Navigating landscapes that are varied, that offer trials and occasional conflicts, is more helpful to creativity than hanging out in landscapes that pose no challenge to our senses and our minds. Our two million-year history is packed with challenges and conflicts.

In perceiving changes, we tend to regard the most recent ones as the most revolutionary. This is often inconsistent with the facts. Recent progress in telecommunications technologies is not more revolutionary than what happened in the late nineteenth century in relative terms. Moreover, in terms of the consequent economic and social changes, the Internet revolution has not been as important as the washing machine and other household appliances. These things, by vastly reducing the amount of work needed for household chores, allowed women to enter the labor market and virtually got rid of professions like domestic service. We should not "put the telescope backward"　when we look into the past and underestimate the old and overestimate the new. This leads us to make all sorts of wrong decisions about national economic policy, corporate policies, and our own careers.

From the beginning of human history, people have asked questions about the world and their place within it. For early societies, the answers to the most basic questions were found in religion. Some people, however, found the traditional religious explanations inadequate, and they began to search for answers based on reason. This shift marked the birth of philosophy, and the first of the great thinkers that we know of was Thales of Miletus. He used reason to inquire into the nature of the universe, and encouraged others to do likewise. He passed on to his followers not only his answers but also the process of thinking rationally, together with an idea of what kind of explanations could be considered satisfactory.

Having extremely vivid memories of past emotional experiences and only weak memories of past everyday events means we maintain a biased perception of the past. We tend to view the past as a concentrated time line of emotionally exciting events. We remember the arousing aspects of an episode and forget the boring bits. A summer vacation will be recalled for its highlights, and the less exciting parts will fade away with time, eventually to be forgotten forever. As a result, when we estimate how our next summer vacation will make us feel, we overestimate the positive. It seems as though an imprecise picture of the past is one reason for our inaccurate forecasts of the future.

Without a doubt, dinosaurs are a popular topic for kids across the planet. Something about these extinct creatures from long ago seems to hold almost everyone's attention, young or old, boy or girl. Though we don't know a lot about dinosaurs, what we do know is fascinating to children of all ages. But why? "I think the reason kids like dinosaurs so much is that dinosaurs were big, were different from anything alive today, and are extinct. So they are imagination engines," explains Jack Horner, a technical advisor for the Jurassic Park films. Teachers all over the country would agree. Dinosaurs are studied in classrooms each year, not only for the science behind the topic, but also because of the creative thinking it seems to foster in students. "The best part about this is what happens with their writing," Jennifer Zimmerman, a primary school teacher in Washington, D.C., says. "I think it's the mystery of dinosaurs―the fact that there are still so many things we don't know―that inspires them to use that topic in their journals." Children also feel powerful when asked to draw a dinosaur. Since no one knows what colors dinosaurs actually were, a child can use what information he has―and his imagination―to draw a dinosaur as he sees it.

Sometimes, we are fascinated when our assumptions are turned inside out and around. The artist Pablo Picasso, for example, used Cubism as a way to help us see the world differently. In his famous work Three Musicians, he used abstract forms to shape the players in such an unexpected way that when you first see this artwork, you assume that nothing makes sense. Yet when you look at the painting a second time, the figures come together. Picasso's work challenges your assumptions about how space and objects are used. His artwork helps you see the world differently and reminds you there are alternative ways of using shape, objects, and colors. The reward for this is the intrinsic pleasure you get by looking at this work.

The often-used phrase "pay attention" is insightful: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 x 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

Everyone knows a young person who is impressively "street smart" but does poorly in school. We think it is a waste that one who is so intelligent about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work. What we don't realize is that schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to draw such street smarts and guide them toward good academic work. Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools and colleges overlook the intellectual potential of street smarts: the fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-intellectual concerns. We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic.

Music connects people to one another not only through a shared interest or hobby, but also through emotional connections to particular songs, communities, and artists. The significance of others in the search for the self is meaningful; as Agger, a sociology professor, states, "identities are largely social products, formed in relation to others and how we think they view us." And Frith, a socio-musicologist, argues that popular music has such connections. For music fans, the genres, artists, and songs in which people find meaning, thus, function as potential "places" through which one's identity can be positioned in relation to others: they act as chains that hold at least parts of one's identity in place. The connections made through shared musical passions provide a sense of safety and security in the notion that there are groups of similar people who can provide the feeling of a community.

The acceleration of human migration toward the shores is a contemporary phenomenon, but the knowledge and understanding of the potential risks regarding coastal living are not. Indeed, even at a time when human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions were not exponentially altering the climate, warming the oceans, and leading to rising seas, our ancestors knew how to better listen to and respect the many movements and warnings of the seas, thus settling farther inland. For instance, along Japan's coast, hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, were put in place to warn people not to build homes below a certain point. Over the world, moon and tides, winds, rains and hurricanes were naturally guiding humans' settlement choice.

Although humans have been drinking coffee for centuries, it is not clear just where coffee originated or who first discovered it. However, the predominant legend has it that a goatherd discovered coffee in the Ethiopian highlands. Various dates for this legend include 900 BC, 300 AD, and 800 AD. Regardless of the actual date, it is said that Kaldi, the goatherd, noticed that his goats did not sleep at night after eating berries from what would later be known as a coffee tree. When Kaldi reported his observation to the local monastery, the abbot became the first person to brew a pot of coffee and note its flavor and alerting effect when he drank it. Word of the awakening effects and the pleasant taste of this new beverage soon spread beyond the monastery. The story of Kaldi might be more fable than fact, but at least some historical evidence indicates that coffee did originate in the Ethiopian highlands.