104 Teaching Minds found to be true. At the core of thinking, you find generalization and explanation. But it is important to remember that what starts the process of generalization and explanation is failure. Without failure we don’t try to generalize and explain because we have nothing to generalize and explain. Thinking, therefore, looks like this: Make a prediction Prediction fails Make a generalization Explain your generalization Make a new prediction Let me explain how this works and why one cannot think well if one cannot do this. To explain, I will tell a personal story relating to my own thinking and learning with respect to two of the twelve cognitive processes. I will explain afterwards why I have chosen to tell stories and why I have used personal ones. DESCRIBING Let’s start with describing. There is, of course, an art to describing. Anyone who writes and anyone who speaks publicly is learning all the time about describing. Since I was a professor for 30 odd years, and since I have written hundreds of papers and about 25 books, and since I have given numerous keynote speeches around the world, I have been thinking a great deal about describing for many years. I learn something whenever I speak publicly because I can easily tell whether I am being heard or not. Are the listeners on the edge of their seats or are they half asleep (or literally asleep)? I learn when I write because I read the reviews, and colleagues are always happy to tell me what was wrong with what I wrote. Once, I was given a lesson in public speaking by someone older and wiser than me that I never forgot. I recently had been hired at Stanford as a professor. I was pretty young (22) and full of myself. In those days, the Computer Science Department ran a course for new graduate students that served as an introduction to all the special re- search possibilities in artificial intelligence for those who wanted to enter that field. There were many faculty in AI at Stanford and each