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Keep your ears and eyes open, and your mouth shut
Sunday, 16 October 2005
Who wins in life?
Often it's the lucky, but just as often it's the best informed. The quality of our decisions is directly related to the quality of our information. Therefore, it's important to make sure your information is top-notch - this isn't as easy as many people think.
The big problem many people have when collecting information about the world is that they're lazy and arrogant. They think they already know far more than they do and so can't be bothered gaining new information, or using the new to question their current beliefs.
Have you ever noticed that it's often those with the least amount of useful knowledge to give who seem to talk the most? Why is that?
It's because they think they already know it all. They're so busy telling the world how important what they know is, that they don't notice that things are quite different to what they believe.
Keep your ears and eyes open all the time. No matter how much you learn on any particular subject, it's likely you have only scratched the surface of what there is to know. The world is infinitely complex, and things are never as they first appear.
The history of human knowledge is a story of closely held beliefs being shown as ridiculous by carefully observed fact. The world isn't flat. Our Earth isn't at the center of the universe. Our Sun isn't even close to being the largest object in the sky.
And all the time new discoveries are being made that shatter the consensus opinion.
In 2005, two Australian scientists won the Nobel Prize for medicine by showing that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, and not by stress and lifestyle as had been widely believed. At first, the theories of these "rogue" scientists were dismissed as stupid by the medical establishment - complacent in their ivory tower of perfect knowledge. It was only through careful experiment that the Australians proved that they were right.
If the entire medical establishment of trained scientists can be so wrong about something, isn't it just possible that you may also be?
To believe that your knowledge of life is complete and perfect is silly. Not only that, it's dangerous. Our biggest mistakes are usually made because we have bad information and false beliefs.
Keep your ears and eyes open and never make the mistake of thinking your open mouth is a fountain of truth.
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