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Never be completely satisfied with your answers
Thursday, 20 April 2006
What is the key force driving humanity forward? The answer is deceptively simple, it's the ability to question our own beliefs. Unfortunately, this ability is in constant conflict with another part of our nature - our tendency to insist the answers we already have are good enough.
A stubborn insistence that we're right, and nothing can change that fact, is a green-card to stop thinking altogether. Too many people fall into that position and find it impossible to climb out. They are willing to endure anything as long as it doesn't involve admitting that their explanation possibly isn't perfect. In doing so, they condemn themselves into one of humanity's greatest follies - an excess of pride and self-belief.
Don't you fall into that trap.
The evidence that never being satisfied with your answers is an excellent strategy for life is widespread, if you care to look.
It's in the idiocy of the loud-mouth teenager who thinks he knows it all, but still has a lot of difficult lessons to learn. It's in the annual report of the company who keeps following the same old strategy that used to work but seems to have stalled recently. And it lifted us out of the middle-ages into the renaissance, when people finally had the courage to question what had been seen as true for a thousand years.
Always be looking at your assumptions and beliefs, no matter how deeply held, with a niggling feeling that you still haven't got them quite right yet. Be looking for those few extra scraps of information that can improve your model of how the world works. Make sure you look in places you wouldn't normally bother with - especially in the writings of those who disagree with your present views.
If you follow this path, I guarantee it will bring you more success in life than the lazy thinkers who keep pushing on with the same old stale solutions. I've often surprised myself to hear someone expressing a view that I realize in naive, and remembering when I too once thought that way and would argue with anyone who disagreed.
Especially be wary of times when you become angry because the world doesn't behave in the way you expect it to. This is a sure sign that your model is faulty. Some people can waste their entire lives embroiled in bitter disputes simply because reality isn't behaving in the way that it's "supposed to". This is a huge waste of time and energy.
If it's a battle between your views of how the universe should be, and how it actually is, your eventual defeat is guaranteed.
The world is endlessly complicated and you will never fully understand it. Make peace with this fact and, rather than being someone who always supplies the answers, instead become someone who's always asking more questions. Being the person who's always "right" may satisfy your pride, but it won't do much for your success. Being someone who suspects they may be wrong, but is willing to act on the information they have, is a much better strategy.
Even in areas that are well-researched, people can often be surprised by how wrong their deeply held beliefs actually were.
In 2005, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine by showing that stomach ulcers could be caused by a bacteria. It was one of the greatest medical finds of the past century. Now many ulcers can be treated with drugs and antibiotics where before there was no effective treatment.
Up until that point, most medical researchers and doctors thought that ulcers were caused mostly by stress. The idea that they could be caused by bacteria was considered ludicrous, and Warren and Marshall's idea was ridiculed. In the end, Dr Marshall had to deliberately infect himself and suffer an ulcer to prove their idea was correct.
This is just one of millions of examples of what seemed accurate being shown to be false, even if the idea was firmly established.
Never be completely satisfied with your answers, and success is much more likely to come your way.
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