The only three things you need to recommend to any 20 years old.
If I got a chance to talk to any 20 years old, I’d tell them these three things:
- Be Curious,
- Learn to search for answers, and
- Learn to Validate those answers.
Before this, you need to learn to trust yourself. If you learn to trust yourself and develop faith in your own abilities to solve your own problems, you will feel at home wherever you are in the world.
I don’t think there’s a greater prize of life than faith in your own capacities to survive and thrive. It’s of inestimable value. And the younger would probably ask me, “How do I learn to trust myself?”
The Royal Society has a motto: “Nullius in Verba”, which roughly translates to “take nobody’s word for it”.
“Take nobody’s word for it.” that’s what I would tell them, “not even their own.”
Verify all things for yourself, come up with your own beliefs, and try to validate them.
And as you validate your own beliefs, eventually you’ll stumble upon a belief that you can’t disprove, try as you might. And as your list of unshakeable beliefs grows you will develop a trust in yourself that is not naive. You will trust yourself not because you choose to, but because it’s the inevitable byproduct of not being able to disprove yourself.
Ask Questions
As a society, we tend to focus a lot on answers. Answers are solutions to problems. We tend to give less prestige to questions. Everyone has them. They’re easy. It’s the answers that take the work.
This overlooks the power of questions. Asking questions gives you a better understanding of everything: the situation you are in, the challenges you are facing. Life.
Asking questions means you want to learn. You want to understand and know. So where do you start? Anywhere you want. But don’t feel pressure, to begin with, the big questions, the ones we all confront at one time or another, like the meaning of life, or what exists beyond our physical experience of the earth. There is a significant amount to be learned from the seemingly mundane ones, questions that seem so basic, once we reach about age 12 we no longer bother asking them — because we either think we know the answer or are afraid of admitting we don’t.
Da Vinci was never ashamed of his curiosity or uniqueness. He typically operated in a child-like fantasy world allowing his mind to drift where ever it wanted it to go. He was flamboyant, authentic, and unabashedly alternative. He was secure and self-assured and completely absorbed in his greater purpose. Not money, but safety, appreciation, and freedom to explore were his priorities in selecting his work. Da Vinci didn’t create for others, he created it to satisfy his insatiable intellectual appetite.
Not burdened by formal education, Da Vinci was free to follow his own intellectual path as an acute visual thinker rather than relying on mathematics or other technical disciplines. His breadth made him truly great as he integrated his ground-breaking scientific study into his artwork as well as his artwork into his scientific study. Yet, the power of observation may have been his greatest gift. It sparked his curiosity, which triggered his exploration, and evolved into his marvelous creativity. Da Vinci was a highly reflective man who wrote copious notes of his thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and the things that he was working on. These journal writings fueled his self-discovery and self-development.
Learn to Search the Answers
When it comes to seeking the answers, the world is upon you. Being curious isn’t enough, asking questions is a part of it. You need to learn to search for the answers to your questions. This comes from resources how you perceive things every day. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge you can find everywhere written by great philosophers or great thinkers.
But if your problem is unique? If you trying to solve a problem that none has solved yet. You won’t be finding any answers in any book. There is still a possibility to reveal the solutions, you need to seek answers from Nature itself. Perhaps you need to have a true perception of how you view the world. The wisdom from books shapes your perception.
By providing various ecosystem services, the world’s biodiversity plays an irreplaceable role in providing food, water, air, energy, medicine, and a wide range of products and services — all of which determine the quality of our lives. Most of the innovations are inspired by nature.
Validating your answers
While you may find a solution but it must be really equivalent. Experimenting with your idea is a great way to do that.
By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. In order to improve the bulb, Edison needed all the persistence he had learned years before in his basement laboratory. He tested thousands and thousands of other materials to use for the filament. He even thought about using tungsten, which is the metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he couldn’t work with it given the tools available at that time.
One day, Edison was sitting in his laboratory absent-mindedly rolling a piece of compressed carbon between his fingers. He began carbonizing materials to be used for the filament. He tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including Baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was tedious and very demanding, especially on his workers helping with the experiments. He always recognized the importance of hard work and determination.
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Edison decided to try a carbonized cotton thread filament. When voltage was applied to the completed bulb, it began to radiate a soft orange glow. Just about fifteen hours later, the filament finally burned out. Further experimentation produced filaments that could burn longer and longer with each test. Patent number 223,898 was given to Edison’s electric lamp.
Here’s an example.
Vanessa struggles with focus, so she states her problem in the form of a question: why can’t I focus?
She gives herself an answer I have a medical condition.
So she goes to the doctor to get a checkup and the doctor tells her everything is fine.
So that answer is a theory, disproved. [Validation disproved]
So she states another answer: I can’t focus because of external distractions.
So she starts to eliminate noise from the background, take away distracting items, and go to the library if she needs to. This works for a bit, but eventually, she finds herself getting distracted by her own thoughts.
So she disproves her last theory, it’s not just external distractions that are stopping her from focusing. So she comes up with another answer: I can’t focus because of external and internal distractions.
So she sorts out these internal distractions, and she finally achieves the level of focus she wants.
Her working theory, which she hasn’t been able to disprove yet, is that focus occurs when external and internal distractions are fully eliminated, and she has individual processes for eliminating these distractions.
And she develops trust in her abilities to focus when she needs to because she’s gained reliable insight into the workings of her own mind.
Som Venessa goes through a process of asking herself a question, coming up with an answer, and trying to disprove that answer.
Going through this cyclical process allows her to discover valuable insights about the world and herself.
And Venessa continues this process for other areas of her life too, figuring out what foods are best for her to eat, what workouts are good, what we should study in university, so on and so forth.
And slowly she learns to trust her own abilities to navigate through the world and accomplish the goals she sets for herself.
This question-answer-falsification process may seem tedious, but I think it’s necessary because it’s really the only way Venessa can develop her abilities to successfully navigate through the world on her own.
And I’d leave my younger self with this. I know you want directions. You want to exact turns, left-right-left, left that are going to get you to where you want to go. You want the tactic, or the book recommendation, or the app, or the step-by-step system that’s going to get you where you want to go.
Directions only work if someone knows your exact starting point and your exact ending point. You will mostly never get good directions in life. Then you might become more sophisticated and instead of looking for directions, you’ll begin looking for a map. A map of the territory so you can guide yourself from your starting point to your endpoint. The thing is all maps eventually become false.
If you wait long enough, even the mountains and the oceans move. So you may find a good map, but all maps eventually become false and unreliable. In the end, what you were searching for was a compass, Something that could always point you to True North. And this compass is inside you, but it needs to be calibrated. Get to work calibrating it as soon as you can, that way you can always find out where you need to go, from where you are. If you can do that, you don’t need any other advice.
Thanks for reading. I hope this was worth your time. Also, don’t forget to “CLAP” and “Follow” me Devnson for more similar Stories.
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