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We all, both as individuals and as cultures, have beliefs that won’t stand the test of time, and very likely some that we will be laughing about years down the road.
Fortunately, we are not only time-binders, as Korzybski puts it, we also have the scientific method. You know, the thing that brought us airplanes and computers, modern medicine and the combustion engine – in other words, all the nice little things that almost everyone in the western culture uses, even if their propaganda (distributed over the Internet) is strictly anti-science. But enough about what could serve as a definition for hypocrisy.
Through our methods of testing and improving concepts, we are making progress. In all areas, diverse as they may be. I want to share three examples with you today, widely seperated and still linked by this core approach.
Stupid stuff we used to do… is a collection of some misconceptions we as society held not long ago, but have since abandoned. Like cigarettes as treatment for asthma. It should serve as a cautioning reminder that even a few decades can bring about so much change in the collective “wisdom” that we today laugh about what our parents considered true.
Baby Steps to Grown-Up Control is a short article about discipline and self-control. It turns out that actual research done on the subject tells us that many of the anecdotal recipes don’t work at all, or are counter-productive. Whoever told you about them had their success despite, not because of these falsehoods. But, there is some truth in other approaches. Unsurprisingly, anecdotal evidence and passed-down wisdom is a hit-and-miss method. It lacks the crucial step of testing the hypothesis.
Zen To Done (ZTD) is an example of the concept of the scientific method applied to personal experience. The author took the well-known Getting Things Done (GTD) method of task management and put it to the test. Not a double-blind test in a representative population sample, but a test with the population that mattered to him – he himself. He then refined the method and tested it again, creating the kind of incremental improvement that moves mankind forward. Not forgetting the crucial step of sharing it – if you’ve tried GTD like I have and found you spent too much time organizing work and too little actually doing it, despite GTDs promise to the opposite – try ZTD. Or extract your own variation.
I have been gobbling up game-changers for the past months now. When you open your eyes, you find many sources derailing long-held beliefs and putting actual knowledge into their place. Whether it’s The Science of Trust, which I’ve mentioned so often recently, you rightfully conclude I’m a big fan, or Re-Work – a book that challenges many assumptions on how to run a business, written by people who run their business in the way they describe, or Out of Character (which I’ve also mentioned before), which utterly demolishes the common concept of, well, character.
Keeping an open mind is always important. But even more important is filling the void that you keep open with the right stuff. And letting go when it turns out that it actually wasn’t so right after all.
And that, in a nutshell, is the paradigm shift that makes us better.
