The Science of a Prosperous Life

(Friday Filosophy 7/14/23)

Happy Freakin’ Friday!

Here's your weekly postcard from me with a question, topic, or challenge to contemplate.  This week let’s explore the idea of thinking like a scientist.  Not so you can get a research grant but to better manifest a prosperous life.

To do this topic justice, we need to delve into how you respond to new or different ideas.  With the levels of polarization happening today, and the mental manipulation being practiced on you from marketers, governments, and the datasphere – you're likely closing down the potential avenues for accepting new ideas.  Much worse, you then could identify with one dominant idea that becomes your worldview.   If that happens, it leads you down a pathway that is in a 180-degree direction away from a prosperous life.

The most anti-prosperity person is the one with one idea, because they enter a bunker siege mentality and will defend it to the death.  A good scientist values criticism and pushback from others and is always willing to question any premise. A great scientist will have 100 ideas, fervently hoping they each of them offers a breakthrough, but knowing full well that most (or even all of them) will be wrong.  They test hypotheses one after another, eliminating each one until they reach the closest possible version of the truth.

Scientific progress come with the audacity to question and test things – and the humility to let the results teach you.  And I'd argue that living a prosperous life works in the same manner.

Peace,

- RG

P.S. If you want bonus reading on how allowing an idea to create an identity can harm your prosperity, read this post.

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