Creating change requires you to know what that change is. Once you know what change looks like you need to know how you’ll get there from where you are now. One way is to come up with ideas on how to get there. Those ideas might come from yourself and your experiences. Or those ideas might come from someone else and their experiences. But those ideas are not always true. And even if they were true once upon a time, they might not be valid in this new situation or circumstance. In order for you to learn the truth, or at least come closer to it, you need to think scientifically.
In order to gain certainty that what you know is the right route, we need to run experiments to predictably achieve the result again and again. Running experiments are a part of thinking scientifically. The parts of scientific thinking we’ll be looking at are hypotheses and experiments. These can then be applied to other areas, not just scientific fields.
Scientific thinking refers to thinking and reasoning in a particular way. The emphasis we’ll be looking at is experimentation and hypothesis formation.
The first step when creating an experiment is to come up with a hypothesis. A hypothesis is essentially what you believe will happen if you do X. If you do X, Y will happen. E.g. if you go in the sun you’ll get a tan. A hypothesis is, in other words, an assumption. Worth keeping in mind is that when someone says or teaches something, even if they’re a “guru”, it can just be an assumption they have. Unless they have actually tested something, it’s just an assumption.
In order to turn an assumption into fact, you need to create an experiment. An experiment is a structured plan of how you’re going to prove or disprove your hypothesis. What you want to do here is to use a simple formula, A + B = C. Where C is the end situation, A is your current situation, and B is the thing that you will put in contact with your current situation, A, in order to achieve your end situation, C. Then you will run the experiment to gain validated learning. Take the assumption of you being in the sun will lead to you getting a tan. To create an experiment we need to define A, B, and C. A is you without a tan, C is you with a tan, B therefore will be the sun. We can now run an experiment where you without a tan come in contact with the sun and see if you get a tan.
A lot of times people say what is just an assumption, they haven’t actually tested it. If you want to learn quickly you can run experiments and see what happens. You might run an experiment to test what many people believe to be true to find that it’s actually not true, or maybe there’s a better way to do things. Test your assumptions, and I’ll see you next week.