Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw
“I broke my vertebrae and suffered from a traumatic brain injury in a car accident” my friend told me.
He had acute back pain and depression after the accident.
He started drinking heavily.
“Due to depression, I began to have suicidal thoughts” he added
One night he went to his bed and stared in his medicine cabinet.
He said to himself, “if I take all of these prescription pills, what do I have to lose?”
Right then his cell phone rings.
He closed his eyes and said to himself, “don’t answer it, it’s my time.”
But he didn’t know why he looked over and saw it was his mother.
He picked up and his mother said, “son, I know you are suffering, I am quitting my teaching job and coming to your place. You need me at this point, I will be there if you need anything.”
“I don’t know why my brain turned upside down that day, I thought, my mother is quitting her job for me and I’m thinking of taking my life” he said.
“That day I began rethinking and it became a habit in my life, from that day forward, I never looked back in my life again,” he continued.
“I’m a design engineer now and work for one of the fortune 500 companies” he said.
Design engineering is his bread and butter at the moment.
He said to me, “The habit of rethinking is fundamental to my profession if I have to survive but for me it gives more energy in my personal life.”
At best what he assured me is he is constantly aware of his limits of thinking but still expects something out of his everyday task and he is convinced that it is possible by the practice of rethinking.
He always doubts what he knows and he is always curious about what he doesn’t know.
I was very impressed by what he was telling me.
I was more interested in how he does it.
I realized that I should update myself as much as I can based on what he was saying.
We definitely need new data from our own as well as others’ experiments and experiences to make a habit of rethinking.
Not only you and me but every single individual should update from his or her inner and outer experiences through thinking and rethinking process.
Recently, I also realized that being a scientist or engineer itself isn’t only a profession, it becomes more and more of a pattern of thinking.
It improves other parts of life significantly.
Though my friend works in design science, I believe working on any science is a lifestyle of thinking and rethinking which is completely different from preaching and prosecuting.
Why do scientists and engineers think and rethink is because they are trying to find the truth out of something.
To find the truth, they have to run an experiment to test their hypothesis and make the result known called knowledge.
These experiments and results are so crucial that they not only guide their daily decisions regularly but also the norm of our society.
Look around, the most luxurious and essential things we use everyday are products of scientists.
Scientists are always trying new things.
Their experiments often fail, but they should become happy in the newness and shouldn’t mind the failures. They never think of overinvesting in their experiments and don’t take it personally if a new experiment fails.
My designer scientist friend told me, “science is not only an academic concept and doesn’t come only from literature.
My mother’s telephone call is one example of how our mind changes subconsciously.
Many things at work come from experience.
Experience teaches us that as a scientist we shouldn’t fall in the trap of confirmation bias and desirability bias. This is the problem of academic people.”
In his words, the former bias is to see what we expect to see and the latter bias is to see what we want to see.
These biases stop our curious intelligence.
They make us good at thinking but worse at rethinking.
We become lazy on rethinking because we just accept linear thinking.
I learned from my friend that rethinking is a skillset, but if we go deep down it’s also a mindset.
We have many mental tools that we need in life.
We only have to get them out and remove the rust.
Rethinking habits helps us to find the correct mental tool.
He further added that the curse of knowledge is nothing but knowledge itself because it closes our mind to what we don’t know.
Good judgment depends on having the skill and the will to open our minds.
Mind only opens when we rethink and think continuously in a cycle.
Every time when we take a step forward with an open mind, we have to revise and update our understanding of the task and the world.
“My mother opened my mind and helped me to live and understand the world,” he said.
Any task is for the world so all tasks in life are connected irrespective of the nature, professional or personal.
This revision usually involves a lot of thinking and rethinking regarding our facts, opinions, beliefs, taboos, agreement, and disagreements.
The most important thing is we have to readjust our expectations that shape our findings.
At present we have to view our experiences as periods of our lives. Youth, apprenticeship, marriage, parenthood, sickness, death, and so on are connected to our task. Everyone has to capture this progression when we think of the next step.
The career that we always worry about nowadays is the capacity to navigate this course of progression through experiences rather than facts.
This is how my friend views his life as a design engineer.
He added, “In driving, we learn to identify our visual blind spots and remove them with the help of mirrors and sensors. But in life, our mind doesn’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”.
I have seen that the smartest minds today who study computers, biology, and math have come to understand that the world no longer only sees predictable, linear thinking.
Instead, our life is filled with chaos, challenges, and complexities.
We experience periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. If we go deeper in thinking and rethinking, in place of linearity, we see loops, spirals, wobbles, twists and turnabouts.
Linear thinking sees the world in quantity and symmetry but non linear thinking removes those boundaries.
That’s what my designer friend experienced.
If we understand these life principles on a deeper level, each one can become a better scientist as well as a better human being.
“The obstacle of rethinking is arrogance, which I have experienced across the labs and offices” he continued.
Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction in one’s mind, that stops rethinking.
Our humility and kindness is a permeable filter that absorbs life experiences and encourages us in rethinking to convert them into knowledge and wisdom.
Rethinking is the integrity of a scientist.
We have to live and we cannot live without making mistakes.
When people make mistakes, we as scientists, have to take it as an opportunity to explore.
So we have to make mistakes but learn from them. Once we repeat these mistakes in life, we acquire wisdom. Eventually, we realize that the wisdom that we acquired is not real wisdom. This realization brings the invention of new wisdom.
We only live truly and happily once we continue the cycle of this old wisdom replaced by new wisdom for the rest of our life.
This is the ultimate consequence of thinking and rethinking.
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters our mind.
It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters our heart.
Scientists who are right a lot listen a lot, and change their mind a lot.
If we don’t change our mind frequently, we’re going to be wrong a lot.
The power of listening is not just talking less.
It’s more than that.
It gives the luxury of skills in asking and responding.
The most important thing is to show interest in other people’s interests or work rather than trying to judge their position or prove our own agenda.
Always think this way.
Scientist is a person who is in outer space and observing things very carefully.
When you get to see an overview of the earth from outer space, you realize you share a common identity with all human beings.
If you are in space then you see the Asia and Africa continents below, they behave like cities that would move from an airplane.
The amazing thing is that we can circle the entire planet in 90 minutes from space.
Moreover, from space, stars look the same as from earth but our planet earth gives us a different perspective about life and humanity as a whole, we start to think how fragile the earth planet is where all of humankind exists.
There is a difference between thinking effectively and thinking efficiently, that you realize more when you think from outer space.
As my friend said, thinking effectively means working a thing in the right way but thinking efficiently means thinking only the right things as I did when I received my mother’s call in the time of turmoil.
Though the job of thinking is not difficult, but, most of the time we don’t put it into practice. This is the difficult part in life.
Difficulty is not always proportional to importance.
Just take some examples in this respect which are not difficult at all but very powerful for our lives.
In medicine, simply washing hands has proved to be second only to penicillin in saving lives.
How difficult is it to wash hands?
Immunocompromisation is a way to explain a weak immune system in our body.
When our immune system is weakened, our body can’t fight off viruses, bacteria, or fungi very well. This can lead to serious infections and thousands of people die every year.
To improve our immunity, just taking more cranberry juice and chill peppers do a vital job.
Cranberry juice changes the acidity of the urine, preventing bacteria from gaining foothold for infection. Research shows that cranberry juice has a beneficial effect on gamma delta T cells, a special type of immune T cell. These cells are found in the lining of the gut and other mucous membranes of the body including the urinary tract.
Similarly, the bright red, yellow, and green colors of chile peppers contain bioactives like Zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene.
The bioactive form that carries the heat, capsaicin, activates the immune system and increases the number of circulating white blood cells and antibody producing beta cells.
How difficult is it to drink more cranberry juice and eat a little more chili peppers?
Scientific transactions are similar to investment transactions.
A lot of professional investors always say that the key to market success is not your skill and knowledge as an investor compared with other individual investors, but the skill and knowledge with which each specific investment transaction is made.
Exactly the same way, the successful scientist is not equipped only with skill and knowledge compared with other scientists but also with scientific transactions based on skill and knowledge.
This scientific transaction is nothing but the practice of thinking and rethinking.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Progress for valued society