If I had a chance to talk to my 20 year old self, I’d tell myself this: 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 in life
than faith in your own capacities to survive and thrive. It’s of inestimable value.
And the younger me would probably ask me how, “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 myself, “not even my own.”.
Verify all things for yourself, come up with your own beliefs, and try to disprove them.
And as you disprove 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.
I would tell myself to ask questions, propose answers, and falsify those answers. I would tell
myself to destroy all my precious beliefs, because the truth needs no protection. Only
those beliefs which cannot crack under pressure carry the potential of being valuable diamonds.
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 checked up, and the doctor tells her everything is fine.
So that answer is, in theory, 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, something I talked about doing in another video,
link in the description if you want to check it out,
and she finally achieves the level of focus she wants.
Her working theory, that 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 a trust in her abilities to focus when she needs to,
because she’s gained reliable insight into the workings of her own mind.
So Vanessa 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 Vanessa 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 she 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 Vanessa 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 the 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 end point. 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.
But nullius in verba. Don’t take my word for it. Verify it for yourself.