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Rights, Giftings & Blog Plans for 2015

 

We should be able to agree that all people have inalienable natural rights, rights we do not tolerate being stripped away by other people. Of this most Americans and many people’s around the world will agree to and would even give their lives to defend. As you know these rights include:

  • Life
  • Liberty
  • Pursuit of Happiness

Standing on the foundation of these rights are what I call inalienable gifts, these gifts are human activities that emerge from people when their natural rights are defended.  These gifts emerge from us naturally when our rights are ensured and defended, these gifts are built into our DNA and they include:

  • The ability and drive to create, to invent and to provide value.
  • The ability and drive to build community and family.

Creativity, as I’ve written about extensively in the past is a powerful force in this world and has been the primary topic of this blog.

In 2015 I would like move to the next primary topic of this blog which is ‘building and managing of households’.  Creativity will always be an important theme for this site but I want to also write about managing the family.  The fellowship that comes and is enjoyed by people among family or friendship groups is foundational to a civilized society.  There are households of families, there are households of faith and I believe that family gets to the core of why we are on this planet.

I’m not necessarily adding this topic because I am an expert on this topic but because this is where I am in life.  You may know that I am married with 5 young children, and am a member of a church. These two families are a huge part of my life.  As part of my new years goals for 2015 I am attempting to better align my blogging with my family life and create products accordingly.  I also plan to share my faith much more so on this site. Topics that I plan to write about and hopefully create products include: Household management, parenting from a dad’s perspective, children’s training and education (particularly science), healthy marriage from a husband’s perspective, family budgeting and healthy church.

Some of you began following this blog when I was writing about innovation and science, where this blog is headed I think is considerably different from this topic.  I may still write about this periodically but I understand if you un-follow, no hard feelings. This blog has been a several year-long journey of tweaks and adjustments and I have enjoyed every moment of it.

Any feedback? Are there particular family or church topics that you would like to see discussed?

PS: My home computer is down which means I can not edit podcast episodes, unfortunately until my computer is replaced podcasting for this site is on hold.

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Five Steps to Always Think for Yourself

We all have the freedom of thought and will and no one, no matter how eloquent or politically correct, can take that from us unless we allow it.

I’ve written in the past that there are obstacles to living a creative life.  The primary three obstacles are:

  1. Not thinking for oneself
  2. Emotional wounds
  3. Excessive busyness

We all have struggled with these to certain degrees  but each one of these can greatly hinder our creative fire, they can cover over our creative abilities and cause us to not be able to create as we were designed to.

The first obstacle (not thinking for oneself) is a doozy. This concerns me as I see it seemingly expanding. I see this in almost every area of life, from all walks of life, no one is exempt from this stumbling stone, those who think for themselves are few and far between.

Be it politics (and all the topics being  politicized), religion, handling money, healthcare issues, school systems,  any difficult debate on any topic, we are better off if we have thought it through on our own rather than empowering other people to think for us.  Not thinking is usually a guarantee at getting deceived.

I want to share a 5-step process which can ensure that we can always think for ourselves. I’ll name this process at the end.  Everyone reading this post can begin to think for themselves by following five steps as they approach any difficult question or topic.

  1. Do some learning on your topic first: study what other people are saying on your question, study the facts, if someone feels strongly in a certain direction, try to find opposing opinions.  Look for intellectually honest people, not partisan non-thinkers. To do this well we mustn’t accept anyone’s word at face value, suspend all trust for the moment, for the sake of thinking for yourself. Take no one’s word for anything at step in the process.
  2. Create two or more theories of your own: theories about a solution or answer to the question, they may match closely the existing two sides of a debate or they may be wildly different from any other side.  Create your own idea that you think makes sense and suspend any tendency to take a side for the moment if only for the sake of thinking for yourself.
  3. Test your theories based on reality, based on the laws of physics or based on what you know to be true. Testing of theories can be done with almost anything. Science questions are the easiest to test because of observable experiments.   Look into the popular sides to a question and explore how their hypothesis were tested, look into if they were tested at all. At this stage do not trust anything that has not been tested and demonstrate-able.  If people say its been tested and here are the results don’t trust them unless you can see for yourself.  This is a time of intentional doubt of anything unseen.
  4. Study results, if you are looking at other people’s tests, what assumptions have they made. What assumptions are they hiding? What assumptions might you be making? State clearly all assumptions.
  5. Draw YOUR conclusion, this is the moment where we get to decide on our own what we think about a topic.  This is the moment when we start to think for ourselves.  This process can become rapid second nature over time. As I’ve grown older I’ve learned when to trust and when to not trust people, regardless of their position, intelligence and authority.  I’ve learned to spot unspoken or hidden assumptions a mile away and expose them, sometimes they are terrible assumptions, to the point of deception.

Too many people refuse to think for themselves these days, I’m shocked to hear people who are supposed advocates for science do and openly discourage people to think for themselves.  Science has taken a celebrity/ politics dominated turn away from its roots. Politics has hijacked our scientific mental processes.  Much of the scientific community has become a political battering ram for a minority of non-thinkers.

By following the above 5 steps we can begin to think for ourselves on every topic and not be pushed or pulled around by deceptive or foolish people… no matter how eloquent or well groomed they look on TV.

If you haven’t noticed yet these topics were taken from a popular process from generations past. These process steps were taken from the scientific method. Remember that?

In what areas have you seen people refuse to think for themselves?

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A Type of Creativity That Few Will Acknowledge

 

 

A friend recently was amazed how easily that I solved a problem, he was amazed that he didn’t think of it years ago, he had been engineering and inventing around a certain technology for decades, his knowledge is impeccable on the topic.  He had explored and thought and pored over a problem for years.  To compare us intelligently on the topic is laughable.

I came in with total ignorance, completely unfamiliar with the problem.  I didn’t know the rules, I didn’t know the restrictions, I didn’t know how it had been done for decades so it was very easy for me to see the obvious problem and therefore the obvious solution.

Glaring me in the face was key to the solution and I casually solved it not fully understanding what I had done.

Sometimes the most stubborn problems are solved with a fresh, and ignorant set of eyes.

Ignorance is not necessarily a weakness, in creativity sometimes ignorance is a strength because you’re not chained down with the excessive knowledge of rules or perceived restrictions.

There are two types of creativity, intelligence-based, knowing every detail, every angle, every boundary and all the history. But there is also ignorance-based creativity with fresh eyes that are too naïve to know that “I couldn’t solve the problem that way.”

Those who have all their eggs in intelligence and experience and knowledge baskets don’t always like to acknowledge the strength of ignorance-based creativity but it is powerful and useful.

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