Experiment Yourself Scientifically

I’m sure if you’re in your 20s you must have made a project report or a research paper for your school or university. This is the report where you have to follow the complete scientific steps to reach a conclusion or prove a hypothesis. The basic steps are.

1. Ask a question.
2. Perform research.
3. Establish your hypothesis.
4. Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment.
5. Make an observation.
6. Analyze the results and draw a conclusion.
7. Present the findings.
8. Rest the findings (usually done by others)

This is a formal way of approaching any question and finding if the answer is valid for that question. The point that I want to make after showing you the nerdy side of mine is that we rarely do that with ourselves. We’re not strangers to just believing things other people say. I’m taking this protein because a guy in my gym said it’s the best. I’m taking that as a career choice because a lot of people are taking it. It’ll work for me because it worked for my friend. HOW?

How can we just assume something will work for us or affect us the same way it did to others? and most of the times things don’t work out the way we expected. So its very important to see what works for us than to take someone’s word for it. And what’s the best way to do that experiment on yourself? Using the best way possible. Let’s say you want to start reading and you ask yourself ‘Should I start reading books?’, so using the above scientific steps we can evaluate it as following.

1. Ask a question: Should I start reading books?
2. Perform research: Why to read books, what are the best books to read, what will I get reading books etc.
3. Establish your hypothesis: It might help me focus better, articulate myself better and improve my knowledge.
4. Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment: Start reading the book 30 mins per day for the whole month.
5. Make an observation: How many days did I skip reading, what made me take interest in further reading, What did I like and what did I not like about reading, did I have fun reading books.
6. Analyze the results and draw a conclusion: Compared to who I was before starting to read, do I consider myself to be improved after a month? Can I continue to keep reading to support my hypothesis?
7. Present the findings: The answer seem to be yes and I did see improvements and curiosity to read more OR the answer seem to be negative and I don’t think I like reading books whatsoever.

What happened here is you actually took out time to experiment if that habit or that activity works for you and if it is worth doing for a longer time instead of just assuming that you don’t like reading or you’d always enjoy reading books. So when you’re not sure if you should or should not do something, conduct an experiment yourself scientifically.

Artwork: https://dribbble.com/shots/3425986-Science-Lab