Story Time: Testing the Jars

One day, a student entered a room where he found two large glass jars filled with clear liquid. As he approached the table, the teacher called out to him, “Be careful! One of those jars is filled with water, but the other one is filled with acid, and you could be harmed severely if you were to get it on you!”

The student stopped in his tracks. “But teacher,” the student called out, “how can I tell which one is filled with water and which one is filled with acid?”

“To be sure,” the teacher answered, “both liquids might appear at first to be very much the same.” He then handed the student a large iron rod and winked. “But you can learn their true natures immediately by watching what they do.”

Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

Story Time: The Angry Dog

Once upon a time, there was a little village with a problem: they had an angry dog prowling around the outskirts of the town, growling and barking at anybody that it would find.

This lasted for many days. The villagers were terrified, and were careful to always have something with them to protect themselves if they should ever encounter the dog, whether a gun, a pitchfork, or even simply a rock. Whenever they would see the dog, they waved their weapons in the air and yelled at it to go away.

One day, a little boy saw the dog far off in the distance, slinking around the outskirts of the town. It looked gaunt and weak. The boy was moved with compassion and took pity on the dog. He dashed back to his home, grabbed a bowl, and filled it with several scraps of food.

He then headed back to search for the dog. When he found the dog, he called out to it, “Good morning, dog! I brought a gift for you!” And he lifted the bowl up for the dog to see.

As the dog approached, it smiled. And the boy smiled. He then asked the dog, “You don’t seem so bad. What makes you so angry?”

The dog sighed. “The people of this town are all so frightened of me that nobody will feed me or play with me. It makes me so sad, so lonely — and very angry!”

And with that, the dog snarled and lunged at the boy. The terrified boy shrieked and ran far away from the dog, still clutching the bowl of food between his trembling fingers.

Image by wirestock on Freepik

Story Time: Stew In The Pot

A student wandered into the kitchen as the master was preparing the evening meal. The master beckoned to him saying, “Come in, my young pupil, and inspect the evening meal I am preparing.”

The young man stepped closer and the master raised the lid from a pot on the warm stove. The wise old man gestured at the pot and instructed, “Young man, look inside this pot. Tell me, what do you see?”

The young man looked into the pot and saw it was full of vegetables, meat, and a thick, rich gravy. It smelled incredible! He licked his lips.

“I see…” he began, pondering the delightful pot of stew in front of him, “carrots.”

The master nodded his head. “Good,” he said. “And what else do you see?”

The student answered, “I see peas.”

“Correct, go on.”

The student pointed into the pot, “I think this right here might be onion.”

“Very good,” the master nodded. “Keep going.”

“Well, these here are obviously potatoes, and — “

” — and beef, and gravy, and garlic,” the master interrupted. “Yes, all these things and more. Everything you have said is true. But you’ve overlooked the most important thing in the pot.”

The student raised his eyebrows. “Master, what have I overlooked?”

“What I see in the pot,” the master mused as he grabbed a ladle, “is stew.” The master scooped some stew into a bowl and handed it to the student with a broad smile. “And it’s delicious!”

Itchy’s Diner: My victory over Procrastination

I’m pleased to announce that as of today, I have finally published Itchy’s Diner!

It’s 2023.

I wrote the first 50,000 words in 2007!

I’d love to say I’ve spent the past 16 years refining the book and making it as near to perfect as I could…but I must confess, I spent nearly the entire time not working on my book. In fact, I didn’t even write the final words of my first draft until 2019!

You might wonder, did I not like the book? As it happens, I love Itchy’s Diner! Even as I was writing it, I liked it better than my first book, The Dream Weaver, and I was very pleased with The Dream Weaver.

I’m not a psychologist, but I can’t help but think that’s actually a big part of why I dragged my feet for so long. While it remained a work in progress, it was mine and mine alone. It was my cherished little world where Itchy interacted with the many different characters that walked through the doors of his diner, my own private little retreat I could always visit where everything felt old and familiar.

A homecoming of sorts.

And in those times that I felt aimless or hopeless, questioning if I was doing anything with my life, I always had Itchy’s Diner to continue working on. Whenever I feared I wasn’t accomplishing anything, I could put in an hour or two of writing and editing Itchy’s Diner, and my thirst for achievement would be sated once again. Indeed, it was in the moments that I most feared I was wasting my life that I was most likely to work on my book with renewed vigor — but a vigor that all too often burned out after a few days or a week.

Since it took me 16 years to complete the book working in that manner, I guess I’m happy to tell you that yes, such moments of existential dread have been rather infrequent in my life. But through good times and bad, one thing remained constant: I have long held to the conviction that if I were to die before officially releasing Itchy’s Diner, it would be my saddest failure.

So today, Itchy’s Diner is no longer mine alone. It is ours, and I’m happy to share it with you. It has helped me find meaning, purpose, and joy in my relatively small and insignificant life for 16 years. I sincerely hope it will do the same for you.

As for me, I have a giant stack of ideas for new creative projects that’s been building up for 16 years. I often said to myself “that’s a cool project, but I really should finish Itchy’s Diner first.” So I guess you could say I have a lot of promises I’ve made to myself that have just come due.

I wish you all the best, until we meet again.

You Find What You Focus On (So Focus On What’s Good)

Recently, I was reminded of an important fact of life: we find a lot more of something when we’re looking for it!

Some time ago, I began periodically fasting. And on one of my fasting days, I was shocked to find I was already hungry by 9 in the morning. Now, what’s surprising about that is that I rarely eat breakfast, whether I’m fasting or not. And I often eat lunch simply because it’s lunchtime rather than because I’m hungry. So for me to be hungry so early in the morning…well, it’s unheard of!

Clearly, the only reason I was hungry was because I had already chosen not to eat. And for the simple fact that on that day I had chosen to pay closer attention to what I ate and when I ate it (or more accurately, what and when I did not eat), I then became hyper-focused on eating…and on hunger.

In other words, I found a lot more of what I was paying attention to. 

I’m sure we’ve all experienced this same effect. For instance, you learn a new word, and suddenly you encounter it everywhere. Or you see a yellow car and actually think to yourself “that’s interesting, yellow cars are pretty rare”, only to find over the next week or so that you now seem to see a yellow car at every intersection!

What’s fascinating here is that in these examples, that new word and those yellow cars didn’t suddenly appear everywhere, they were there all along. The only thing that changed was our attention to them. It’s quite likely that I’m hungry around mid-morning every day, but I usually don’t notice because I’m busy paying attention to other things.

One thing’s certain: you find what you focus on. This can be positive, or extremely negative. Have you ever encountered somebody that can find the stormcloud behind every silver lining? Don’t be that person. If you’re looking for what’s bad in every situation, you will surely find it! And what value is there in that?

So if you’re going to find what you’re looking for anyway, strive to be the person that finds what’s good in everything. And if I can make a suggestion, I recommend that you look for the ultimate good in everything: God. Yes, turn your focus toward God’s presence in your life. With that focus, you will indeed find countless examples of His benevolence, and be amazed!

Are you ready to be amazed by God?

Psalm 22 Made me the Christian I Am Today

Simply put, Psalm 22 is what got me to put my trust in Jesus.

Still with me?

Great! Here’s the longer version of that story…

I grew up in the Christian church and was raised by very faithful Christian parents, but my own faith wavered quite a bit as I grew older. By the time I was in college, it’s fair to say I had no faith at all. I was pretty sure religion was just a pleasant fiction that helped weak-minded people pretend that life isn’t as horrible as it truly is. I wouldn’t say I was ever an atheist, but I was very much an agnostic. That is, I was never certain that God didn’t exist, I was just uncertain that He did exist. And I didn’t really care whether He existed or not.

But it made me uncomfortable to have a family so devout in their faith while I remained neither hot or cold. I’ve always been a decisive person, so I really disliked taking the position that “maybe” God exists. And it seemed to me that if I were to not follow in my family’s footsteps, I should at least have good reasons for it. So, I decided to do something I had never done before: I read the Bible.

I started with the Gospel of Mark. I started with Mark for 2 reasons. First, as one of the 4 Gospels, it was almost entirely about Jesus. And since Jesus is what Christianity is all about, that seemed like a good place to start. And second, it was a very short book. Yes, that’s right: I was putting the lowest possible effort into my spiritual well-being! Ah, to be young.

Overall, I didn’t run into anything surprising (though I never previously read the Bible on my own, I was thoroughly exposed to the Gospels over the years simply through my family’s regular attendance). But I happened to have a study Bible with me as I was reading Mark, loaded with footnotes about the text that offered alternate translations and scholarly notes about the culture of the time and how it might impact the meaning of the words in ways our modern ear might not pick up.

One note in the account of Jesus’s crucifixion stood out to me in particular. It noted that Jesus’s anguished cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was actually quoting the first line of Psalm 22. The note further suggested that it was common to quote the opening line of a Psalm as a way to call the entire Psalm to the listener’s mind. Well, that piqued my curiosity. Now I had to know, what did the rest of Psalm 22 have to say?! I immediately flipped through the pages back to the Psalms, and to Psalm 22. I began to read…

And I was absolutely blown away by what I found! Psalm 22 described, in eerie detail, what Jesus was going through. The scorn and ridicule of those around him. His garments divvied up by the casting of lots. His hands and feet pierced. It was clear to me I was reading a summary of what I had just read in Mark!

And I knew that the Psalms were written several hundred years before Jesus endured the agony that it described so well. 
That simple realization in that very instant opened my eyes to the possibility that even though the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent supernatural person might sound made up, it doesn’t mean it is made up. Eventually, you reach a point where there are just “too many coincidences.”  And I’ve discovered many more since then.

I encourage you to take a moment right now to follow in my footsteps. Read the Gospel of Mark. And once you’ve read through 15:39, go read Psalm 22 while it’s still fresh. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the day I read Psalm 22 was the day I truly began to believe that Jesus’s death on a cross thousands of miles away and thousands of years ago was the most important event in all of history.

Story Time: The Old man and The Bengal Tiger

Once upon a time, not terribly long ago, there lived a kindly old man with an adoring family. His wife had passed some time ago, but his daughter lived in town with her husband and son.

The old man cherished his grandson, and they spent time together as much as was possible. And so the old man was especially happy one morning to prepare to celebrate his grandson’s 5th birthday party with his daughter’s family.

It was beautiful outside, perfect weather for the picnic they had planned in the park. He thought of what fun it would be to watch the wide grin spread across his grandson’s face when he opened his present to see the very thing he had been begging for for months. He thought of what fun it would be to listen to his grandson’s rambling and enthusiastic stories of what he had been doing since they last saw each other.

But mostly, he thought of how nice it would be to spend time with all the people that meant the most to him. When it came down to it, he knew that all the happiest times of his life were spent in the company of the ones he loved.

However, as the old man cinched up his tie and began to put on his worn and faded leather shoes, an announcement was broadcast on the radio:

“This is an emergency notice,” the reporter spoke with great urgency. “There has been a report of a Bengal tiger loose in the city! No other information is available at this time, but residents are advised to stay indoors for their safety until we know more.”

Oh, dear, the old man groaned as he dropped his shoe to the floor in disappointment. The party would have to wait, it just wouldn’t be prudent to have a picnic in the park with a tiger on the loose!

The old man phoned his daughter with the news, and they agreed that it might be best to postpone the picnic, given the circumstances. The old man asked to speak to his grandson to break the news to him. The boy was disappointed, but the old man had the impression that his grandson understood the danger and why they had to cancel.

The old man hung up the phone and fought back a regretful tear. And as he sat in his empty home, alone with his thoughts, he began to worry about the tiger.

It was so frightening to think that a tiger could be right outside his door, lying in the bushes in cat-like silence, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice! Why, he could merely step out his door to get the daily paper and, BAM! The tiger would shred him with its horrible claws and savage teeth. A mere second of carelessness, with such terrible consequences! As the hours wore on, the old man’s imagination dreamed up countless other terrifying scenarios, each ending the same horrible way.

It soon became apparent that there was some kind of miscommunication: the reports were not of a Bengal tiger, but rather of a Bengal cat, a simple house pet that had gone missing. But the news stations didn’t announce the correction with anywhere near the enthusiasm or frequency as they did the initial report, for it was not nearly as exciting a thing to report.

And so it happened that the old man missed the announcement altogether. When his daughter called to invite him to celebrate his grandson’s birthday indoors at their home instead, he dared not go! He thanked her for the invite, but declined. He told her simply that he wasn’t feeling well, for he was embarrassed to admit the real reason–he was terrified of the Bengal tiger! The old man asked to speak to his grandson to break the news to him. The boy was disappointed, but the old man had the impression that his grandson understood why he could not visit.

That evening, the old man went to bed frightened and alone, terrified of the Bengal tiger prowling the city.

Then, sometime during the evening, the old man passed away in his sleep. Never again would he attend his grandson’s birthday parties. And he would never again spend the happiest times of his life in the company of the ones he loved.

And that is the story of how a kindly old man with an adoring family died frightened and alone…terrified of a Bengal cat.

The Importance of Definitions: Getting Precise

In a previous article, I mentioned that definitions play an important role in the search for Truth. So let’s take a look at just how important definitions are.

Defining the words we use (and the words other people use) is an important step toward understanding each person’s point of view. For example, what does it mean to be “alive”? As you try to describe it, you’ll find that it’s a far more complex matter than you might have guessed. Are we talking about brain function? Breathing? Movement? Flourishing? Self-actualization? Depending on the conversation, it could mean any one of those!

Have you ever had an argument with somebody, only to discover in the end that you actually agreed all along, but were just explaining your views differently? It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? This can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes, we simply don’t express ourselves correctly. We might use a word incorrectly, like say “magnificent” when we actually mean “magnanimous.” Other times, we might incorrectly interpret the meaning of a word that another person is using correctly. And other times, we might be using a word that is technically accurate, but could have communicated with more precision by using a more concrete word. Like saying “apple” when we could have said “Golden Delicious.” 

Being precise about the words we use helps us gain a greater understanding of our own views and of other people’s views. When we make sure that the words we use are communicating what we intend, and verify that the words we hear from another person mean what they intended for them to mean, we can then make sure that we’re all on the same page and that we’re actually talking about what we think we’re talking about. And hopefully, it brings us closer to discovering Truth in the process (which should always be our ultimate goal).

That’s right, when we get more precise about our definitions, we move closer to Truth. Taking the trouble to understand the words we use encourages us to elevate the quality of our thinking overall. Often, our knowledge is merely surface knowledge. But we rarely realize how little we know about what we think we know until we’re brought face to face with it. To see how this operates, imagine you’re a detective interviewing a witness. If they told you that the suspect got away in “a vehicle,” how deep is their understanding of the situation? And how useful is their testimony? A “vehicle” could be a car. But it could also be a skateboard, a helicopter, a schooner, the list is nearly limitless. The information is correct, but imprecise. And the suspect will likely never be caught! But imagine instead that the witness said the suspect got into a blue 2003 Ford F-150 pickup truck with a broken rear tail light on the driver’s side, and Minnesota plates that ended in 534. Now, suddenly it looks like finding the culprit will be a lot easier! When you commit to getting to this kind of precision with your words and the meaning you apply to them, you take your thinking to the next level.

Getting serious about your definitions also helps you discover the gaps in your thinking. I think we’ve all had those moments where we’re arguing with somebody, and they bring up a counterargument that we literally had never even thought of. Defining your terms, when done properly, helps you to ensure that you are considering the issue from every angle. By far, the best tool for getting clear about your definitions is to use the law of the excluded middle. With this approach, you can divide everything into 2 parts, and only two parts: this or not this. And you can further divide each of those parts into 2 parts, and only 2 parts. And so on, until you can no longer make any meaningful distinctions. And in this manner, you ensure that all the way down the chain, you never overlooked anything. Now that’s precision!

So the law of the excluded middle is the most important thinking tool available. And establishing precise definitions is a very close second! The next time you’re having trouble discussing an issue with somebody, take a moment to iron out the definitions of the terms the both of you are using. Never assume you know what they mean, ask them questions about it to make sure. It’ll seem magical.

A Tale Of Two Maladies: How to Think About communicable disease risks

Introducing the Contrast Method

One strategy I use often when analyzing an issue is to apply sharp contrasts to the matter. That is, if I was exploring whether or not air travel is safe, I would look at it from two very different perspectives. One perspective would be to consider what extremely unsafe air travel would look like, compared with what overwhelmingly safe air travel would look like. For example, no flights would ever arrive at their destination safely if air travel were completely unsafe. On the other side of the spectrum, perfectly safe air travel would see absolutely every single flight arrive at its destination, without incident. Stepping back, we can then consider where we might place the current state of air travel along the continuum between grossly unsafe and totally safe. (And I think it’s pretty safe, all things considered. Wouldn’t you agree?)

Subtle distinctions can make it very difficult to analyze something effectively. For example, it would be very challenging to guess if a rock weighs closer to 5 or 6 pounds—but ridiculously easy to guess if that rock weighs closer to 1 pound or 100 pounds!

The “Contrast Method” makes it easier to think about challenging issues by carving a path through subtle distinctions by exaggerating them—giving you a window into the deeper issues at play that allows you to view the entire situation with more clarity. You are then in a better position to return from those exaggerations and consider those subtle distinctions from a position of new wisdom.

Applying contrasts is a fairly straightforward process. First, you define the main question. Then, you look at the contributing factors involved. You then adjust those factors to be exaggerated, sharply-contrasting versions of themselves. And finally, you review how those contrasts apply to the main question at hand. So, what does this look like in practice? Let’s find out!

To Fear Or Not To Fear

Given the current political and social climate, what better issue to consider than this: how concerned should we be about not just COVID-19, but any communicable disease? How do we reason about communicable diseases and the risks they pose to us and to others?

Worst-Case Scenarios

Let’s take a look at 2 radically different diseases. To avoid bumping into any secret biases we might have which could potentially spoil our exploration, we’ll consider two sharply contrasting fictional diseases. Let’s meet the contenders by building our first contrast around the “worst-case scenario”…

The Tallahassee Tickle: This charming little disease was first recognized in Tallahassee, FL. It gets its name from its signature symptom, which is a nettlesome tickling sensation on your earlobe. It lasts for about 15 minutes and it’s gone. 

The Rhody Horror: This ghastly spectacle was first discovered in Providence, Rhode Island. Its horrific, tell-tale symptom reaches its climax when your eyes liquefy, leaving you writhing in agony over a period of 12-14 hours until you finally die from sheer exhaustion (and extensive internal bleeding).

I trust you would agree that of the two, The Horror is by far the more distressing of the two maladies. It would certainly be understandable if you were to fear it! But would it be rational? That depends on a number of other factors. Like how contagious it is, for example. So let’s take a look at that next.

Infectiousness

For this contrast, let’s look at the difference between a disease that’s nearly impossible to get and one that’s nearly impossible to avoid. On the one hand, imagine you could catch these diseases only if you were continuously within 3 feet of an infected person for 12 hours or more. And on the other hand, imagine that you could catch these diseases merely be being in an infected person’s field of vision! As in, if they see you, then you’re infected. How does this affect the rationality of our fear of these diseases?

For The Tickle, this doesn’t really move the needle at all, does it? Whether it’s impossible to catch or impossible to avoid, in the end The Tickle is merely an inconvenience.  Whether it’s contagious or not is almost irrelevant.

But The Horror is a very different matter, isn’t it? When it’s nearly impossible to catch, that provides a lot of hope, doesn’t it? Suddenly, it doesn’t look as scary as when we were considering only the worst-case scenario, wouldn’t you agree? Even though The Horror is out there, the fact that it’s nearly impossible to get actually makes it appear less horrific than before. But when it’s nearly impossible to avoid, its infectiousness seems to act as a fear multiplier. While the notion of possibly contracting this dreaded disease was already pretty disturbing, being nearly certain of contracting it makes it sound many times worse, and far more terrifying!

Here we see that the infectiousness of a disease matters in direct relation to the seriousness of the disease. By itself, that a disease is contagious is almost irrelevant. But when paired with a dangerous disease, suddenly the stakes are raised—by orders of magnitude if the disease is serious enough. But let’s not abandon all hope yet. Let’s take a look at how the treatability of a disease impacts our rational concern about it.

Treatability

Here, a natural contrast springs up. On one side, we look at what would happen if the disease was easily treatable (and since we’re dealing with fiction here, let’s say all you had to do was drink a tall glass of water to be fully cured). On the other side, we look at what happens when it is absolutely not treatable.

Once again, we find that when it comes to The Tickle, whether or not it’s treatable is essentially irrelevant. Once that tickle sets in, it’ll be over in 15 minutes anyway. 

And once again, we find the same scenario play out for The Horror with regard to treatability as we saw with infectiousness. When it’s eminently treatable, it loses all of its power. Now, even if you were to catch it—even if it was certain that you would—you have essentially zero reason to fear the virus if there’s an exceedingly effective treatment for it.

Interestingly, if The Horror is not treatable at all, that doesn’t appear to have the same multiplying factor as with infectiousness, because we were already basically assuming it wasn’t treatable when we were looking at the other factors.

So it seems that the treatability of a disease has the potential to make it better—far better, if it’s completely treatable—yet does not have the power to make it “worse” in the event it’s not treatable.

Now, so far we’ve been looking at these diseases from the standpoint of the worse-case scenario. But how do these look when we look at the most likely scenarios instead?

Typical Prognosis

So the tickle of The Tickle and the horrific liquefied eyeballs of The Horror are the things that get the headlines. But how would these illnesses look if those were not the most likely outcomes?

Even without getting into the weeds here, can we just agree that The Tickle is going to fare pretty much the same as with all the previous contrasts? If the worst-case scenario (getting a tickling sensation on your ear lobe for a short time) isn’t the most common symptom, what was already a trifling disease now becomes even less concerning…but not by any meaningful degree.

Moving on to The Horror, we find an interesting thing. If the horror of The Horror is not the most common scenario, now what? Let’s imagine that only 1 in a billion cases end in the horror, and all other cases result in a minor runny nose. As in, most people will think they simply had seasonal allergies or something. Now, suddenly, The Horror is starting to look a lot like the Tickle, isn’t it? By contrast, if instead 1 in a billion cases presented the runny nose, and all other cases brought the full-strength Horror, well, now it’s terrifying again. So as we slide that needle along the spectrum, at what point does The Horror make the leap from “relatively harmless” to “relatively terrifying”? When 1 in a billion cases present the full-strength Horror? At 1 in a million? 1 in 100,000? If we were to chart how frightening The Horror was as the likely outcome changed across that spectrum, how would that graph look?

It seems, then, that the likely outcome of a disease is a far more meaningful driver of rational concern than the worst-case outcome. Essentially, the worst case is meaningful only in relation to how likely it is to occur.

The Cure For Fear

Fear is often the result of a lack of information, or facts without context. The Contrast Method helps encourage us to dig deeper into an issue, to view it from many angles and to come face to face with worst-case scenarios. This gives us courage and confidence when we return to the original issue with new perspectives. It frees us from being driven by emotions (which in this example would leave us in crippling fear of catching the Rhody Horror, no matter what the reality of the situation is), and nudges us closer to thinking objectively about the issues.

I hope you will find, as I have, that the Contrast Method is an invaluable tool, and that it serves you well. 

Before you go, I invite you take a moment right now and apply the Contrast Method to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mentally adjust the settings on each of those factors as if you were adjusting the equalizer dials on a stereo, and watch how those changes impact the reasonable concern for this disease. For added perspective, I invite you to contrast those findings with the common cold, the seasonal flu, and bubonic plague. Good luck!

The Master Tool For Thinking Accurately

Recently, I posted a call for a renewed reverence for Truth.

In case any of you are willing to join me in that pursuit, I thought I would now write a number of articles about how to think clearly and accurately, to equip you with the tools you’ll need in your search for Truth—and to recognize it when you’ve found it. In this first article, I want to discuss one of the foundational principles of logic: the law of the excluded middle.

The law of the excluded middle is simple, but its implications are profound. In short, the law of the excluded middle just means that any statement or claim you make is either true, or it is not true. Period. There is no middle ground, no “gray” area.

If that thought bothers you, if you find yourself instinctively pulled to disagree…well, that’s why I’ve chosen this as the subject of my first article about how to think accurately!

In our culture, we tend to reflexively distrust what we call “black-and-white” thinking. It’s often viewed as too rigid, and blind to nuance. We then praise ourselves when we rise above the perceived limits of black-and-white thinking and feel exceedingly sophisticated by seeing all of the gray area between the figurative black and white.

However, accurate thinking can not be accomplished by wandering about within the near limitless expanse of gray area. You see, the grey area avoids at all costs making a firm distinction, of saying with conviction, “this is true” or “that is false“. You are then merely a wanderer with no map and no destination. Clear, accurate thinking demands that you eventually step out of the fog of all that might be true and into the bright light of what is true. Such clarity can only be found in the precision offered by thinking solely within the confines of “true” and “false”.

When you commit to thinking in terms of true or not-true, you now have an exceedingly powerful tool to cut straight to the heart of any issue. You are now attacking the problem with the logical precision of a computer, which under the hood processes all of its “thoughts” in terms of true and not-true, on and not-on.

As it happens, the problem with “black and white” thinking is that it isn’t rigid enough: rather than “black or white”, you should be thinking in terms of “black or not-black” and “white or not-white” (or “gray or not-gray”). In other words, true or not-true.

Is Trump a corrupt president? Was Obama a scandal-free president? Does God exist? The Truth of these questions can be sought out with dogged tenacity, because you can have confidence that the answers are going to be either “yes” or “no.” You need only find the evidence.

Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into Truth-seeking than this, but simply by getting comfortable with declaring things to be true or false, you will already be well on your way!

Okay, so pop quiz: are zebras black? Or are they white? Are they both? Are they neither? It will all come down to how we define what it means for a zebra to “be black” or to “be white.” I’ll discuss the importance of definitions in my next article.