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When I was little, my dad and I talked about the different approaches used by scientists and engineers. He summed it up thus: “Scientists are concerned whether or not something should work, but an engineer cares only that it does work.” A little simplistic perhaps, but a pretty powerful distinction for a kid. I’ve learned to apply this to my own life and development. As with any area of learning and advancement, you do not necessarily need to know the theory in order to use the technology, though it will often help.
When improving your life, you need to be both a scientist and an engineer.
As you may have gathered by now, I tend to favor the hands-on, try-it-out engineering model for my day-to-day life. But this is tempered by my desire to really know what’s going on. For our purposes here, I’m not describing science in the strict definitions of the Scientific Method, but rather as an exploration and discovery, based on theory.
Theory is very important in our lives whether or not we realize it. Theory is what gives us a mental framework for the world. By developing those theories, we can in turn come up with new technologies, both internal and external. The development and refinement of Theory is the act and practice of discovery itself. In so doing, you expand your world and you expand the possibilities. The drawback to the pursuit of pure Theory is that it does not yield much in the way of new technologies by itself.
The Engineer’s Dilemma
I’d like to open this section with a poem I heard in my youth:
The Engineer’s Dilemma
It’s not my place to run the train
The whistle I cannot blow.
It’s not my place to say how far
The train’s allowed to go.
It’s not my place to shoot off steam
Nor even ring the bell.
But let the d@*& thing jump the track
And see who catches hell.-Author Unknown
Engineering is great for working within established frameworks of theory, but is not that great for coming up with radically new ideas. Engineering is about refining applications that work right now into applications that work even better. Using something entirely new is, generally speaking, not part of the process. The pragmatic “does it work” serves well, but is also incomplete. Just as pure Theory doesn’t do much good without Applications, Applications are stagnant without new Theory.
Using Theory and Applications together
What I suggest as a course of action, and what has worked for me in the past, is exploring the world and trying new things to refine your Theory, but doing so with an Engineer’s eye to Applications. Throughout the course of this blog I will keep pushing the envelope for better Theory, and in so doing get better Applications to share with you. Be warned that some of them can and probably will seem rather “woo woo” for you.
When and if this happens (and it probably will, at some point), try it out and ask yourself: “Does it work for me?” Forget about whether or not you think it should work. When trying something new, just try it. If it works, then use it. If your theory is incompatible with the application, then one of two things will happen. The first possibility is that the tech you are trying to use will fail, due to the fact that your world will not allow for this application to be used at this time. You have heard that whether or not you think you can do something , you are correct is true in this case. If you believe that there is no such thing as intuition, attempts to integrate techs that rely on it will probably not serve you. If you wish, you can simply let them go and move on to something that does work for you. However, I suggest that you try them out anyway, because there’s always the wonderful second possibility: You try it out and it works. Many people have difficulty understanding why theorists are tickled pink when they realize that their findings reveal something that they did not expect. They love it because it is something new to explore. If you try - honestly and with an open mind - try out a tech that you were unsure would work for you and it did, how would you feel afterward? I bet that you would feel like the world is opening up to you, which in fact it is.
Only you can determine what works for you. If you try something and it works, don’t let a naysayer rob you of it. If you let them poison your mind, you won’t be able to really get what you want. Your confidence will go down, and your shiny new tech will suddenly stop working. Everyone is unique and so is every journey. Take the time to play with yours.
