Unlocking Better Health and More Money By Solving The Crossword Puzzle of Truth
And the 3 words that are crucial to solving it.
The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.
— St. Augustine
This would be nice, but it ain’t so. Truth is always getting stymied, hidden and obfuscated. Especially when it’s not lining up with the ideas and beliefs that are prevalent at the time. We somehow seem to think that truth is available to all, and easy to find.
Let me tell you: it is not.
If it were easy, everyone would have it, but that’s hardly the case. It is available to all who care enough and are willing to put in the time and effort to uncover it. That turns out to be a relatively small number of people.
When it comes to truth, we have a few things working against us.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
— Anais Nin
First of all, we live in a world where illusion reigns. It’s been this way as long as humans have walked the earth. It’s the nature of our mind to filter out things that don’t fit our existing beliefs. We all walk around with a huge bias: what we we’ve been taught to believe. Our picture of reality is incomplete. Always.
Secondly, anything worth having will take effort on our part. If you care about truth you have to seek it out. Find those champions for truth who value it and pursue it with integrity. They’re out there.
Then there’s censorship. Our era is one of increasing censorship and propaganda. There’s even propaganda to sell the censorship. The nature of censorship is to hide information that conflicts with someone’s agenda. And how do you know what you don’t know? There’s only one reason for censorship and propaganda: to control your thinking.
With that in mind let’s look at a few champions for truth.
Ignaz Semmelweis
He was a 19th century Hungarian physician who made an important discovery. He noticed that wards using midwives had much lower mortality rates than those that were serviced by physicians. Not hard to see why, in retrospect. In those days physicians would often go directly from cutting into cadavers to helping women deliver their babies.
Semmelweis assumed that the doctors carried something on their hands. So he had the doctors wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution before delivering the babies. The results were dramatic. Mortality rates plummeted in the doctors’ wards.
Although his assumption had been correct, he couldn’t prove what it was. The germ theory had not yet been fleshed out.
The sad result was that even though he published his findings, doctors around the country simply ignored his advice. Why did they ignore it when the data were so convincing? Wards that implemented the hand washing went from a mortality rate of almost 20% to less than 2%.
You may think that this was a couple centuries ago. Maybe people were not as smart then and they didn’t have the internet. Then consider Carole Baggerly, who even in today’s age has been waging a very similar, uphill battle.
Carole Baggerly
As a breast cancer patient she received chemo and radiation. After this ordeal she was astounded to discover scientific research about vitamin D. It showed that low vitamin D blood levels were strongly correlated with getting cancer, while those with high levels had both a much lower chance of getting cancer, and much better chances of long term survival after treatment.
Why didn’t her doctors tell her this? Appalled by the gap between what researchers know and what doctors tell their patients, she took action.
She started Grassroots Health, a non-profit dedicated to researching and documenting the effects of vitamin D on our health. Its primary goal is making this research available to people and medical providers around the world.
You may be surprised to hear that multiple research studies found that vitamin D blood levels of 60 ng/ml reduce the risk of breast cancer by 80% or more. That’s not insignificant if you consider that in today’s world 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer some time in their life.
Warren Buffett
As America’s most famous investor he became the world’s richest man, outperforming the S&P500 not by a few percentage points, but by and astounding 200x. $100 invested in the S&P500 would have grown to almost $5000 over a 50-year period, the same amount invested by Buffett grew to more than $1,000,000.
How is it that Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger were able to have such incredible results? They were able to see and recognize value more clearly than the regular investor.
What if your life could be 10x or 20x or 200x better than it is today if you could see truth more clearly?
Seeing truth more clearly allows us to make better decisions, and yet we resist it.
Wisdom
Now what do these three champions for truth have in common?
They were curious and willing to follow the facts. And the facts gave them a better understanding of how things work.
They also discovered how hard it is to give this truth, that is so obvious to them, to others.
The fact is that truth has to be discovered, and it can only happen one person at a time. Each one of us has to discover our own truth. Just because someone else has discovered it doesn’t make it your truth. You have to care enough about the truth, and sometimes you have to care enough to erase an old belief. Most people do not care enough to do that. Like the doctors delivering babies a couple of centuries ago, they prefer to stick with what they have.
Semmelweis became increasingly disturbed when so few doctors were adopting the changes he recommended. He ended up being carted off to in an insane asylum, severely beaten by the guards, and he died shortly after.
Warren Buffett shares his insights into the stock market with anyone who cares to read it in his annual letter to shareholders. He takes little credit and acknowledges that most of his investments have only performed so-so. A few investments did exceedingly well and are continuing to increase in value year after year. There’s a lot of wisdom there if you care to read it.
Carole has come to appreciate what a monumental task it is to educate people on a single aspect of truth: our bodies need vitamin D and most people need more than they get or make. Could we cut the cost of health care in this country in half if everyone had enough vitamin D in their blood? Who knows? The data seem to point in that direction, so Carole keeps plugging away at her mission of educating people.
Why is it so hard to share our wisdom? To help me understand, I visualize this as a crossword puzzle. Imagine that you’re trying to solve a crossword puzzle and you have filled in several words across. Any word that goes down and intersects now has to match the letters you already have. But as much as we hate to admit it, not every word in our crossword puzzle is correct.
This is the situation we find ourselves in. Existing beliefs take precedence over new ones. Some were drilled into us when we were kids, others we picked up from friends, books and even movies. Right or wrong, these are our beliefs.
Keeping an open mind
Just as it takes effort to fill out a crossword puzzle, it takes effort to think critically about truth. But the harder part is to keep an open mind.
The longer a belief has existed, the harder it becomes to erase. It’s as if the answers we wrote in pencil slowly turn to permanent ink. The longer we have a belief in our system, the harder it becomes to say these three words: I was wrong. We form attachments to our beliefs, just like we form attachments with people.
Nothing wrong with forming attachments of course. But some of us have developed a loyalty to our beliefs that we don’t even have for our best friends.
Even Albert Einstein, as brilliant as he was, had this problem. As a young man his general theory of relativity sent shockwaves through the scientific community. It didn’t sit well with the older scientists, many of whom couldn’t accept this newfangled theory. In time, the facts proved his theory correct.
But, as he got older, he was also unable to shift into accepting new concepts and beliefs, even though they were supported by the data. Just as older scientists had resisted his theory of relativity, so did he resist quantum physics, which was spearheaded by the next generation of physicists.
We have an innate resistance to new facts that don’t fit our current picture of reality. When we’re young, our crossword puzzle has few entries in it, so we’re more flexible incorporating new beliefs. There’s no conflict yet. But the more time we’ve spent adding words — or beliefs — to the puzzle, the more attached we become to them. They become like our favorite chair. Why would you ever get rid of your favorite chair? It’s so comfortable, it just feels right.
This is the conundrum of truth. It takes a strong commitment to be willing to look at our precious crossword puzzle and make changes to it.
What it takes is being able to say: “I was wrong.”
These are powerful words. If you care about truth, practice them often. They can open up a path to a better future, through a better view of reality.
