It is good to read autobiographies of people and a good one to read is Everything All at Once by Bill Nye – How to unleash your inner nerd tap into radical curiosity and solve any problem – published by Rodale distributed by Macmillian, NY, 2017. In the Bill who on TV is known as the Science Guy believes everyone was an inner nerd that can lead to being curious about a subject and then learn to find a solution. In theory due to the internet we can be as curious about subjects more than we ever could in the past. We only need to pick a subject and spend time learning and then move towards a solution, it sounds easy but it reality people seem not to know what is true and what is used to make money and what is false.

Science and what is nowdays called critical thinking takes discipline and diligence. What makes us humans to make a living is our ability to make predictions by finding patterns in nature and then to take advantage of them. Along the way to researching, you need to take heed of a simple phrase – Everyone you’ll meet, ever, knows something you don’t”. In the book, Mr. Nye uses the example of working for Sundstrand Data Control which makes most of the black boxes in airplanes, he and his team were trying to solve a problem but they were not quite working. His boss told him to go talk to the machinists who made the parts for input. They showed him their concerns or abilities and the result was a better instrument. The lesson Mr. Nye learned is many times the people with the best knowledge are no so obvious. In the above case, the machinists were steps away but in days before asking were miles away from solving the problems. Another example was watching a flight attendant dealing with an bad customer – the skills she used to calm the person down and be able to move on to her other functions required a great deal of expertise, being professional at a high standard and she showed them with ease.

A great teaching point was in high school physics class a teacher drew a titled ellipse and asked Mr. Nye to figure it out. Mr. Nye pondered it, and could not come up with a solution. The lesson the teacher was teaching him was to look at the problem differently. The secret was to step back and reasses the problem at hand, in this case the solution was to tilt his head to see. The lesson was about constraints – about what ideas to leave out and the ideas you can work with. Constraints can help you because you can not process everything. The issue is not defining the problem, the issue is why is the problem a problem in the first place?

Bill Nye’s Code of Conduct:

Be open and honest

Do not pretend you know what you do not know

Show the world as it is, rather than the way you wish it was

Respect facts, do not deny them just because you do not like them

Move forward only after you trust your design.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, generally we believe there are a number of great ways to invest in the markets and we will find a really easy way. The truth is getting compound interest to work for you rather than against you is the easiest way but it takes time to do. This is the reason why if you have credit card debt, you  will be paying for a long time, if you own the credit card companies you will be benefiting for a long time. It is hard to find a stock which has a 40% internatl rates of return consistently – credit cards have do this. In order to buy a stock, unless you work there are believe you have some insider knowledge, most of us have to do homework or testing hypothesis. If it works then you try – you can invest with real money or there are many software programs to track companies until you buy them.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.