Applying Scientific Method to Life
What is the Scientific Method?
The scientific method is an iterative process used to find truth through exploring observations and answering questions. Approach life and business like they are science experiments. It's been said that mistakes are just experiments that have gone on too long. Use the Scientific Method to test and iterate every aspect of your life.
Discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining evidence, and seeing if all the available information can uncover a logical truth.
The steps of the Scientific Method can be interpreted and represented different ways but here is a reliable diagram that can be used;
Steps of the Scientific Method
1. Formulate Question
The scientific method starts when you form a question about regarding something that you observe in your life: How, What, When, Who, Which, Why, or Where?
2. Construct Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work. It is an attempt to answer your question with an explanation that can be tested. A good hypothesis allows you to then make a prediction:
"If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen."
State both your hypothesis and the resulting prediction you will be testing. Predictions must be easy to measure.
3. Research and Observation
Rather than starting from scratch in putting together a plan for answering your question, you want to take advantage of experiments from other people. You can learn from other peoples mistakes and save yourself a lot of time testing and running experiments that have been done before...
Read biographies, text books and books on the subject. Be smart there are endless resources in your local library and on the internet to help you find the best way to do things and ensure that you don't repeat mistakes from the past. At this point you could end your scientific method and confirm your hypothesis without the experiment.
4. Test and Experiment
Your experiment tests whether your prediction is accurate and thus your hypothesis is supported or not. It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. You conduct a fair test by making sure that you change only one factor at a time while keeping all other conditions the same.
You should also repeat your experiments several times to make sure that the first results weren't just an accident.
5. Analyze Results & Conclude
Once your experiment is complete, you collect your measurements and analyze them to see if they support your hypothesis or not.
6. Confirm Hypothesis
You may often find that predictions were not accurate and your hypothesis was not supported, and in such cases communicate the results of the experiment and then go back and construct a new hypothesis and prediction based on the information learned during experiment. There is no such thing as failure, only a result from your experiment. This starts much of the process of the scientific method over again. Even if you find that your hypothesis was supported, you may want to test it again in a new way.
7. Report
You may want to reflect on the results of your experiment by writing in a journal or creating a report of your findings. Professional scientists do the same thing by publishing their final report in a scientific journal or by presenting their results on a poster or during a talk at a scientific meeting.
A key to success is running your life as experiments, try different things and test your hypothesis on what may or may not work in your life. Be abundant in the experiments you run and you'll find yourself living a life that delivers results for you!