How To Think With Dan Henry How Thinking Like A Scientist Can Grow Your Business
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A few weeks ago, I was taking my daily morning walk and listening to some videos from Neil deGrasse Tyson. During one of those videos, he was discussing the difference between thinking objectively and non-objectively.
Neil continued on to tell a story about how some of the planets (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) were discovered in our solar system over the course of about a hundred years.
The way in which we thought and problem solved then changed our understanding of the solar system, gravity, Newton’s Law, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and much more.
I want to take some time today to share this story because it really does apply to the way you do business. The way in which the scientific community makes discoveries is very close to how a great entrepreneur also thinks.
When I personally thought less like a scientist, that was when I was broke and struggling, and when I thought more like a scientist, that’s when I became more successful.
In this episode, I am going to cover:
- What Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have to do with your business
- Why Newton's Laws and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity explain a lot about entrepreneurship
- The difference between personal truth, political truth, and objective truth, and why which truth you choose can make or break your business
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— TRANSCRIPT —
In today's episode, we're going to talk about why thinking like a scientist can help grow your business and why the opposite can put it in the grave.
So today's show, and I'm very excited about this because I get to talk about something that is actually far more important than, you know, what most people think about when it comes to entrepreneurship and business. Most people think about things like advertising and marketing and sales funnels and you know, all this jazz. And they don't really think about the bigger picture. And I was on my warning morning walk this morning, and I was listening to some videos from Neil deGrasse, Tyson, the, you know, famed astrophysicist. And so I'm listening and he's telling this story about how the scientific community over the course of say, I think it was a, you know, a hundred or so years discovered planets in the solar system. And I found it to be fascinating. And I saw a lot of similarities between, you know, how perception and how truth is discovered, both in science as well in inter entrepreneurship.
And so I'd like to tell you this story, and then I'd like to tell you how it applies to entrepreneurship because it's an extremely, extraordinarily important lesson. So Neil was telling this story about how, you know, back in the, whatever it was, 18 hundred, or what have you, how we discovered the planet Uranus. And when it was discovered, everybody in the scientific community was super, super happy and super, you know, they're just very excited, you know, Oh, we discovered a new planet. And so as they're, you know, analyzing this planet's orbit, they find that there's something going on with the orbit and it is not following Newton's law. And at that time Newton's law was considered well, for lack of better phrase law, it explained everything. And so they were confused as to why this planet's orbit was funky because if Newton's law was true, then it's orbit should be different.
But for some reason it was, or it was orbiting funky. And so they were faced with a choice, a way to think about things and they thought they could think, well, either, you know, Newton is, is full of it. And this just is laws don't really explain everything. And you know, we were, we were wrong all along, or it does follow Newton's law, which would mean that there must be some other body or planet or object out in the solar system that's influencing Uranus's orbit. And so they did a mathematical calculation, which at that time was very difficult and took a while because there's, there were no computers. And so they do this calculation and they say, okay, if Newton's law is in fact accurate and true, that means that in order for this planet, Uranus to orbit at this particular place, or on this particular path, there must be another planet right here.
And they find a place in space where there must be in that exact spot, a planet. Otherwise, there's no way that Uranus could follow the path that it followed. And so they went out and they made a call out to the observatories and they said, look, you know, look at this exact spot right here and tell me if there's a planet, basically. And so they did that and sure enough, they found a planet and that was the planet Neptune. And so they find this planet and they go, wow, that, you know, Newton's amazing. Newton's the man, you know, this is just great you know new dunes. Awesome. Right? Well, some time passes and the scientific community finds out that mercury, they find another planet. Mercury is not following Newton's law. The orbit is funky. And so they go, okay, we've already been through this with Uranus.
We've already figured this out. We can do it again. There must be another planet. And because mercury is so close to the sun, perhaps that, that, that planet is being washed out and we just can't see it because it's being, you know, we're blinded by the salt, whatever, right. So they start looking for this planet and they say, okay, based on the orbit, there must be a planet, you know, in this area right here. And so they look for it, they look for it and they look for it and they look for it and they look for it. Yeah. I look for it and they cannot find it. And then they were so convinced that this planet existed, that they named it, they named it planet Vulcan, which I find extraordinarily nerdy and hilarious, but they named it planet rocket never found it. And some time passes and along comes Einstein and Einstein develops the, you know, improves upon the, the general theory of relativity and advances that.
And so with that, he wasn't trying to prove anything about, you know, about Newton's law or with the mercury and all that. But it just, as a byproduct explained it and here is how it explained it because mercury was so close to the sun Newton's law had to be modified, or it ha it, it, it didn't necessarily, you know, Einstein didn't necessarily contradict Newton's law. It simply modified it because the sun's gravity is so intense. It's just so much more gravity when you're that close, that it changes the laws of physics, whereas elsewhere in the solar system and, you know, and farther out in space in deep space, there is very weak gravity. And so the same rules don't apply. And so when you paired Einstein's general theory of relativity with Newton's law and blah, blah, blah, it perfectly explained the orbit and the issues with mercury and okay.
The scientific community goes, okay, well, we figured that out. Great. Fantastic. Okay. Well then you know, some time passes and yet again, they find that Neptune Neptune's orbit is also funky. Right. And they go, okay, here we go again. And so they say, alright, well, it can't, we can't use Einstein's theory to explain this, because this is way out into the solar system. Gravity is weak, so it can't be the sun. So that's out. Right. So it ha we got to go back to Newton's law. So now, you know, we, we got to find a planet right here. They did the calculation and all that, the whole process again. And they said, okay, right here must be a planet. Just like they found Neptune because they calculated your Uranus is in orbit. Is that okay? Right here as the planet, they found Neptune, they did it again with Neptune and they went out to the observatories and they said, look right here.
So the observatories look and nothing, they found there was nothing there. And they go, well, wait a minute. Einstein's theory, Newton, what is going on here? So there was nothing there. Well, and again, and again, they had named this planet, they called it Planet X. And they said that you know, it, you know, it's gotta be the size of the earth because for it to influence Neptune's gravity, that much, it would have to be the size of the earth. And this whole thing in New York times it was planted X so thick, but they couldn't find it. So they, they widened the area of search and they said, well, it's gotta be there somewhere. Right. So they widened the area of search and they find a planet and that planet ended up being called Pluto. And so they say, Oh, we found planet X. And it's the size of the earth.
It has to be, they didn't measure it. They just assumed it was the size of the earth because of the fact that it was influencing Neptune's gravity that much. And so it, even though it wasn't quite in the right spot, you know, and the mathematicians in the scientific community were sitting there and saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. It's not in the right spot. Something's funky here. The New York times, Oh, we found, you know, we found this new earth and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, planet X. And so this, this paradox, or this, this, this issue goes unresolved for decades because you can't explain the fact that, you know, you don't play, you know, planet X or Pluto or whatever you wanna call it. It's not in the right spot. Right. So again, this still doesn't add up and we're back to questioning Newton's law because we're like, well, wait a minute.
This isn't in the right spot, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so decades and decades and decades go by. And one day a researcher an astrophysicist named miles Standish in 1993 you know, decides that he is going to look into this a little further. And he says, you know what, let me go out to the observatories that actually collected this data that gave us this information that said all these things about Neptune's orbit. And let me just look into this. And so he goes around and he finds this one observatory that something is weird with the data and he looks into it further and he compares it and he brings it out and he finds it. There was some error at the observatory. So I don't remember it was like a faulty gearbox or something. I believe it was a faulty gearbox.
I could be wrong on that, but it was something going on, something simple, right? And it caused an, a segment of the data to be in error. Erin is data. And so miles takes out that part of the data and recalculates the whole shebang and finds that Neptune's orbit in fact, follows Newton's law precisely. And so this multiple decade long mystery of why Newton's Newton's law, wasn't applying to Neptune, came down to a faulty gearbox. And the fact that they thought Pluto was bigger than it ended up being was simply based on the assumption that that planet must be what was influencing Neptune's gravity. And so when they finally measured Pluto and they remeasured and remeasured as our measurement, our ability to measure got better and better over the decades, they found that Pluto was much smaller and smaller than we thought. And it ended up being what always was this size, but they ended up finding out it was smaller than Earth's moon.
And it was eventually downgraded to a dwarf planet, basically a rock, an IC rock floating in the Kaiser belt of the outer solar system. And so it no longer was the ninth planet. And this process proves that when you try to think objectives and you question your, your own conclusions and you search for it, not a personal truth or a political truth, but an objective truth, otherwise known as the actual truth, you can discover things that most human beings on this planet cannot discover because they're just not willing to think objectives. And, you know, in, in that process, I'm sure there were people that wanted Newton's law to be true because they liked Newton. And then there were people that didn't want his law to be true because they didn't like Newton. And then there was people who and scientists that, that thought objectively and enough scientists thought objectively to figure out what we now know.
And this is the process of progression and in business in entrepreneurship, oftentimes we make this terrible mistake of looking at our own business, non objectively, right. We, I mean, imagine, imagine for a moment that, you know, when you're sitting there and I know this sounds crazy, but imagine for a moment that when you're sitting there evaluating your business, that you're making decisions and you're interpreting data because you want something to be true, because it was your idea, or you want something to not be true, because it was somebody at your company that you don't like personally, and their idea ended up working. And you're like, no, no, no, no, there's gotta be something out, you know, and think about how difficult it would be to build a business and be in, be a successful entrepreneur. If you're always thinking with a political or personal truth, rather than objective truth and a quote from Neil that I, that I really liked was you can argue all you want, but if nature disagrees with you, you're wrong, you know, and, and that's the thing is the truth is the truth.
It doesn't matter. I mean, people skew the truth based on their political preferences, based on their personal preferences all the time. And they don't think like a scientist, and I'm not thinking, I'm not saying that they are art by a scientist. There are, but what I believe, and, and, and I think Neil would concur a good scientist thinks, I mean, the ultimate form of, of science is to think objective really right, to find the answer, not try to interpret the data to come to an answer that you want, but to find the answer. And in my personal life, you know, building from, you know, selling water bottles on the side of the road, all the way to creating an eight-figure company, I look back and I think about every year from the year that I was broke to the year that I'm sitting there, you know, wall street, journal, bestseller, eight figures, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, multiple million-dollar properties and all this jazz.
And I'm thinking about my mindset and the way I think thought. And I go back to when I was sitting in this home, in this small town where everybody was, you know, running around with their fashion and their, in the, you know, their, you know, political subject or trend that they were talking about that week and this and that. And I began to realize that as you go closer to the time in my life, when I was broke, as we move closer to that, I thought in more of the personal and political way, I want, you know, I interpreted things to be true because I wanted a certain truth. And, you know, I then realized that as I got closer to where I am now, my thinking changed. And instead of, you know, thinking personally and politically, I thought more objectively. Now I'm a human being.
We're all human beings. We're not perfect. I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. So I'm sure on a daily basis, I still think, I'm sure there are times I still think personally or politically, and I try to catch myself and think of objectively. And I try to do that more and more because now that I realize that objective thinking really does help your company and really does help you grow personally and professionally, I get excited about it. I think, Oh, I start chatting, bringing myself. And I said, Oh, what, what, what did I do or say, or think, or, or, or, or act on that that maybe is wrong. And I start getting excited about being wrong. I start getting excited about things that I've done, that they could be wrong. And now I can find better ways or, or I can find the real issue.
You know, there were things that I did not use to do in my business that I later found out, warranted my attention. And if I never, if I always stuck to my personal truth, I never, ever, ever would have discovered those things. And, you know, that's why I find it funny when, when Pluto got downgraded to know you're not a planet to whatever dwarf planet or whatever it is. It's not no longer a planet in our solar system. So many people in the United States and possibly the world. But I just know here in the United States were so angry and they were so like, Oh, we've been taught this our whole lives and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I found that absolutely fascinating that someone would get angry over discovering the truth. And what, I mean, the masses felt that way angry that they discovered something that was true, that went against something they were comfortable with.
And, and, and think about that. Think about being comfortable. Like what if one day let's say you're religious. I don't care what the religion is. It could be Christianity, it could be Islam. It could be Scientology. It could be, you know, pick a number, right. Let's just say you believe in that thing, you obviously want that thing to be true. And so imagine if one day a spaceship lands on earth from some aliens and says, Hey guys, just so you know yeah, there's no, God it's actually, you're all part of a scientific experiment or you know, this, or, or, you know, Hey, Darwin was wrong. Evolution is wrong, science, your wrong religion, you're wrong. It's actually this you're in a simulate, whatever. Right. Can you ask yourself, you know, if you are a Christian, are, are, are you, are you really going to sit there and go, Oh, I was wrong. Okay. Or you can be like, no,
No, not, I'm not, you know, you must be from God. Angel and you, you got into an argument with God and they were right. I mean, that's an, I mean, I'm fine. Fascinated by how somebody would do that. Or let's say you're a very scientific person and you want science the way that we perceive science to be true and say, Nope, Nope, Nope. We're not, you know what, if that alien comes in and says, Hey, there's a God, his name is Jehovah. And validates it. You now sign the scientific community is like, Oh no, no, no, no, that can't be, you know, maybe, maybe this alien you know, maybe this alien actually found the Bible and read it and thought it was true. I mean, you could go on and on, but, and maybe, maybe that's right. Maybe it's right. You know, but the idea that you're 100% so certain that it's right. That's what I feel is dangerous thinking, you know, like maybe it's right. Maybe it's wrong. How do we find the truth? How do we, how do we understand what flaws we have in our thinking and how do we expose those and stir those up and try to think better?
You know, that's, that's how I try to view things. You know, and again, I was listening to this this morning and I remember Neil says, you know, if you discover in the frontier, that's when we don't know the question to ask. If we know every single question to ask, then we are no longer on the frontier. And so it just got me thinking to my own belief system, you know, and, and I, I found it fascinating how, you know, I used to be one of those people that probably would've got angry, that they downgraded Pluto. I probably would have been a, which I find to be just, it's very fascinating how you get angry about something like that. You know, I just, I don't understand how you'd be angry about finding the truth. You know, it's very odd to me, but cause I'm, I'm always a believer in the truth.
And so that said, you know, when you look at your business when you look at the things going on, your employees colleagues look at the end of the day, there have been moments in my business where somebody else was right. And I was wrong and I could sit there and say one of a hundred things I could say, you know, Nope, they're wrong. I'm right. Or, Nope, it's an excuse because of this or Nope, this and that. Or I could say something like, well, man, I hired a good employee because they, they figured out something that I didn't, you know, but ultimately do you want to be right? Or do you want to accomplish the mission? Let me say that again. Do you want to be right? Or do you wanna grow your business? Do you want to be right? Or do you want to win?
Because at the end of the day, you're here to win, right? And if you are here to win, then, you know, discovering the truth is only possible. If you're open to being wrong and winners, real true winners are okay with being wrong. And so I ask you to challenge yourself, challenge yourself, to being wrong, challenge yourself, to being critical of not just the conclusions you've come to, but the way you're thinking about coming to those conclusions and the more I do it, the more personal and professional growth, you know, that I see, but sitting there and making an evaluation or decision that you want to be true. And I'll leave you with one more example that I find I find pretty cool. I was, again, I was listening to Neil and he was talking about the, I believe he called it paradox SIA or maybe basically some condition where you see things you want to see, like, like for instance, if you just bought a yellow car, all of a sudden you see a bunch of yellow cars, right.
Just like he, and he made a great point here. He said he was referencing that, that time when and I believe this happened in Clearwater, Florida, very close to where I live, but there was this, this building and this, a parent image of the Virgin Mary appeared on the building. It was some sort of like rainbow glass reflection thing. And, and the way they cleaned the glass that day, or I don't remember the details, but basically, the Virgin Mary PO supposedly appeared on this glass building and, you know, dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people gathered out to worship the building and, you know, there were all these news articles and, you know, look, do I, do I personally know if, if that was the Virgin Mary appearing there, or if that was just, you know, in, in one of the thousands of days that have gone by when they've cleaned those windows, the Windex or whatever, just happened to dry and fall in the right place.
And it kind of looked like a face that people, you know, thought was the Virgin Mary. I don't know. I mean, I can say what based on the evidence, I think it is, which would be, I think it was just fricking Windex, you know, but I'm not, I'm open to the idea. I think it's just as ignorant and biased to say it is as it isn't, you know, without diving into the evidence. But you know, if you present evidence to me of the contrary, I would consider it. But here's what Neil said. He said, think about this. All the people that saw the Virgin, Mary, they were all Christian. Were there any Muslims that saw the Virgin, Mary? Were there any atheists that saw the Virgin Mary? Were there any Buddhists that saw the Virgin Mary or was every single person that saw the Virgin Mary, a Christian? And he goes, Hmm, think about that. What does that tell you? And I believe he was alluding to the fact that it tells you that people see what they want to see period. So if you look at your business and you only see what you want to see, it's going to be very difficult to grow. But if you see what is actually there through objective thinking, you can grow a lot faster. I hope you enjoyed this episode and seeing the next one.