The first rule of clear thinking is to stop treating your ideas like sacred objects.

Because they’re not. They’re tools. And the faster you learn to break them, the better they get.

This is the foundation of Karl Popper’s philosophy. Popper was a 20th-century philosopher of science—arguably one of the most influential of all time. He challenged the old idea that science advances through confirmation. His view, rather, was that real science doesn’t prove ideas right. It tries to prove them wrong. And the ideas that survive repeated attempts to kill them—those are the ones worth keeping. But only until something better comes along.