The true warrior is aware of many interesting facts:

What psychology and behavioural economics have shown is that people don’t think very carefully. They’re influenced by all sorts of superficial things in their decision making. They procrastinate and they don’t read the small print!

Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula, even when the people have been given the prediction by the formula! These decision makers feel that they can ignore the formula, because they have additional information about the situation, but they are wrong about ninety per cent of the time.

Talk about making a mistake … ruining a good thing, and screwing up the outcome! This formulaic approach to prediction—explained in excellent detail by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow1—is called the “Meehl Pattern,” (named after Paul Everett Meehl, an American psychology professor and author of Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, 1954) and relies on empirical data to create a predicative algorithm. In fact, one student of Meehl’s, a wine lover by the name of Orley Ashenfelter, has written a fairly simple algorithm that predicts the future price for fine vintage Bordeaux wines, with a correlation coefficient of 0.92 between the predicted price and the actual price.

The true warrior knows this secret inside out and backwards. The true warrior does not guess. The true warrior does not know better than the empirical evidence at hand. The true warrior does not trust their gut. The true warrior has perfected the skill of reading the signs! The true warrior designs tests to monitor behaviour. They learn what works, and quickly discard what does not. The true warrior practices their faith and belief by trusting the evidence produced by the weapons and tools they employ. No warrior “knows better”. The best of the true warriors just open themselves to the evidence, and embrace their learning!

Validation is just the way of the true warrior. It cannot be any other way. Remember, when faced with an opponent who doesn’t think very carefully, who is influenced by all sorts of superficial things in their decision making, who procrastinates and doesn’t read the small print, it’s no wonder that the true warrior prevails!

You are warriors, and by embracing and utilizing these facts, as key weapons in your arsenal, you will more often prevail. A surplus of prevails will lead to success, wisdom, and wealth that will exceed your greatest expectations. So it has been written.