How to be an effective person

First I want to note that the conclusions below are my own opinion based on my own life experiences. I am not a life coach or expert on this topic. This is merely my attempt to share my opinions on what I currently think it takes to be an effective person.

How to be an effective person

• Your body is your best friend. This simply means that you have to love yourself and take care of yourself physically. This can mean trying to keep yourself healthy because you cannot be effective at anything if you lose your most valuable assets.

• Follow the evidence rather than your feelings. This means that there will be times when your emotions betray you and there are going to be instances where the evidence or new knowledge completely shatters your current world view. It is important to always be capable of revising your current beliefs and adapting to the current evidence. This also means making decisions based on the available evidence just as an investigator, a scientist, a doctor, is typically going to do in their fields.

• Listen to advice from people you trust. While I cannot tell you how to determine who to trust or who to take your advice from, I can say that to be an effective person requires making important decisions with the input and advice from others. An individual has a limited perspective, limited knowledge, limited ability to escape their own bias, and only by having a team of "qualified" advisors can an individual make decisions beyond themselves.

There is more to being an effective person than these three basics but this is the bare minimum. To summarize it up, take care of your health, follow the latest results, and don't make important decisions by yourself. We all learn from our mistakes and even if you do everything right there will be times where you are given bad advice or simply have no one to give you good advice, or where your health fails due to an accident, or where you make a decision based on short term feelings, but it's important to learn from any mistakes so as not to make them again. To learn from mistakes is to be able to adapt, and to be able to adapt is crucial to becoming more effective over time from experience.