Nov 23, 2025

The Importance of Thinking for Yourself: Navigating Life and the UPSC Exam

Purpose of this article: To understand how important it is to have an independent set of core beliefs about how the human mind and world works, and how to form them the right way.

Why Is This Relevant for UPSC?

UPSC is a marathon, ranging from 2 to 3 years (if you do things right and get lucky) to 6 to 7 years (if you do things wrong and get unlucky).

Imagine a marathon runner who starts a 20-mile race based on the advice of a few experienced coaches.

At mile 3: Tired and mentally vulnerable, they see billboards from a new set of experts claiming their shoes are wrong and would not last the race. Anxious, the runner stops, buys the new shoes, and resumes.
At mile 7: A different set of trustworthy-looking coaches appears, screaming that the posture of the runner is wrong. The runner stops again to adjust.

This cycle repeats. The runner, exhausted not just by the running but by the constant pivot in strategy, lives in a state of perpetual anxiety. They never know if they are doing the right thing.

Life Lesson

Always understand the incentives of the people advising you. Are they selling shoes? Or are they helping you run?

The Solution

The runner must themself, do their own in depth research (from 1st principles: means boiling things down into their most basic forms then building your way up), preferably before starting the race. By doing their own research from first principles, perhaps with initial guidance, they must conclude and form their own set of core beliefs: These are the right shoes, and this is the right posture for me.

If they do this, when the billboards appear at miles 3 and 7, they can ignore them. They will have the conviction to stick to the plan because they know it is the right thing to do, rather than just hoping it is.

Beliefs

Do you have beliefs? Do you believe in anything strongly? Extremely strongly? Think. Take your time. Think of a belief in which you have the strongest conviction.

Example: One of my strongest conviction beliefs is the Dopamine Theory popularized by Andrew Huberman.

Only after you have thought of a belief, move ahead.

Would you bet 1% of all your future accumulated monetary assets on it being true?

Yes?
How about 10%?
Still yes?
How about 50%?

Probably no now, right?

I would bet 50% of all my future accumulated monetary assets on the Andrew Huberman popularized Dopamine Theory being true.

This might seem foolish to you.

Where do I get such strong conviction from ?

I have two sources:

Experience: Having experienced it myself in my daily life, consistently over many months and a few years now.
Science: It is robustly backed by scientific research, and I am a strong believer in the conclusions arrived at from the peer-reviewed scientific research process.

Self-Reflection

How do you come to believe what you believe in?
To what degree do you believe in it?
Do you use any process/frameworks/filters which must be passed by things to graduate to becoming a part of your beliefs?
If you were to be stripped of all your beliefs, how would you go about forming them from the ground up?
Would you start believing what your parents teach you? Your friends? Influencers?

The Trap of Inherited Beliefs

Suppose you believed a few things your parents taught you. After a few years, you encountered an experience that proved those beliefs to be false. What do you do then?

Do you un-believe them and remove them from your set of beliefs? If you do, congrats, you are on the right path.

However, a very high majority of people start explaining that situation or experience in a way that lets their belief save face. They come up with brilliant creativity and absolutely ridiculous explanations, just so they do not have to go through the pain of admitting that what they believed to be true is actually false (Cognitive Dissonance).

And thus begins the web and collection of beliefs that we form over our lifetimes, mostly from our experience and our desires. Most of these are probably false and incorrect.

The Broken Compass

Life is like a voyage. I think the majority of us are on this voyage without a correctly functioning compass.

Instead of pointing to Magnetic North (Objective Reality), our compasses are calibrated by:

Past Winds: Our personal experiences and traumas.
Desired Destinations: Where we want to go, rather than where we are.

When your compass is guided by I want this to be true rather than This is true, you end up shipwrecked.

Finding True North

To navigate the world successfully, you need a compass that points to reality, regardless of how harsh it is. You need a mechanism to find truth that is so robust that even if it contradicts your oldest beliefs, you update your map without hesitation.

For you to confidently decide True North, you must have strong conviction in the reasoning and process (mechanism) you followed to arrive there.

The Evolution of Truth (from Ancient Greece to Modern Internet)

Is there a right way to think to arrive at the Truth? To understand this from 1st principles, let us go back to a time when the way of believing described above (parents, teachings, life experience) was the only way.

1. Ancient Greece (Around 5 BC)

Until this period, people solved problems with whatever solution was available or came to mind. Then came Socrates. He started to think deeply, question the stuff around him, and come to the best possible solutions.

2. Empiricism

This logical way of thinking was taken further by his student Plato, and then to the most famous of the three: Aristotle. He realized that sitting and thinking was not enough; you had to go out, observe nature, and document it. This was the birth of Empiricism.

3. The Scientific Method

This method of observation and learning from experiments gained prominence over a thousand years and solidified into the Scientific Method.

Conduct experiments.
Observe results.
Document them.

This means whatever is documented is most probably true (a fact) unless proven otherwise by the same method.

4. Reproducibility

Individual experiments can have human errors. The solution? Reproducibility. If, with the same inputs and conditions, the outputs are reproducible, then human error is negligible. In other words: If I cannot reproduce your result in my lab with your instructions, your fact is garbage.

5. The Internet & Coordination

How do we coordinate these results? The internet solved this. Now scientists could coordinate, see each others results, and critique them.

6. The Nuclear Weapon: Peer Review

A superpower was born in the scientific world: Peer-Reviewed Literature. Documented conclusions are given a WWE Royal Rumble type welcome by other scientists in the niche. Any conclusion with an iota of weakness is desecrated.

Numerous scientists challenging the hyposthesis of the scientist who proposed it

The Result: If a conclusion is stated in a research paper published in a good peer-reviewed journal, we can be reasonably sure those conclusions are probably true until proven otherwise.

Practical Application: How to Form Beliefs Today

If you realize the gravity of what you have just read, you should be happy. No more voodoo, no more listening to individual advice about what worked for them.

Form a firm commitment to only believe what is in good peer-reviewed scientific research papers, and nothing else. From this way, start forming your core set of beliefs.

Now how to do this ourselves ?

If you can, more power to you, but for majority of us, it probably will be very time consuming and difficult, specially for a novice.

This is where we move 1 degree away from our link with direct research papers.

We link with them, through a person, well established in their field, well acclaimed, well known, we believe what they say, as it is probably true.

If they created a platform to simplify that research for us, that would be incredible

Some one like this actually exists : Andrew Huberman

May be God really does exist who made him do that for us !

Listen to him, what he says ! It is highly probable what he tells is true and a fact !

He has loads of videos and you guys are tight on time so let me guide you, as I am an Andrew Huuuuuuuberman fan, like ishowspeed is of Ronaldo

1st Video to Watch

Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction

How it helps in your UPSC prep: It is the core of how to be consistent in upsc preparation, which will be the subject of one of my next articles.

Other ways to get started with forming beliefs from scientific method and conclusions

Alright, now that we have accepted (hopefully) that scientific way of thinking is the best methodology for building our core belief system, below are few ways in which we can get started to discover the scientific truths and forming our beliefs :

Listen to Accomplished Scientists: like Neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman, Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman, and listen to what they have to say on various important topics.
Look for Repetitive Themes: Concepts reiterated by multiple accomplished people and validated by research.
- Example: Humans have brains evolved for survival during the tribal period. This is reiterated by Tim Urban (Wait But Why)(he is also presenter of most viewed ted talk ever, on procastination), the book Seeking Wisdom, and many others.
Logical Consistency: Things that make incredible logical and rational sense (e.g., human lust explained by the evolutionary purpose of reproduction).
Consult LLMs: Discuss with AI (like Gemini) to check if a concept is research-proven.

My Main Core Set of Beliefs (So Far)

These are borrowed from other people (and filtered by myself), who use the scientific method and 1st principles, to come up with those beliefs/systems/frameworks

Top few are :

Dopamine Theory & 6 Pillars (Andrew Huberman)
Overconfidence section and other lessons (Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman)
The Tribal Brain of humans (Tim Urban)
First Principles Thinking (Elon Musk)
Deep Work & Flow (Cal Newport & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi respectively)
Dramatically Slowing Aging (Bryan Johnson)
Dialogues with AI: Conclusions reached after deep dialogues with Gemini Gems.

Recommended resources : I dont want you guys to get distracted by these right now (except watching the video linked above as it forms the core of being consistent in prep), and focus 100% on preparation, so not mentioning them here; but if someone feels they are good at managing such distrations with studies, reach out to me on the telegram group below and I will send the recommended resource list to you.

If you would like to read my learnings from my 2 attempts at prelims, you can read them here : UPSC Prelims Autopsy (80 & 85) & The Scientific Method