The wonderful and insightful Tony Robbins made the observation that people are either auditory in their focus or visual. It’s possible to discover which one someone is by their word choice. Does the person say, “I hear you,” or do they say, “I see what you’re saying”? If you tell them to go left, do they say, “Sounds like you want me to go left,” or is it, “Looks like you want me to go left”?

We learn by watching, or listening, and sometimes both. In school we see what the teacher is writing on the board, but we also hear the lecture.

It’s a funny profundity that we learn while listening, but we don’t learn while talking. It means the person listening is learning from someone who isn’t learning or listening.

Not always, of course. There’s no absolute in this.

Have you ever heard someone tell you something is impossible and then tried to find a way to make that “impossible” thing happen?

If so, you were fighting against an assumption.

Humans do it all the time. Humans make assumptions.

Think of a doctor. Not only a doctor, a scientist. Not only that but a scientist doctor who likes to play football. Now tell me you didn’t assume that this scientist doctor who plays football is a male personage. If you did, you might want to check yourself for other assumptions. What other assumptions do you make regularly?

How did you learn that doctors are exclusively male? Maybe you didn’t learn exclusivity. Maybe you only learned to assume that MOST doctors are male. It’s not true, thank God. Could you imagine how messed up we might be if only men could be doctors?

How about football players? What if the majority of them were male? Again, it’s a good thing females play the sport of kicking a round ball too. (Wink, wink, elbow nudge. Did you think of another kind of “football”? Another assumption?)

And scientists? Well, here’s where humans make even more assumptions. When you think of a scientist, do you also think of someone who has been to university and has a smattering of diplomas displayed on a wall somewhere? Those would be assumptions based on stereotypes.

How do you define a scientist? What are the requirements to be one? The longer you think about it, the more stereotypes you’ll strip away, and the closer you’ll come to the truth.

Is a long, white coat required? No. Specific clothing doesn’t make someone a scientist.

Is college attendance required? No. The world has a long history of people making scientific discoveries, without ever setting body, foot, or even toe inside a college.

Is a scientific discovery a requirement? This question is tricky. Certainly applying oneself to discovery, or in other words, doing the work, is necessary, but is the recognition of something as a scientific discovery required to call someone a scientist? Is work ethic enough? For instance, if Thomas Edison ran all of his experiments on how to make a light bulb except for the final one that worked, would you call him a scientist? What if someone else discovered how to make a light bulb before him, yet he still did the work? Would he have still been considered a scientist? What if fourteen people all tried to discover how to make a light bulb and never accomplished the task? Would they all be considered scientists? Or would none of them?

Here’re more questions: Do you have to use big words to be a scientist? Do you have to be a word nerd? Do you have to be a nerd? Do you have to have a love of books? Do you have to have a love of learning? Do you need to be curious? Is lack of social skills an attribute? Is lack of an assumptive nature an attribute?

If that last one is true, then it sounds like no humans are scientists.