By Dr. Joy Chacko | 06/26/2021
CHAPTER 1
Research is an intelligence tool to build knowledge and learn effectively and you should use this tool for your personal and professional development. Research would help executives, academics, veteran and novice writers, and everyone, including students, both offline and online.
True, research is finding the truth. In other words, research is a set of process for discovering accurate information or exposing the right knowledge in a given area.
In any environment, research is one of the pillars for development in which you aim to develop knowledge, whether it is for an academic discipline, contributing to the advancement of science, social, business, or personal development.
Do you need to be a PhD in conducting research to find truth?
Conducting intelligent research is a way to find truth. The great thing is that you do not need to attend a costly doctorate or a 5 to 7 year PhD program to learn what research is and how it could help you in finding truth. Remember, to reach your full potential you need to develop personally. For personal development, you might need to find truthful information and helpful tools.
Think about, you want to be the best surgeon, engineer, business executive, or a successful entrepreneur and have a thriving goal in mind. But hat is not enough. You would be stuck in limbo with your potentials if you do not learn and discover your path to success.
Everybody has goals and visions, but the problem starts when you don’t know how to exactly go about fulfilling those goals. If your primary plan does not work, what other options you have in place to fulfilling those same goals. An essential prerequisite to the success is personal development, you have to be mature and grow as a person so your success will be proportional to your desired state.
To get to that stage, you need reliable good information. It is important to know that there are different types of information on the internet, some are true and some are completely false. This could also be the state to whom you interact with, some state true, and some state false. To identify true information and the right tools for your success, what you must know is how to conduct quality research.
What is intelligence and why you need to be intelligent in finding truth more than ever?
There are different theories of intelligence—for example, practical intelligence, analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, etc.
However, for this topic, by intelligence, I imply that you want to have the ability to understand what truth is and what is falsity, then apply that ability to gain knowledge and use it to find the truth toward using it for personal and professional development through inventing short term and long term solutions that could otherwise hinder your potential growth.
More than ever, you need to be intelligent in finding truth because of the exponential growth of content uploaded every moments on internet, falsity spread as truth everywhere, people get confused of which is truth or falsity, and even fact checkers are unable to distinguish truth from falsity without stating that some are true and some are false. In this situation, you need to use intelligence in finding what truth is, what real truth is.
Therefore, what we must discuss first is the concept of research, so what is research? Thereafter, how and why you should have intelligence in finding truth for real solutions. You will read more about these topics in the following chapters.