Here’s an interesting challenge — Sit down at least once a day and write down something that you’re sure is true. It can be anything: a future prediction, a principle you believe in, or just something you think is right or wrong.

In life, we grow and mature by polishing and improving our ideas. Unfortunately, most of us can safely ignore this process by not taking responsibility and accountability for our thoughts and actions.

There is a huge advantage for people who work in a profession that requires making correct future predictions. Careers in fields such as marketing, politics, finance, and engineering often involve putting your ideas on the line because they are linked to tangible results.

Many of these people will still manage to avoid facing their errors. The three most classic ways of doing this are blaming somebody else for your mistakes (“if only so and so did / didn’t do X”), pretending that your failures are actually successes, or just plain ignoring them entirely.

So, by putting your thoughts and ideas on a public record, you’ll have the motivation to actually care about articulating them and doubting their validity. This will radically change your life in the long run.

If you’re honest with yourself during and after the writing process, there’s a good chance you’ll find that almost all of your ideas are either somewhat false or just plain wrong. Our minds are like a garbage dump of other peoples’ thoughts, and we can only clean them one weed at a time.

Beyond facing your faulty thinking in real-time while writing, another major advantage is the ability to use the power of hindsight. You’ll often find that even something you just wrote a month ago is so damn wrong that all you want to do is either burn it or pretend it doesn’t exist.

Mark Twain, the writer best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has a famous quote on the topic: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

In our quest for ultimate knowledge, we fear ignorance and not knowing as much as we should. However, it’s not the lack of knowledge that ends up ruining our lives, it’s our false knowledge which we mistake for truth.

Begin improving your thinking today and grow the quality of your life by writing down something you think is true on a daily basis. Review what you wrote every few weeks or months, you’ll be shocked by the results.