In any endeavor – and especially serious matters concerning our work, relationships, or money and investing decisions – it’s wise to consider whether the “best practices” for success have been distilled and illuminated already. The basic principle is that essentially none of today’s challenges, for any of us, are brand new, so we can and should rely on the collective wisdom and experiences of hundreds of thousands of trials and errors that have come before us.
There is no need to invent the wheel.
For example, medicine in the 21st century can largely be trusted because the best practices (“evidenced-based medicine”) utilize the best available research in making conscientious, explicit, and judicious decisions about the care of individual patients.