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Mon, February 9, 2026
I wanted to make a focused video highlighting one aspect of faith which is the the necessity to search. And I've seen many examples of this
principle in my life, some professionally. And I thought a way that I could explain this in very simple terms is just by talking about
this contrived analogy of making a perfect soup. Some of you may have seen this cartoon movie with this mouse, this heroic mouse. There was a French chef in
that movie and there was a lot of pressure on him to make a perfect soup every year. And I'll talk a little bit more about
that in a minute. But if you were tasked with making a soup from scratch and you were given a list of potential ingredients, how would you go about
empirically discovering the best soup possible? Well, you take your ingredients and you try different permutations of them, different
arrangements. So you would try some ingredients and not others and then you would modify the amount of those ingredients and then you could taste the
soup and see how good it is. As you went through and you tried different ingredients, you might end up with a soup that is better or worse than
what you've seen before. And if you continue modulating those ingredients, what you'll end up with is that one soup will be better than all of
the others. And this is how you could empirically discover the perfect soup. So how does this apply to life?
If you don't have what you want yet, keep looking. And the question is, what haven't you tried yet?
Now, in this simple example of the soup, you may have seen that the options included watermelon. And you could probably leave that one
out because it's really not very likely at all that the best soup is going to include watermelon. But some ingredients, they might be a
dark horse ingredient, something that you wouldn't expect to make the difference between the best soup and anything else. Like apple, for example.
I've had apple in fall soups before. And sometimes it can make all the difference. And maybe you don't even need all that much. Maybe it's just this
little bit of a secret ingredient and it makes for a soup that's better than any other option. And so it is with your search of options
in life. Of course, you should start on the things that seem most likely to you to lead to what you desire. But if you've
tried those things and they have failed to bring what you want, the answer still might be out there. This is a puzzle. And if you arbitrarily
omit potential options, you may well be excluding yourself from the very thing that you say that you
want. Other takeaways from this is that if you were to do this, really make a whole bunch of soup, you would find that most
of the soup is pretty bad. it's mediocre at best and that some of the soups are much better than the others. You may even find that the best soup
is much better than the second best soup. And this sort of thing tends to occur in life. So
what if you don't have an unlimited amount of ingredients and time? Well, you can save some time and some resources or give yourself access to
opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have because of your limited resources. If you can ask someone who's better at
making soup than you. In the cartoon I referenced earlier, this French chef had this weird food genie that would appear and taste the best soup that he had made
so far and then tell him what to add to it to make it even better. And and this sounds contrived and silly. It's from a kids cartoon. However,
life actually does work like that. And it's kind of silly to think that you can reinvent the wheel and come up with something better than anyone else that's
ever lived. Of course, that's possible. But are you really going to try more ingredients than every single person who ever lived
combined? Probably not. Probably not. So, is there someone out there, living or dead, that has a result that you
would like to have in your own life? Well, why don't you see what you can learn from them? Dead people may have left behind something in a book or a
story history. And living people, you could actually just go talk to them. Even if they're rich and famous, maybe you can't have a
face-toface conversation with them. But do they have resources, videos, books, something that you can get your hands on and learn from them?
Now, what if you've done all of this? What if you've tried everything and you still haven't found what you're looking for? Well, if your objective is to
obtain what's best, it's already on your list of things that you've tried. And so now your choice is, do you want the best thing available to you or would
you just rather not have it? And that might sound depressing, but it it actually brings a great deal of peace or it should to know what your options
really are and to have the power to choose from them. And it also should give you a lot of gratitude
to enjoy the best that you can have and acknowledge it as such. Whereas if you just happen to make the best soup on the first try, you might always be
wondering, is there something better out there? Well, if you actually do the work to run the experiments or to ask the people who
have, you don't have to wonder about that and you can be that much more grateful for the best soup that you can get your hands on. And so I hope you
take these things to heart. I think you will find that these lessons are applicable in every aspect of life.