Hemingway once said:
“The essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, bullshit detector.”
I understood it as a writer’s ability to extract a good idea from a multitude of bad ones, but it can also be understood as a writer’s ability to cut all sufficiencies from his writing, or to recognize the truth from lies.
Either way, a good bullshit detector is something every writer should have, but it seems to me that such a detector could be of benefit to everybody.
With something like this, you can easily recognize that a free book is not really free if you are going to pay for the shipping or the blog subscription.
Such a detector is very useful when people on the internet try to teach you how to earn money online by enrolling into their overpriced courses.
Also, with the detector you are able to understand that Facebook, YouTube, and many other online services are not free, but you pay for them with the attention you spend watching advertisements.
With this detector, you will know that telling yourself that you are going to study tomorrow actually means that you will study the day before the exam; or telling yourself that you are going to start exercising on Monday actually means that you are most likely not going to do it this year.
The shit detector allows you to single out those who will return the borrowed money from those who will not.
And finally, such a detector will put you in a lot of trouble because you will not be able to tolerate someone else’s bullshit and because of that your tongue will often be longer than it should be.