All of us have ideas about how the world works. Whether we believe that the Earth is balanced on the back of a tortoise floating on a pelican perched at the center of a cosmic fishing bowl, or that the new T-shirt company we’re working on with our sister’s best friend Harriet will be worth $15 Million in 5 years, all of our ideas fall somewhere between amazingly right and laughably wrong.

Typically, we judge these ideas on a pretty simple scale, those that happen to spring from that boundless font of wisdom that is our minds are unerringly right, the ones that trace their origins to any other source require a teeny bit more skepticism.

This works in a lot of cases but it does have a problem, a problem that leads us to do silly things like build bridges that fall and towers that lean and startups that burn capital like S’mores at a Boy Scout mixer. This way of thinking also costs us time, money and motivation, precious resources that we can’t really afford to lose.

The odd thing about this type of error is that it’s so easy to solve yet so few people do it because it would require a reversal of the way we like to look at the world. When we have a brilliant flash of insight, our first reflex is to do everything in our power to gather evidence to prove that it’s correct. We narrow our gaze and go digging around for anything, anywhere that will make us feel right. This isn’t surprising, it’s nice to be right and feels even nicer to be proven right by the outside world.

Often though, the evidence we end up collecting is thin, and it leaves us with an inflated sense of confidence but very little else.

What we really need to do is turn this test on its head. Let’s say you have a hypothesis that you are absolutely, positively certain is correct — instead of searching for why it’s right, try something different, try to prove it wrong. Run an experiment with the intention of seeing it fail. If you think that you can build a business selling 200 e-books a month, set a goal to sell ten the first month and twenty the next. See whether your airtight, viral marketing plan pans out with these cheaper, easier mini-projects. If your hypothesis was right, you should beat your goals pretty soundly, but if it’s taking you 60 hours a week to sell five books, you can be fairly certain that there is something wrong that you would do well to look into.

When you try to prove things wrong instead of right, you start to see where you might have made mistakes. Suddenly things that you were willing to overlook while you were blinded by overconfidence start to stick out like sore thumbs. When you’re early in a project’s lifecycle and all you have to lose are your ideas, this opens you up to doing some high-impact, low-cost pruning that will pay dividends in the long run. Getting into the habit of testing hypothesis is also good in a more general sense because it causes you to start benchmarking ideas early instead of assuming the blue sky projections you scrawled on the back of that napkin at Sonnys are proxies for reality.

Have the courage to aggressively prove yourself wrong. If you can’t be honest with yourself when you’re all alone and no one cares, who can?

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