Who Should You Listen to? January 17, 2007
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Communication, Society, Personal Growth, Productivity, Relationships, Abilities, Leadership , 1 comment so far
When it comes to advice, some are phenomenal, some are plain bad and the bulk of them everywhere in between. Most of the time there’s a subconscious, automated gut feeling that tells you whether a piece of advice is more of the productive or the destructive sort. But when you’re swimming in uncharted waters of information flow, there’s little in the way of knowing what genuinely helps and improves you in the subject and what lulls you into being another sucker giving away your resources in vain.
The first prerequisite for expanding your knowledge is definitely leaving the know-it-all attitude behind. Whether you consciously identify yourself with or without it and whether the subject is one that you know nothing or lots about, it’s always good to remind yourself that what you currently think you know about something, may in fact be blocking you from applying new understanding beyond your current magnitude, perspective or methodology of the given issue. As an old Zen story goes “You have to empty your own cup of knowledge before somebody can pour new, refreshing content in it.” Therefore, the first step is to actually listen.
Moving on to who you should listen to, the answer is simple. Everyone. I’ve gotten lots of great advice on what I shouldn’t do simply by listening to the calamities that resulted from poor decisions. And given that these people don’t feel embarrassed about the choices they’ve made, they want to let you know. Poor people talk about misfortunes because they feel victimized. Accordingly, they say the world is against them and they want sympathy for their helplessness. Prosperous people tell you because their mistakes plunged them into learning from the mistakes that served as triggers to enhance their internal locus of control.
The following step is therefore to ask questions - lots of them. As I wrote in an earlier entry, asking questions is a skill worth improving. The benefit is of course that you’ll get better and better at asking the right questions, the ones that pinpoint exactly what you want and need to know. Additionally, you’ll become prudent enough to tell who has the most knowledge and experience within a field that you need to inquire about further.
There’s a simple, four-word phrase that you can use every single time you find yourself perplexed over something totally new to you that somebody is trying to more or less force upon you - Will you guarantee it? Ask that question every single time somebody tries to sell you mutual funds, a new weight-loss program, info products and any new, better, improved widget of your choice. Anyone coming to an halt when you give those four penetrating words as a counter attack isn’t serving your best interest. Why? Because they don’t seem to practice what they preach. Besides, what works for them isn’t guaranteed to work for you.
Another great way to assess the applicability, productivity, usefulness and ease of a piece of advice is to look how well that information is treating its source. In other words, you may want to do exactly the opposite of what a broke, sick and ignorant person is telling you. If they’re whining about their misfortune, they’re telling you not to whine. If they feel powerless to do something about it, they’re telling you to become empowered to take action. And if they want to indulge themselves in feeling pride over being the little man fighting the rest of the evil corporate and capitalist society and government, then they’re telling you to be humble, caring and giving as you think of the human nature as inherently good.
You’ll get quite far simply by asking questions, listening and being critical only within your own mind. At a given point you’ll feel so comfortable about your understanding of any given issue that you want to share it with others. Every now and then you might get knocked down by know-it-alls who know better than you and this will remind you only to give your opinion when asked for. Trying to force something onto others isn’t the answer no matter how helpful it would be to the recipient. It just won’t work. Leading by example on the other hand will awaken more and more people to start using the advice in this article to learn from you.
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Tales and Truth December 19, 2006
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Creativity, Personal Growth, Psychology, Purpose, Beliefs, Vision, Leadership, History , 2 comments
Do you constantly attempt to draw a line between truth and fiction? Do you find yourself classifying a story as gullible, make-belief fantasies long before it has reached its end? And do you refrain yourself from watching movies after something supernatural, miraculous or extremely unlikely happens because it may offend your intellect? After all, fairy tales are for children, right?
Yet, there are great stories dividing adults’ beliefs as well. There’s a story of a man who had the strong vision of a flood coming to pass, so he set out to build an ark in the midst of the dry desert land. There’s a story of a character called Narasimha, who saved humanity from a demon invincible both day and night, by slaying it upon sundawn. And some people speak of and believe in a man capable of giving blind humans their sight back among other remarkable feats.
What are these tales for? Quite simply, they share the same reason we tell children about Robin Hood, the ugly duckling or little red riding hood - to give perspective, meaning and guidance into our lives. We’re all followers of example on one plane or another when it comes to applying a moral code to our behaviour. We tell others about mistakes that were done so that they don’t have to repeat them. The human mind learns the lesson and the moral of a story whether it understands or measures its veracity or not. Therefore, limiting the mind from potentially untrue events puts on a filter for the brain that may not be of the best interest for the mind. By this example I conceptualize the brain as a container of logical and reasoning intelligence and the mind as a container of psychological, emotional, moral and spiritual intelligence.
A human being suffers no loss in personal growth by increasing all areas of intelligence, because intellect and spirituality can co-exist together in consciousness itself. Denying oneself from listening to tales, fantasy, glurge and various stories of unknown truthfulness is like saying that the right side of the brain is useless for personal growth when it comes to external information that we input to our mind. A brain like this wouldn’t allow its possessor to watch movies like The Iron Giant, Hero, The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings, whereas a creative brain would devour these titles, but show no interest in watching financial news, table sports or various documentaries.
You can take the advice from a story and still believe it to be utterly false. It doesn’t have to be a contradicting event. It’s simply allowing yourself to notice the power of holding contradicting thoughts in your brain. For this whole topic I’d like to recommend the movie Big Fish above all. It’s a story of two men with opposing beliefs about tales and truth. If you’ve already watched it, then you may find the following ending empowering. When a person hears the same story over and over again, it can get boring to listen to. But consider how some people live. The longer they perpetuate and repeat the same truth they believe and live in, the more boring and unfulfilled they also become. So maybe it’s time to embrace the tales and stories you hear, stop judging them as true or false and start creating one that has you as its main character. Maybe the rest of us can learn something new to live by.
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