30 Days of Writing Day 16 Focus on the Message, Not the Messenger

You’ll meet several thousands of people in your life, and they have their own viewpoints and stories and whatever, and you’ll disagree with them a fair amount of times given a life time, but you should always remembers one thing: they’re not always wrong, and you’re not always right.

You have to fight the innate human instinct to short-circuit decision making which incentivizes making a snap judgment on an idea based on its messenger. Well, I guess you can do the short-circuiting thing if it’s just a small thing, but for big life decisions, you cannot be that fickle. Remember that growth and idea is what matters, not your personal biases.

As someone living in a poor country who (someday) wants to immigrate to a better life in a richer country, in order to contribute to the bleeding edge of humanity, I don’t agree with Trump and his immigration policies. But to disregard everything he says or everything he does is naive: I can take a lesson from “how to get better at public speaking”, “how to be convince others with your arguments”, and read parts of his life and take what I can to improve my life.

People have several ingredients to their personality: How would you feel if your entire being was invalidated based on one idea that you had? There was one person I particularly didn’t like, but was a good cook, so I just got good cooking tips from her anyway. And while I don’t agree with her beliefs, I thank her for those cooking tips.

This is something that I have to practice more, but at least I know that it exists. I’ll consolidate this idea/blog posts as I discover new things.”