When I am at my retrospective best, I experience painful embarrassment on recollecting the times when I have been casually, unnecessarily and needless to say, wrongly judgemental about someone.
Off late, I have realised that I would really like to change this about myself. The being judgemental bit I mean… Not the feeling of embarrassment that it rightly causes.
I am a firm believer and from personal experience that whenever I have had a strong urge to make something happen, and I stay reasonably focused on the idea, ways and means to take the next step often and serendipitously present themselves. Well, this concept deserves its own blogpost so will refrain from going into it any deeper at this moment.
Recently I was reminded of this “natural” tendency of being judgemental while reading a book about personal finances and money by Morgan Housel. In his book, Morgan refers to the skill of achieving financial success as a soft skill. Through twenty chapters written from the heart, Morgan goes on to strengthen this point that financial success has a lot more to do with luck and how you behave than it has to do with intellect and effort. He calls this mentality, The Psychology of Money; also the name of the book.
One of the chapters in this book focuses on how we tend to judge others and their financial decisions. He attempts to open our eyes to why people behave the way they do, how everyone’s past experience with money defines their perception of how money works and in turn influences their future financial decisions.
“Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”
– Michael Batnick
This one is one of the many quotes from the book. All of us could be victims of this to some extent. You might never understand why someone behaves the way they do unless you have had the experiences they have.
The Late Stephen Covey also referred to this in his record bestseller, 7 habits of highly successful people. You may recollect how he encouraged his reader to ‘first seek to understand’ by sharing his personal experience while riding a subway.
A father walks into an otherwise quiet compartment with three kids. The kids cause quite a ruckus in the train and the father is seen not doing anything to control them. Irate, he tells his father how indifferent he is being and the disturbance his kids are causing.
To this, the father replies that the kids have just lost their mother and just like him they probably don’t know how to deal with the situation.
After hearing the man, Stephen’s perception of the whole situation changed to the extent that he fell really sorry for the family.
These are some of the examples from books that I have read that I hope continue serve as reminders, my notes to self if you will, whenever I notice myself going down the very tempting rabbit hole of judging someone. And I hope, these reminders help me eradicate this almost despicable and self defeating tendency.
Literally. No one is crazy.
