Mostly Right

I am often reminded that every day you need to stop and think.

You need to pause, reflect on all that is around you, all that you remember, all that you’re currently learning, and just sit with it. Stew in it. Bathe in it.

These moments of peace are when the connections form. When your mind wanders, and starts to move laterally, linearly, exponentially. It starts to form frameworks, draw connections like stars in the universe aligning to make up the big dipper.

Everything you learn fits in somewhere, but you shouldn’t just read, listen to, or watch opinions that agree with yours. You must keep an open mind and learn both sides of the story. Every story.

Keeping an open mind can be a challenge, but the way I’ve dealt with it is to be curious. I’m curious as to why they think that way, and the beliefs I hold.

By reading the contrasting thoughts and opinions, you can hopefully understand that each side makes sense to that side, and the perspective of the storyteller matters just as much as the reader.

What your job is, is to make up your own mind, and have your own perspective.

There are a couple of things to realize.

The first: Most media is produced to sell ads, so the more controversial, the more eyeballs that see it, the more ads get sold.

This is a self-reinforcing cycle, and things escalate to more and more flashy, scary, extreme as time goes on. You get numb to something that would have rocked your world last year.

So by stopping and thinking about what you believe. What you think is true, is an important first step.

The second thing to realize is things are almost always more complex than they seem. Even if you think you know the whole truth.

There is almost always more to the story. You should know and understand that things are more complex than they seem, and even if you think you know the whole truth, there is probably more to the story than you thought.

So, if there’s more going on than it seems, and everyone has their own experiences which give them biases and perspectives that are different from your own, how do you make decisions in this world?

You have to move forward and make decisions with the available information you have, and know that you will often be wrong. That decision you made today was the wrong one.

That’s OK.

Being comfortable with the amount of knowledge you have, and being mostly right, is better than only getting one side of the story, taking that as truth, and being completely wrong.