Don’t judge people by their worst mistakes.

~ Avengers: Endgame

See people as a sum of everything they have been, are and can be; not just by what they do now. That is how you check yourself from not crossing over the line to becoming judgemental.

We “fail” only once – when we give up for the wrong reasons.

A while back, I made the conscious decision to change one of my values. To prioritize honesty over being polite.

Learning a new value is never easy. It is new, unfamiliar and scary. We don’t know the rules of the game yet and we often feel like bumbling amateurs compared to the people we admire for the same value.

My struggle is that I vacillate between overdoing the honesty bit just to prove a point and reverting back to being polite in the fear of hurting others’ feelings. There was one such occasion recently where I kept repeating a statement even after the person said it was hurtful to hear it. I refused to back down from telling the truth. But I came to realise that beating her over the head with the truth was not helping to inspire the behavioral change I wanted. All it had managed to do was heap on hurt. In the pursuit of honesty, I had lost sight of what I wanted to achieve in the first place. So I apologised and promised to not repeat it.

Even though I handled this situation wrong, it didn’t diminish the significance of the reason why I had adopted this value to begin with. There are always going to be moments like this when we are adopting a new value, mistakes through which we learn the new boundaries. What is important is to not give up but be kind to ourselves as we navigate this new land.

The quality of a society is more important than your place in the society
~ Ruut Veenhoven (Father of Happiness Research)

Ruut Veenhoven is a Dutch sociologist and a leading authority on happiness studies. He has a solid reason for making this claim. Prioritizing oneself over all else may take off to a promising start but it will eventually end up destroying the very environment it needs for its own continued success.

When we try to justify any unethical behavior to our parents, they respond by asking “What happens if everyone were to say and do the same thing?” We usually treat that as a rhetorical question because it is a hypothetical situation. In reality, such behavior can take over a community or organization and when it does, it destroys all trust within, which in turn means that even the person who was previously winning through crooked ways will now start losing.

Selfish behavior may lead to short-term gains but it also ends up poisoning the land you have been standing on all along.

One of my all-time favorite Disney songs whose lyrics energise me everytime I listen.

Birds don’t just fly
They fall down and get up
Nobody learns without getting it wrong

…

Don’t beat yourself up
Don’t need to run so fast
Sometimes we come last but we did our best

…

I will keep on making those new mistakes

…

I wanna try everything
I wanna try everything even though I could fail

Get comfortable with being by yourself.

This doesn’t mean isolating oneself from others. Rather if we reach that point of comfort with being on our own by dealing with all the accompanying emotions in a healthy manner and becoming more self-aware and self-accepting, then we can be confident that the relationships we form from that secure position will be for the right reasons.

Musing for the day

I can disagree with you and still be tolerant of your opinions.

I have consistently valued honesty very high in my life. And I used to say that I am straightforward because of that quality. But there is a difference between being honest and being frank. Honesty is being truthful, not lying. Frankness on the other hand is saying what we think. Openly speaking our mind. Not tempering it for society in favor of civilized behavior.

Ofcourse, sensitivity and tact are needed sometimes. But what we should be wary of is getting used to moderating our speech to the point where it is simply polite and nothing more. That is how we start losing our identity.

I am very sensitive to how my words and actions could affect others and as a result, often opt to give a polite non-answer rather than speak my mind. But recently, I have realised how useful the latter can be in life. If we are open about ourselves, then it is a pretty good bet that the people who spend time with us are those who are good with who we are. This does not mean that they agree with everything we say but they like and respect us for who we really are all the same.

That is how true meaningful bonds gets forged. And isn’t that what gives life fulfillment?

When you have set yourself a goal, first ask “Why am I doing this?”

Only when you have the answer to that, ask the next one “How can I achieve it?”

Too often we bundle both questions together, or worse, never ask the first. That leads to a solution that is practical but may actually be diverting us from achieving the real objective, to the point where we forget it all together.

We may still have to alter our course according to feasibility but the true values we defined at the onset will serve as our guiding star. They will help us correct our path when “practicality” is leading us astray.

The strongest influence in our lives comes from our values. By values, I don’t mean our ethics. Rather I am referring to the things we pick and choose as most important to us. It can be anything – relationships, professional growth, meeting new people, empathy – basically anything under the sun. When we don’t consciously choose these values, short-term urges take their place.

Learning to pick what is important to us is a lifelong process that keeps evolving with time. The not-so-obvious point to be aware of is that when we choose a value ‘X’, we also have to reject others that are not ‘X’. For instance, if I choose to concentrate on forming deeper personal relationships, I have to also reduce large group interactions in order to be effective in forging those intimate bonds. Without consciously choosing to reject the ‘not X’ somethings, we have no true identity.

We are defined as much by what we reject as we are by what we pick.