Perspectives

Short Story

Seek different perspectives on matters that concern you and your well being. Career, Business, Life, etc.

Long Story

Like you, I had a lot of questions. I had questions about anything and everything. From science to astronomy to everyday life and so on. So naturally, I asked these questions to family, friends, relatives, teachers, etc. After the dawn of the internet, I started googling. Read and consumed a lot of content. Some got it right, some got it wrong, however, that made talk to a varied set of people. It made a lot of sense, common sense.

All of this led me to always seek different perspectives, to diversify the portfolio of the content I sought (read, listen, watch). My favourite books collection displays a glimpse of the variety.

Where am I getting with all this?
I am getting to an important question which is, “How do people validate whether the content they are consuming is correct and is not misguided information.” There are many answers, like, seeking out help from people you believe are true, nice, empathetic, successful (whatever that means), have high emotional quotient, and so on. But, IMO, the answer is this conviction comes with experience and still might be wrong. Most events are uncertain and we must embrace it. At some point in time, one might find something unbelievably awesome only to know after some time that all of that was pure BS. It is embarrassing but we learn some patterns, so, not everything is lost. The pattern might be something like, “This felt too good to be true, I had a strange doubt about it’s working, it was so stupid of me think this was awesome, etc.” As they say in software, “There are no right or wrong designs. There are good and there are bad. “ What we might have lacked was thinking through multiple lenses or simply asking some other people their opinions. That would have lowered the probability of disappointment/embarrassment. I feel this is the right time to bring up some mental models that one can use to sift through such difficulties. A second order thinking mindset might help think long term and effect of effects i.e. meta effects.

So, to sum up, consume varied content and have strong opinions about it. Also be ready to face embarrassment when your opinions are crushed. Most importantly, learn from them, improve, and when you share what you know, be as correct as you can, because some other person might learn from what you learned.

Final Tip (I promise): Everyone is still entitled to their biases, be ok with it. I am biased, you are biased, they are biased (imagine Nicholas Cage saying that)!