Misconception Month – Good, not Apathetic. An article about the common, incorrect belief that we’re great people, and that it takes effort to be bad.
It’s comforting to believe that you’re a good person. We all do it. We’ve wired ourselves to not really think about how we perceive morality and where we stand on our own scale of judgment.
The scale is often freely applied to other people and events, but a ton of people forget to look inwards first. It’s not really their fault. It’s just conditioning and a byproduct of our societal obsession with winning and being right. Continue reading “Being Good is Not Your Default State”
Misconception Month – Intensive, not Easy. An article about disparaging ourselves, and giving yourself a little more credit for all the things you do.
“Even a monkey could do it.” Have you ever heard that line? It’s used to indicate how easy a job is. Often, an unfulfilled employee will say it about their own profile. It’s not a very encouraging phrase.
However, what you do requires effort. A monkey cannot do it. If you think about it for a moment, you will realize how absurd that is. And then you will realize the absurdity of other negative statements we make.
The things that you do are not easy, they’re intensive. They take training and patience and fortitude to do. So why is it that it’s so easy for us to think otherwise? Continue reading “What You Do Is Not Easy”
Misconception Month – Happy, not Comfortable. An article about the most common lie ever told, and how we choose not to be more because of comfort.
At least eight out of ten people will say yes to the question, “Do you want to be happy?” It is the biggest and most common lie we all participate in. It’s an ingrained part of our culture to treat happiness as the ultimate goal – it’s the inherent marketing that people and companies alike peddle.
Misconception Month – Persistence, not Competence. An article about how the dangers of talent and how persistence leads to a better, sustainable success.
The unholy obsession that we as a people have with genius, competence, and ‘natural talent’ is a toxic mess. We often don’t realize it. It’s an ingrained part of our culture (or at least, across popular and easily accessible cultures) to emphasize talent in children as a focal point of their worth.
We appreciate children for being talented, but there are pitfalls in that appreciation that we disregard. As adults, our praise is conditional. We mean to say that children are well-formed or skilled FOR THEIR AGE. But a child cannot possibly make that distinction. Continue reading “The Key to Success is Not Competence, but Persistence”
