I was browsing a bookstore on a recent trip and bumped into a book that sounded interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the book, but it was a whole book dedicated to one idea – meaning that the content of the book, can basically be boiled down into one sentance, but since that won’t sell, publishers make the author drive home the point in 250 pages instead.
This book, in essance introduced me to a powerful idea, which he called something like “The *** off principle.” For simplicity sake, I’ll reference this at TFOP, for the rest of this post. It was a great idea, and I want to share it.
Since I don’t remember what I have written about over the past year, I will assume that at some point I discussed my interest in “The Nice Guy Syndrome,” due to the fact that I am a nice guy, which is the idea that some people are looking for the constant approval of others, and in search of this approval, they are nice guys to everyone but themselves.
[Editor’s note: At this point I went off to try and find some old posts to crosslink, and found that I wrote a very similar idea a few months back, so please read that for my thoughts on the topic. Instead, I need to take the rest of this post to complete the idea.]
As humans, we recognize things we agree with, and are quick to bring external proofs in to butress our beliefs. Those beliefs that go against our thought, we ignore, or say are simply silly. So ironically, when I saw the book which was in sync with what I already believed, I was excited by the idea, thinking his belief was brilliant, since it was (apparently) already in line with my own thinking.
The real take away, is to recognize that we are apt to do this, so that we can not knee-jerk reject things that go against our current beliefs, rather give them some time to stew, and see if we really might need to reject our own current belief, instead of the the new one.