“This is water” has to be one of my favorite short essays/speeches of all time.
If you haven’t read it/seen it before so yourself a favor and go through it, it doesn’t take very long.
Seriously wish I could get these ideas into everyone’s head.
If you haven’t read it/seen it before so yourself a favor and go through it, it doesn’t take very long.
Seriously wish I could get these ideas into everyone’s head.
To save others a trip to the search engine: http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf
I have not known the source of this garbage, so I hope it's a simplification of the actual source, but I will listen carefully :)
I'm in the middle of making the switch towards maximizing positive outcomes for others, having realized that I have enough for myself. The author paints a description of self-awareness here that I'll be sure to return to every now and again.
I can imagine everyone in traffic, or in the grocery store has a perfectly legitimate reason for why they're acting whatever bothersome way they're acting. But how does that help me accomplish my goal any more efficiently?
The idea is not that there's a profound insight hidden in there. In fact, the essay repeats several times that there's no trite lesson or platitude to walk away with, and that the basic idea is already obvious - the world doesn't revolve around any given person. What's not obvious is exerting the mental effort to consider that fact when you feel like you're the only person who has any self-awareness in a crowded grocery store.
On a more practical level, if you're looking for a lesson then this is close to it - you get in your own way, intellectually speaking, by defaulting to the easy path of discounting the myriad reasons for other peoples' behavior while rationalizing your own. We tend not to think about the things that are so obvious they're dreadfully mundane, but because of that we close ourselves off to insights that could be very helpful but for the fact that we're locked into our first-person perspective.
More succinctly: if you find yourself thinking that you're surrounded by people who lack self-awareness, you might be lacking some of it yourself.