Should We Impose Our Way of Thinking On Others?

In the past, many a times, I failed to think from others’ perspective. I could not understand why they did this or that, or why they didn’t do this or that.

An example of this is regarding the topic of exercising. As someone who exercises very often and advocates healthy lifestyle, I could not understand how could anyone not exercise for years. I had a flatmate last year who had not exercised for about 5 years! I was honestly shocked when he told me that. The first thought I had was that I should convince him to start exercising because there are so many benefits to exercising.

Other things that I could not understand were people spending hours everyday watching drama and TV series and playing video games. Often, I had the urge to stop my friends when I learn that they were doing these activities because to me, these are not productive or purposeful activities. Why waste so much time on them?

However, recently, I started to ponder over this question — should I impose my way of thinking on others?

I used to be quite a control freak. I like things to be done in a certain way. Well, my way. During group project meetings, I tend to be very vocal with my suggestions and how we should do carry out the project. I was behaving that way because I felt that I know what is right and how things should be done. So since I want the projects to turn out well, the team should follow my way of working, right?

Slowly, I’ve learnt that the answer to that question is a huge NO. Through many life experiences such as serving in the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF), working in the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and studying overseas in University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, I gradually understood that there are many ways to go about doing something and there may be more than one right way of doing it. Also, I learnt that everyone has their own preferences and priorities in life and they may not be similar to mine. So it is essential that I learn to understand things from others’ point of view.

Most importantly, I learnt that I will not be right all the time; and even if I am, others might not be wrong because there are many ways of doing things.

I realised that many things are relative and not absolute. For example, I used to think that spending too much time on video games is an absolute waste of time because one could rarely get anything useful out of it. However, I learnt that it really depends on individual cases. For instance, Joel of Buffer suggested that playing Doom II might have been the starting point for Kevin Systrom’s, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, success with Instagram.

So my answer to the question of “Should we impose our way of thinking on others?” is I would not; but I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to ;)

I would love to hear your thoughts on this so chat with me on Twitter, @alfred_lua.

(This is my 3rd blog post of my 30in30 challenge — 30 blog posts in 30 days. I hope to feel comfortable, more confident and become better with writing through this challenge.

This post would be reposted on my personal blog, www.AlfredLua.com.)