Can you change a bad person?

Suppresses their personal emotions and prioritizes the execution of specific tasks.

Good or bad, right or wrong are very subjective concepts. Depending on who you are speaking to, they might vary drastically from each other. With the globalization of the world, I’ve come to realize that some ideas just did not find fertile ground where they started, but in the right environment they can easily thrive. There are some things which were bad and later evolved to become considered good and vice versa. So when I say bad persons here, I am referring to persons you don’t agree with ideologically. Here is how you can change them.

Exert authority

The first step is that you must have some sort of authority over that person in order to influence them effectively. It’s difficult to change a person you can’t control in one way or another. When you have no authority over that person, they can easily break from your influence to go somewhere else to be influenced by something totally different. Having authority here means that they are compelled to obey your instructions or at least follow your example, irrespective of what they think or feel.

Think about the authority a parent has over their children, a leader over the community etc. Having authority over another person can be inherited or obtained, you can give them something they desire or make yourself indispensable for them. Take for example a boss, they have authority over others because of a paycheck, but they have no authority over anybody else, that authority was obtained and not inherited. In the same way, depending on who you are trying to influence (change) you have to find a way to gain authority over them.

The Military playbook

The most striking example of how people get to be influenced and changed into something very specific is in the military. There you have a bunch of men and women, thousands if not millions, who come from different parts of the country and who are groomed into powerful beings who can do a lot of things and work effectively. They learn discipline, collaboration, strength, effectiveness and much more, no matter what they feel or think they all become part of this body capable of working together and doing incredible things.

The question now is, how are they able to do this?

It's quite simple, routine

There is nothing else, their secret is found in a single word, “routine”. Every single day they wake up with a preplanned list of activities; military training, eating, practice, rest, repeat. They do that, for days, months, years and at the end of it all, most of their personality has been crushed, their ideas have been obliterated, and they become machines which only wait to receive instructions. In the military, taking initiatives beyond some limited constraints is a bad thing, you are praised for following instructions and punished for disobeying or taking initiatives.

The point here being that in order for you to change a person, you have to build a routine which suppresses their personal emotions and prioritizes the execution of specific tasks.

The result is a highly efficient person capable of doing the things he has been taught very effectively.

Routine

How did any of us get good at what we know, it all happened because we did it over and over again till the point where it got ingrained into our subconscious. You are a good person not because you learned what good was and just stuck to it, but rather the reason you are a good person is that you kept doing good things over and over again. Otherwise, the temptation of bad would have already got the best of you.

From our ideas, to our habits, all those were honed through years of practice into making us who we are. So, the only way we are going to change a person from bad to good will be to deconstruct the bad habits they already have and place in good ones. Anything short of this will just be temporary, and they’ll eventually revert to those bad habits. The reason people are bad isn’t because they don’t know what good is, they actually do, and they deliberately choose to stick with bad. They do it so much it becomes who they are and changing from that is an uphill battle which can only be overcome with a strict routine.

Will isn’t enough

Generally because we lack authority, time, and control over others we tend to count on their willpower to be enough to get them to change, but unfortunately this isn’t enough. For some this might work, but for the vast majority of persons this won’t cut it. Imagine if the military commander just instructed a thousand soldiers to get strong, certainly a small percentage would, but the vast majority will not be able to do that. We can’t count on luck sometimes, that's why we need to count on something which has proven its effectiveness through time, and that's having a strict routine.

Conclusion

To answer the question posed by the title, yes we can change a bad person, that will require a strict routine to deconstruct their mindset and build a new one which is much more beneficial. That can only be achieved by leveraging the authority we have over those persons in a profitable way.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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