KEEP AN OPEN MIND
It’s easier to blindly believe something than to check its sources. It’s easier to settle into what we know than to understand that the world will never stop changing. It’s just so easy.
What’s tough is to keep an open mind about anything and everything. We like believing in things. It makes us comfortable. We feel knowledgeable even if that knowledge is horribly incorrect. Look back through human history at the wars fought and the lives lost over things like the shape of the Earth, the origin of our species, which God is real, and now our role in a quickly changing global climate, all because we were so set in our ways about what we believed, and those ideas threatened us so much that we fought back. We fought against our own minds and lost so we had to place that threat onto others which is sadly, a much easier battle to win. If your neighbor is the threat, you kill your neighbor, the threat is destroyed, right?
Being presented with an idea different from what you already know is a trigger on several levels. First, it creates cognitive dissonance and our minds have to make a choice between what we know and realizing we might be wrong. It also hurts our pride to think we might be “less than” or “stupid” if we are incorrect about anything. Instead, let’s use this trigger to our advantage.
Learn to recognize how it feels to be told that what you believe is wrong. Start small; perhaps you have a friend occasionally present you with some facts that go against what you know. Do this enough, and after a while, you almost enjoy it. You might find it fascinating to learn about things you’ve “known” for years and train yourself to be a sort of Mythbuster.
I’m in no way telling you to just believe new information. There is no shortage of conspiracies and batshit-crazy theories that have no basis in reality, yet try to present themselves as fact. Your incredibly difficult task is to keep both an open mind and a competent filter to welcome the truth while scraping the bullshit off your shoes.
A habit is nothing more than a programmed response. Everything I write about and you learn from books on habit-forming and productivity is merely us experimenting with how to reprogram those responses. Why not use these programmed responses to open your mind to new ideas and understand that the more you learn, the less you know.
