Category: Josh Feingold Blog

We all live in our own little world, filled with historical nature and nurture which creates our present.  It’s a complicated little world with conflicting emotions, feelings, and desires.  When we face another person, their little world, and our little world come together, resulting in the colliding of two worlds, to create a third little world.

Of course, when we view this third world, it is like asking people on either side of a statue to describe what they see.  Of course, one person will describe the front, and the other person the back.  But they are both looking at the same statue, just from different angles.

Nothing new here.

However, what is important, is that there really is no point arguing with how someone perceives their little world, since from their perspective they are totally correct and your words are unlikely to be heard productively.  Of course, if the other party is very open to change and honest with themselves, perhaps it will work, but the majority of people seem to get stuck in their perspectives in life.

Having said all of this, perhaps the first step should be to see if you are looking at things wrong yourself.

I’m sure that we have all been told the dictum, of “When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.”

It’s a nice idea, reminding people to make the best of things or situations that they find themselves in.  And usually it is true.

However, it is important to realize that sometimes there really isn’t all that much good that comes from a given situation.  It’s pretty much all bad.

Further, when people say it, usually the person they are saying it to isn’t in a place that they can productively use the advice, anyways!

So keep this in mind next time you think of quoting the dictum.  It might just be better form to express your sympathy.

Newton’s Third Law is, “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.”

This law can be equally applied in human relationships (both in the home and work environment) as to anywhere else in physics.  I’ll apply it briefly to the work place.

You see, we often feel that due to one person’s cause, it created another’s (negative) effect.  However, in truth, it was the impact of the two parties that really created the overall outcome.

This is why it is usually fruitless to establish blame on one party or the other in incidents like these. Change either of the variables (i.e. either party) and the end result would probably never have happened.  All we can hope to do is change (remove) the right party so that the same negative outcome doesn’t continue once a new person takes their place.

P.S. Typically, we can see things playing out when we experience the “He Said, She Said” principle.  Where one party says that it X happened, and the other party said that Y happened, when really both X and Y happened, and the outcome was Z.

 

 

There is no such thing as original thought.

Just thoughts that we heard from somewhere else long enough ago to forgot that it wasn’t our own witticism.  Other ideas are typically are just built on principles established by those who came before us or are simply copied from those that we meet along the way.

The reason for this is that our world is a very structured and patterned world in its essence, and as beings that are a direct product of our physical environment (no matter if you choose religion or science), thought (and it’s offspring – action) simply follows those same familiar structures and patterns.

Even our creative process is bound by this truism.  We simply can’t imagine past that which we have experienced first hand – or through extrapolation of known entities.

Of course, I’m not saying anything new.

“The Peter Principle is a belief that in an organization where promotion is based on success, that organization’s members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.”

At its essence this Principle is really based on another principle, which is that “You don’t know, what you don’t know.”

Basically, we are blind to what we don’t know, resulting in the fact that if we are unaware of this fact, we end up taking action based on faulty or partial information.

It is only once we make a mistake, which bring this lack of information front and center, that we realize what we didn’t know.

So while we can’t ever really know what we don’t know, the acknowledgement of the fact can at least better prepare us, and perhaps even help us fend off this typical human error in our daily lives.