The importance of perception / by Alexander Lyadov

“People who do not believe in human goodness rarely encounter its manifestations,” said psychologist Carl Rogers. They have ample evidence to prove conclusively that people are deceitful, wicked, and vicious. In fact, each of us can attest to this from personal experience. Over the course of 20, 30, much less 50 years, our social body has become littered with the scars of bites, burns and cuts. Somewhere I heard the idea that man is capable of enduring any tragic twist of fate or natural cataclysm. But what really knocks you down and sucks the life out of you is the evil of people-strangers, acquaintances, and especially loved ones, directed against you personally.

It’s easy to become a cynic. Only it makes little sense. I recall a business owner convinced that literally every employee is trying to cheat him - to steal something, to get away with responsibility, or to take a free ride. Needless to say, he did not have a strong management team. At the first opportunity, the most talented ones preferred to leave. Which, according to the founder, only confirmed their black ingratitude. I remember another owner complaining either about the “betrayal” of another partner, or about the difficulty of scaling the business alone. But for some reason he could not see the connection between one symptom and another.

There’s anything in the world around us. What the eye concentrates on, the hand reaches for. The fingers would touch one phenomenon out of a billion. Why this one? The sieve of perception delays G, passing by A, B, C, etc. If the mind is the processor, perception is the software. And like software, perception needs regular upgrades to synchronize with reality and clean up the bugs. The latter are assumptions that once helped us a lot, and therefore are dear to us, but then have lost relevance, that is, have become false.

Evil lurks within each of us, as does good. At any moment they are ready to reveal themselves. Which one will? Let it not always and not everywhere, but often enough it depends on our initial perception of the other - the employee, investor or business partner.

Sincerely yours,

-Alexander


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