When I Was in College, I Didn't Know ... (Part 2)
by David Hoffman
Here are the rest of the life lessons I mentioned earlier this week: Things I had not yet worked out or did not feel confident about when I was in college, but began to gain clarity about later. Many of these observations also have been made by others, but I came to them through my own experiences.
26.
College is not merely preparation for life. It is life.
27.
People always respond to the entire context of a communication, not just to the words it contains.
28.
Criticism reveals and reflects upon the critic.29.
In-the-moment negative emotions such as guilt or fear can be extremely useful in illuminating a situation. They can provide clues about the motives, understandings, insecurities and emotional states of other people, especially those whose behavior is sparking the negative emotions. They can deepen self-understanding. The trick is to learn to read these emotions without either suppressing or being overwhelmed by them.
30.
Sometimes the hardest thing in the world to see is what is right in front of you.
31.
People sometimes view choices you make for yourself, but which they would not (or did not) make for themselves, as judgments against them. This is all the more true if the path you choose is one which, at some level, they regret not having chosen. It is easy to be confused by their resulting hostile reactions, but it would be a mistake to be deterred by them.
32.
Every new insight subtly alters your knowledge and perspective about everything you thought you already knew. Each new experience subtly alters your perspective on every aspect of your past.
33.
You aren’t really from somewhere until you go somewhere else.
34.
Changing the world for the better does not mean seeking a stable point beyond which the world stops changing. People need to be involved in ongoing, challenging, cooperative work to advance the common good. An essential aspect of being human is confronting and contributing to the mitigation of life’s imperfections.
35.
Love involves giving and receiving permission to be who you truly are.
36.
A mouse trapped in a maze never sees the maze, only a series of straight paths and corners.
37.
Knowledge derived from breaking things or processes down into their smallest component parts is incomplete. It excludes the broadest patterns, most subtle and profound connections and deepest meanings.
38.
All people yearn, at some level, to become whole, connect authentically with the universe, be who they really are and fulfill their potential.
39.
What feels like inability and weakness may actually be undiscovered or unrevealed talent and strength.
40.
Winning an argument is not the same thing as achieving progress toward the objective at the heart of the argument. Sometimes winning an argument can hinder such progress.
41.
Staying too close to an admired person for too long can stunt one’s growth. When the admired person is nearby, adopting the person’s admirable behaviors and thought processes may feel presumptuous or unnecessary.
42.
All conscious perceptions involve value judgments and assumptions, as do all descriptions of things or situations in the world. No word can precisely express any objective meaning.
43.
A part of the judgment involved in human perceptions is the filtering and prioritization of inputs. In order to focus on the highest-priority information, people take vast portions of their experiences and environments for granted. They adapt to their environments unconsciously, absorbing and relying on a common set of values and assumptions, some of which they might reject if they ever became fully aware of them.
44.
Instincts, intuitions, emotions and dreams are extremely important sources of knowledge. The knowledge they reveal is intrinsic: located within the unconscious mind and relatively untainted by conditioning. Much intrinsic knowledge relates to people’s own true identities and deepest yearnings. The suppression of intrinsic knowledge causes depression and anxiety, and stunts personal growth.
45.
Symbols need not take the form of words, numbers and pictures. All things, people, actions and failures to act are symbols. Symbols can reveal fundamental truths because the unconscious mind invokes intrinsic knowledge to decode them.
46.
The contributions of the greatest scientists, poets, authors, artists, builders and leaders change not just our experience but our capacity to imagine. As a result of great works, there are more available thoughts.
47.
Great teachers empower students to think new thoughts, and expand the scope of their free will.
48.
Excellent teaching is not primarily about transmitting academic content from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the student, but about liberating knowledge and capacities already present in the student.
49.
True teaching transforms the teacher. True leadership transforms the leader. True love transforms the lover. True life is transformation.
So ... what should observation #50 be?
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by David Hoffman Here are the rest of the life lessons I mentioned earlier this week: Things I had not yet worked out or did not feel confident about when I was in college, but began to gain...
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Wed, 06 Nov 2013 12:11:00 -0500
Wed, 06 Nov 2013 12:11:00 -0500
When I Was in College, I Didn't Know ...
by David Hoffman
I was a sensitive young man, sometimes confused or hurt by social situations and people's behavior. In the years after college, I finally started to see patterns in circumstances that had baffled me or caused me pain. I began to write them down, so that I would not forget. After several years, I had compiled the collection set forth below. Even now, a couple of decades later, I still find it useful, because occasionally I still need the reminders.
I first published my list on Co-Create UMBC six years ago, and have re-posted it each year. There is a second list, compiled after I arrived at UMBC in 2003, which I'll post later this week (UPDATE: Posted here).
1.
A very large portion of people’s behavior is driven by insecurity. And a very large portion of the behavior that stems from insecurity can look like confidence.
2.
In many situations, people face a choice between doing something in a way that feels right, resonates, comes from the heart, makes sense, and fits the moment; or doing the thing in the way that they think they are supposed to do it. Examples: Giving a speech; proposing marriage; dealing with somebody’s emotional crisis; disciplining a child; interviewing a job candidate; responding “heroically” to a threat. More often than not, the genuine approach produces more satisfying results. And more often than not, people instead choose to do what they think they are supposed to do. (Part of the problem is that people’s sense of what they are supposed to do comes from many sources, including media, that present the relevant situations in misleading ways. For example, the media may capture the mechanical aspects of an effective speech but not the way the words match the emotions of the moment). 3.
Situations take a while to play out. There’s no need to panic, or to assume that what initially seems to be true will always be true.
4.
People tend to overreact.
5.
A situation that has been imagined, read about, etc. may not be easily recognized when it becomes a real situation. This is because the feel of the imagined situation may have been very distinctive, but the real situation feels much more like every other real situation. Examples: “corruption,” “falling in love,” “heroism.”
6.
In many situations, a variety of motivations drive people’s choice of actions. These motivations can range from deeply spiritual to simply practical. However, over time, the more abstract motivations tend to be forgotten, and the more practical motivations remembered and acted upon. It’s hard to cling to a concept; but practicalities—deadlines, costs, etc.—are hard to forget, and create their own inertia. As a result, people repeatedly find themselves going through the motions: continuing to do things that they once made the choice to do, but without retaining any sense of connection to their deepest needs and motivations. They feel lost, and their activities provide no real sustenance.
7.
People are not their roles.
8.
Many situations apparently resolved through formal processes, such as hiring staff, or creating legislation, are really resolved through a complex combination of formal and informal processes. Very often, the informal processes—which may be unacknowledged and hidden from view—are the more important ones.
9.
The key to effective communication is to understand one’s audience. And a lot of people can’t or don’t bother to understand many audiences for their communications.
10.
People may have to hear the same good idea many times before it enters their consciousness.
11.
Ideas are not appreciated or rewarded in proportion to their truth, beauty, explanatory power, or even social value. Other factors typically matter more. Among them: The credentials of the idea’s originator (however arbitrary their connection to the idea); the prospect that somebody can turn a profit from the idea; and the degree to which the idea departs from, or even improves upon, accepted wisdom (the more it does, the less likely it will be appreciated and rewarded).
12.
Often people want things for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s just something that they feel—maybe the subtle combination of a number of subjective factors (“I want Chinese food—even though we had Chinese last night;” “I want to go home now;” “I want this job despite the fact that it pays less than the other one”). Because they are personal impulses rather than the products of reasoning, these desires can be difficult to assert or defend. In forums where a collective decision is being made, logical arguments may be favored and impulsive arguments dismissed. But the impulses are real, and their connection to people’s welfare is real as well. It is perfectly legitimate to act on such impulses, and to resist the people who try to defeat them with arguments.
13.
Many actions appear to reflect clear, easily inferred motives but in fact do not. People and institutions do all sorts of things that may seem planned, polished and connected to a strategic agenda, but actually are the products of inertia, laziness, whim, jittery responses to incomplete information, or other motives more complex or confused than they seem.
14.
Social change happens in a gestalt—not as the result of any single well-conceived, well-executed program, policy or intervention. There is no single initiative that will save the world. This is because people, institutions, relationships and cultures are extremely complex. Any single action aimed at social change, however well-conceived and widely supported, is likely to be challenged, diverted, thwarted, misunderstood and/or misapplied in a thousand different ways. But honest, thoughtful efforts can have a cumulative effect. Slowly, person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship, they shift the underlying culture and expectations. So the good that we do is not always the immediate good that we intend.
15.
People express opinions for a lot of different reasons. That they really, deeply believe in what they are saying is only one of them.
16.
Overly zealous advocacy of a certain perspective alienates people who might otherwise have adopted that perspective in due time.
17.
The most insidious way to attack or undermine an idea is to call something else by its name.
18.
There are many situations that feel rotten, even when handled perfectly. (Examples: consoling somebody on the death of a friend; apologizing for a mistake that caused a lot of harm). So it is a mistake to assume from the rotten feeling that you have said or done the wrong thing.
19.
A picture left in the same place on the wall long enough will become invisible.
20.
Some things can be learned only through experience.
21.
When the true relationship between cause and effect is unknown, very simple patterns can appear vastly more complicated than they really are.
22.
Perceptions freeze more easily than situations. Once a person has formed a perception of a situation, he or she is likely to miss the fact that the situation has shifted subtly or gradually over time.
23.
Ambiguities in the early part of an arrangement can be costly to resolve. They may be the only things making the arrangement possible. Business deals, marriages, friendships—all may depend on the parties failing to reveal and resolve conflicts in their perceptions about the facts behind their transactions. If one of the parties, at the commencement of an arrangement, sees that these unresolved conflicts may exist, it can be very tempting to keep quiet about them and hope for the best. But the cost of cleaning up the messes that can arise when these conflicts come to light later, long after all parties have begun to take actions consistent with their own perceptions, can be far, far greater. In general, it is much better to name and attempt to resolve ambiguities on the front end of an arrangement rather than risk the catastrophe of having them derail the arrangement later.
24.
Justice is often associated with equality. “Splitting the difference” has a ring of fairness to it. Exhibiting “balance” in reporting on a situation—for example, devoting the same amount of journalistic space to each side of a controversy—seems evenhanded. But in situations in which there actually is a fundamental underlying inequality, treating people equally is fundamentally unjust. For example, if two people disagree about ten aspects of a transaction, but one of the two people is correct about all ten aspects and the other is simply lying for his or her own gain, it would be unjust to conclude that each person must be right about five of the ten sources of disagreement, or to simply “split the difference.”
25.
The two major sources of happiness are self-expression and love. And in truth, they are the same things.
Which items on my list resonate with you? What patterns have you been able to discern from your own experiences?
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