#208 - Right Message, Wrong Messenger
Many moons ago in college, I was at the gym with my then girlfriend.
I was showing her a seated cable row exercise and letting my arms stretch all the way out with each rep.
But that created a conflict for her. She said her ex-boyfriend had told her to keep the exercise in a partial range of motion to maximize muscle engagement.
So, she asked me what I thought.
In truth, I didn’t know enough to answer. But since it was her ex-boyfriend, I dug in deep on my explanation.
“Partial range is so stupid. Why wouldn’t you want to train the full muscle?!?”
The key here is that her ex was a personal trainer and definitely knew more than me.
But since he was her ex, he was a source of insecurity for me. He was my enemy. And that meant that I had already decided to disagree with him on everything.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago.
I was editing a video for a training program about building muscle and optimizing engagement with partial range of motion. The exact same thing he had said.
All of a sudden, this memory popped into my head. And I felt pretty dumb.
It took me 13 years to learn something just because I didn’t like who it came from.
The guy I labeled my enemy was exactly right about his approach. But I couldn’t see it because I was determined to be the opposite of him.
It was the right message, but the wrong messenger.
My insecurity blinded me to something that would have been incredibly helpful.
I’ve been thinking about that concept a lot recently.
There is a lot of news bombarding us today. And it’s too much to sort through.
So we end up making heuristic judgements about things. Meaning, we filter information through a lens to simplify what we think about it.
Foreign wars, nutrition choices, morality issues, and political affairs lose their nuance and get lumped into partisan categories.
In essence, if you’re not on my team, you can’t do anything good. In fact, my team is only capable of doing good. And that makes you all evil.
“Othering” people is not a new concept. Treating strangers as less than is how we separate the in-group from the out-group. And that’s an idea as old as humans.
But we do so at our own peril.
When we categorize people with blanket labels, we rob them of the chance to be human. And we also lose the opportunity to learn from them.
People are messy. And the politics that spring forth from their minds is messy.
And wading through the messiness of this nuance takes work. It’s far easier to cast broad judgment on an individual or group than it is to see their humanity.
It’s fine to feel strongly about your political beliefs. But if you can’t point out a single positive thing about the opposing side, you’re a zealot. And a hypocrite at that.
No matter how much you dislike another human, it is silly to think that any one person is pure evil. And avoiding facts that don’t support your belief is being willfully ignorant.
We lose the ability to see things clearly when we become too far removed from life.
It’s a privileged place to look down at the world from the window of an airplane. You can see a lot at once. But you can see none of it well.
To truly know something, you have to get hands on. You need to get dirty in the details and learn up close.
That means that you can only know so much. And anything beyond the scope of your direct experience is not something you truly know.
Which means you aught to be careful about claiming the truth.
The internet presents us with a lot of facts and pieces of the story. And that can make us feel like experts. And that false confidence can lead to broad categorizations.
The problem is that broad categorizations are all we can offer from that perspective.
I can see the whole city from on top of a mountain. But I can’t see any of the people.
This generalization is helpful as a means of sorting information. But it’s horrible as a method for finding truth.
If you want to win arguments, then generalize away. You’ll be safe and protected because you’ll never have to question your assumptions.
But if you want to learn in a search for truth, then dabble in the details. The only way to ever know what’s right is to risk being wrong.
Don’t miss the message just because you don’t like the messenger.