Check into the right school

I am driving and this fifty-something man gestures to me and points at a deep pothole ahead of me. It is deep and wide. Very conspicuous. I smile and wave my thanks. But it hits me that there were generally 3 possible reactions:

(1) An acknowledgement / a thank you

(2) A negative response boardering on alerting the pedestrian that, please, I have eyes too, am younger and, in fact, pay more attention to what's ahead of me when I drive than he, as a pedestrian, would. In short, just rant!

(3) To ignore the man and act like he did nothing. Look, he is neither my brother nor friend and should mind his business as I do mine!

My mother treated me and my twin brother this way: when she arrived home, one of us would tell her about an exciting thing that would have happened in her absence. If the other would repeat the same story, unaware that it is a repetition, she would listen to that rerun with the same enthusiasm as she did the first! I know because I walked in one day as my twin brother was narrating the same story I had told her and she was listening keenly! (I complained about it and she just smiled).

Mom never dismissed a story's rerun. Every narrator has a different narrative. One story told by two different people increases learning opportunities.

The two stories (about the pedestrian and my mother) have a common factor: every time we discourage people from saying things we think we know, we hurt ourselves in three ways:

( 1) We miss their perspective that is important since it is different from ours: we reduce the quality of our decisions

(2) we run the risk of them one day not telling us about something we do not totally know about and with dire consequences

(3) we check ourselves out of learning processes and check into the school of hard knocks.

#learning #twins #narrative #perspective #risk #decisions #