First, I want to thank you for being here.
Your time is scarce and you are sharing some of it with me in our collective effort to learn, grow, adapt, build, and make the world and ourselves better.
That is no small feat. So thank you.
Second, If I say something you don’t like, good.
That’s good for us both.
It’s good for you because it gives you a chance to do one of the following:
- Update your perspective - maybe change it completely
- Strengthen your perspective (hopefully by investigating/doing more research rather than a slapstick reaction fueled by cognitive dissonance)
If I’m not providing info that challenges you at least sometimes, I’m failing in my attempt to build better humans.
Betterment comes through hard things—Iron sharpens iron.
I love that phrase. It’s from the Bible, though I’m not religious.
When you realize that every obstacle is an opportunity, every hardship is a wellspring of growth and gratitude, and how your most tragic losses end up being necessary fuel for living a fully actualized life, you embrace HARD THINGS.
And the hardest thing most of us do in our modern world is hearing and seeing things we don’t like or fully agree with.
But that’s sooo good and necessary because we know what collective groupthink leads to: communism (millions dead), fascism (millions dead), Us vs Them (tribalism, millions dead), and so on.