Surrounding Yourself With People Who Agree With You Isnt Always the Best Decision
As human beings, part of our life experience is that we need to test ourselves and our ideas. Everyone has different ideas and many times growing as a person is simply meeting other people with contrary ideas to your own. Its easy to have no empathy for certain people if you have never have actually seen their side of things. For the human experience it is necessary to open up our minds and hearts to everyone because we are all connected in the same race.
In the United States especially, we have a big breakdown between economic classes of people where the poor are often seen as lazy leeches on the system, while the rich are vilified as scum sucking profit seekers. We have become so amped up in the argument at this point that seeing the true side of the isle for yourself is no longer a reality for most. The problem is the people making these claims often dont have any friends or acquaintances on the other side.
In general people tend to stick with the people they were raised with and the part of society where they feel more comfortable. However if they want to see the other side of the story, they must go outside their comfort zone and experience it for themselves. I once saw a speaker when I was young who talked about how for the majority of his life he hated black people. Because he had never actually met anyone black, he believed what the people around him had said about them. It wasn't until he went off to college and lived with a black roommate that he realized most of the stuff he was told growing up was a straight up lie.
This idea of surrounding yourself not only with people who agree with you and share your ideas isnt only in your personal life, but in your professional life as well. There are countless stories of businesses being run to the ground because the CEO surrounded himself with people who never wanted to raise their voice and say his idea was stupid, or maybe they shared the same one. Historically one of the reasons the Nazis lost WWII was Hitler surrounded himself with the best Nazis, not the best people for the job. Had he hired more qualified leaders that might have offered opposing ideas, things might not have ended up the way they did.
Ultimately its easier to make the mistake that many do and surround yourself with the most comfortable agreeable people, but don't. If you aren't continuously growing as a person, you aren't experiencing life to the fullest that you can. Dont instantly write someone off because they dont share the same ideas as you, instead talk with them, debate them and try to see the other side they are coming from. You will find doing so a much more fulfilling experience.
You are right that a lot of people make the mistake of avoiding criticism / disagreement... healthy discussion and debate are awesome. That's something I enjoy a lot about my band right now, we are able to discuss ideas that we don't agree on without getting worked up about it.
They say the best friendships happen when people disagree in small ways on a regular basis - as opposed to the ones where people never disagree about anything.
Its healthy to disagree on certain things as long as everyone knows its a disagreement any not going to break friendships like you see so often with bands :)
As much as I hate chaos @heymattsokol has a point we need to be with people not our look alike to get better pictures of ourselves
very compact, good post my friend
he is a naturaly bad person who hated black person this is not good to separate himself others its a sign of negtivity and small mind and think nice to read ur article on it try to met and understand everyone and look a good person from everyone
Yes, I agree with you that it is no good to have all the yes men surround us if we need to grow in maturity or step up to another level of success in our life. My experience told me that we do need to hear different opinion in our team which are willing to get the job done in a better way. However, in a private setting, I prefer someone who really knows me and loves me that will give constructive criticism or advise for our improvement. There are so many people in this world who loves to share criticism out of love but just to release their anger towards the other person and end up really hurting others. This kind of opinion with such an negative attitude is not recommended in this world. We need more positive people to share both positive or sounds negative comment with love. However, I think it is hard to expect others to have such an attitude in reality. But one thing we can do is to start to share our opinion to others with love, then it will start to impact the life of others.
Yes is correct, when you are with a group and they are always agree with you, will create a false idea about your self, you will think that probably you are the best person in one area and if another person confront you with a second idea that is totally in disagree with your point of view, 100% that you won't reconsider the ideas of critics that other persons are providing you. To develop yourself we need to take critics from others to learn and be better in the future.
really good post thanks for shereing
It is always nice to be criticized constructively. by that you are growing as a person. Thanks for sharing your idea. Love reading it! :)
Like a lot of things in life, the thing that makes something so great, is also the biggest drawback. In this case, the danger is the like-mindedness itself.
When you surround yourself with only like-minded people, it’s very easy to stop there and just surround yourself with people who agree with you because you all have the same beliefs, think the same way and do the same things. It becomes very easy to simply accept that something is true because enough of the people around you say it’s true and accept that what you believe is right just because people around you say it’s right.
Agree @calaber24 tp grow one must be outside its comfort zone
I so much agree to that school of thought.