It never fails to strike me as how one-sided many people are in relating to one another.
I often like to tell the story of how one day I was in a cab driving down the Central Expressway (CTE). The driver was so engrossed in talking to me about the bad traffic situation in Singapore that he made this claim: “All women are bad drivers. They cause all accidents.” No sooner had he mentioned this, there was an accident up ahead that involved a woman.
Conversely, there was a situation where a friend of mine (female) drove to my place to pick me up and I was pleasantly surprised to note that she was really good at handling the car. As we drove down the same expressway, it turned out that there was a big jam due to an accident. She made this claim: “Taxi drivers in Singapore are the biggest cause of traffic accidents, and they are getting worse.”
Hmm.
Difference of opinion, or the failure to look at the other person’s perspective?
Very simply put, there are many sides to an opinion. If you think you are always right, think again. I strongly believe that a lot of the arguments we have are unnecessary simply because we fail to understand the other person’s point of view.
A senior manager came up to me once and told me that the “youngsters nowadays” are difficult to train and not willing to take on hardships.
A young engineer recently came up to me and told me that “the more elderly they are the less cooperative they are”.
Hmm… so much for standing in each other’s shoes and getting an understanding for each other. I believe that we fail to recognize the merits of each individual we meet with to the point where it is easy to make assumptions about the other person. I was once taught by Dr. Richard Bandler, the founder of NLP, to consider if I ever thought I was wrong about something. It dawned on me that this teaches me to look at a different perspective. Often, not always, I have a judgement and opinion, and do my best to look at the question and its conventional answer from a different angle, so that I can generate something even more useful. But I always do my best to acknowledge that the perfect answer may not exist, and I have of course, had some of my ideas proven wrong many times. This is why I prefer not to take sides in an argument because both sides often are valid. But as human beings we frequently do not know how to hold more than one possible answer in our heads. It’s as though life were like math, that 1 + 1 must always equal to 2.
But we know life is far more complex than that, and requires a bit more patience and attention. After all, we seldom spend enough time learning about our life, when there are many interesting and beautiful wisdoms to consider. Perhaps it’s time for use to acknowledge that the generation gap is more than just a age difference, but is universal: it is the gap we generated due to our own experiences and memories and biases. Let’s learn how to bridge them by being curious about another person’s perspective, and discover something interesting that we may never have thought of.