...and then, I stopped judging everyone

Whenever I’m sad because of others judging (misjudging) me, I feel frustrated and furious that why are they forming assumptions and opinions when they don’t know my whole story? But after a bit of introspection, I realized one thing and asked myself ‘Don’t I do the same sometimes?’

If you try to think about it, you’d find countless examples when you must have judged others without knowing their whole story.

For example:

Whenever we see any successful person, we automatically assume that he must be hardworking, super talented, ethical, and N number of positive things. We attribute all the good qualities to that person.

But whenever we see an average person or say a person whom the world considers as a “failure”, we again assume that he must be lazy, unmotivated, dumb, and N number of negative qualities.

In short, we assume that the external circumstances of a person is followed by his efforts only.

But reality is far from this. See, we make a mistake by believing that the result of equation is determined by the things which are in our hand only. In life, there are also number of things to the left side of equation which are beyond our hand.

Let me explain it with the help of diagram shown below. Observe it carefully.

 

The diagram represents conditions of two persons which consists of two lines and few boxes. The bottom line is the start line, the green box represents variables like family to which a person is born, privileges like family wealth, better opportunities, etc. The red box represents talent or passion possessed by a person and the black box indicates variable which is in the hand of a person, i.e. efforts or hard work. Note that each box has different height, which means the height is proportional to the amount of a particular variable. The line at the top represents a limit above which a person is said to be leading a respected or successful life. For the sake of simplicity, I have named it as escape line as above that level, a person would be able to escape the lower level of life.

Now let’s discuss the situation of Person 1.

You can see that as the height of green box is more in this case, Person 1 is born to wealthy parents who are well educated and have good contacts.

He wants to become an entrepreneur. Moreover, he is also very talented. His parents has influential contacts. They taught him from the very young age that what he needs to do to become an entrepreneur. So he got the guidance as well. They had the resources to provide him a quality education. Now think that how hard it would be for him to succeed and lead a comfortable life? Not much, because he is born in a well to do family and his parents have the resources. So he has got the right environment to flourish, and talent to make it easier.

Let’s come to Person 2 now:

He also wants to become an entrepreneur. Now call it his bad luck or whatever, but he is born to poor parents who can barely make their ends meet. The environment in his home is very toxic as his parents are fighting most of the time. As a result, he is not able to focus on his studies and gets bad grades. After his graduation, he doesn’t have a privilege to chase his dream and start a business as he has a responsibility to feed his parents. So he starts a job with a below average pay as he didn’t have good grades. He works damn hard but no matter how much efforts he puts in, it’d be immensely hard for him to reach that escape line as he didn’t have other variables going for him.

Now see the right most side in the diagram. It shows that if Person 2 had born with the same privileges as Person 1 and had got the right guidance, resources, he would have been far ahead than Person 1 as he is more hard working.

These are just hypothetical examples but if you see around, you’d find countless similar examples.

But what we should learn from above diagram is we should not judge a person by his current situation or end result, but rather how much efforts he is putting in. Because situation of any person is a combined result of variables which are beyond his control and which are in his control. If you want to judge him at all, then please judge him by the variables which are in his control and not by his result. Because result don't define a person’s character but his efforts do.

So from the next time, whenever you see a person who is not so successful, don’t assume things and give him labels like lazy, unsuccessful but try to understand his circumstances and appreciate him for whatever he has done till now. This may not help him to succeed but would surely bring a smile to his face for being kind and considerate.