Photo by: mint tea
Self-improvement is about helping people have a fuller appreciation of all the wonderful things in their lives, even when many things are bad. It’s really getting people to focus on the good things in life.
The good things in life are other people. And getting to really know other people is the process by which you’re getting to know yourself.
In the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the “gnothi seauton” (latin “nosce te ipsum”) inscription stands as a reminder of this. It refers to the ideal of understanding human behavior, morals and thought, because ultimately to understand oneself is to understand other humans as well. But you can’t understand yourself if you don’t understand the others.
Very few people know themselves and we know other people even less well, because we spend a little slice of our lives with anybody but our parents. And even so, your parents don’t really know you. They spend very little time with you after you’ve been a child and you spend little time with them.
And even your best friends, who you may argue that you know, how many hours a week do you spend with them?
What do you talk about in those hours? In the “best friends” relationships, as in most others, there is a point in which you (and them) stop asking questions – like they are asked in the beginning. The relationship becomes superficial, you don’t work to really understand the other one. We’re somehow becoming afraid of asking them any serious questions about themselves, because we think that our questions might be interpreted as “what, you didn’t know that?”
We know so little about *anyone* in our lives and yet we assume to know so much. We know so little about the good things in life.
How can we create conditions in which we feel comfortable, conditions which would allow us to know each other? Asking questions, we can do that by asking questions.
Did you know that there is very little in our relationships that encourages people to ask questions? Shyness is the extreme, but try to remember when did you last ask your partner or best friend some serious questions about them. That’s probably a long time ago, at the beginning of the relationship. After that point, asking questions becomes somewhat of a taboo.
If you’ve been reading some blogs, or magazines, or if you’ve been watching TV, you may have noticed that interviews are not something unusual. But we don’t do that in our daily lives. Why? Why don’t we keep “interviewing” our friends and partners after we get past the initial phases of the relationship?
I’m sure most of us don’t even know what our parents want to be remembered for, even though most of our time spent with someone is with our parents. If we don’t know that important thing about our parents, what do we know about the rest of our friends? Very little, close to nothing… It may seem like we know a lot about them, but when we believe we know them best, we don’t know them at all.
Integrate the habit of asking questions in your life. Interview your friends, your family and your life partner. Ask them questions like:
- What do you want to be remembered for?
- What in your life are you most proud of?
- What in your life are you most ashamed of and wish you didn’t do it?
- What things you keep doing that you know you don’t want to do? Why do you keep doing them?
Ask them the sort of questions you would ask me. Ask them basic questions about humanity and psychology, about their opinions and beliefs. If you don’t ask that, you really can’t get to know them.
And you look around and everybody’s smiling and you smile; everybody pretends it’s all good and you pretend it’s all good; everybody looks happy and you try to look happy; everyone looks good and you want to look good… There’s not problem with these things, but that’s not living. That’s the superficial part of life.
I once met a lady who realized, after 75 years of life, that she wasted all her youth years without getting to know anybody. And she was sad because now it was too late for her to do that. Some of her friends have died and others moved away, and so it was impossible her to “fix” the situation. It’s never too late in theory, but in practice it is.
One thing that sometimes amuses me is when someone does something terribly wrong and those close to him say: “how could that happen? We knew him, he would never do such a thing.” Situations like these clearly show that we don’t know our parents, we don’t know our friends, we don’t know our sons, we don’t know our brothers, we don’t know our loved ones.
Now get a pen and a piece of paper and prepare an interview. Use the questions that I’ve suggested above, add some more of your own, and interview one of your parents, your loved one or your best friend. Interview them the same way you would interview a stranger: by starting from the assumption that you don’t really know anything about them.
Do it today! You don’t want to reach the stage of that 75 years old lady.
I don’t want you to miss the good things in life, nor do you.
Until next time,
be happy! 
Armannd
