I recently watched an interesting documentary called:
“The Rise & Fall of Allison Mack”
If you don’t know who she is (I didn’t know who she was), she’s an actress who starred in Smallville, but is now in prison.
What did she do exactly?
She recruited people into a multi-level marketing business which was actually a front for a sex cult.
But I don’t want to talk about her today.
At one point during the documentary, there was a term that was mentioned that I’ve heard of before but never really bothered to look more into.
Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP for short.
Apparently, there’s a negative association that comes with that term. People have said that there’s no scientific evidence that it works. Or if it does work, it’s unethical and manipulative.
I don’t fully believe the latter to be true. Everything in life can be used for good or bad.
So I did some research to learn more about the topic. Eventually, I came across a book that you may already be familiar with.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
It’s a very popular self-development book that was recommended to me multiple times, but I never took the time to read it until yesterday.
So far I’ve only finished reading the first chapter which explained why you shouldn’t criticize other people.
Long story short, when you criticize someone for any wrongdoing, they’ll immediately put their guard up and convince themselves that what they did was justified.
I always knew that it isn’t a good thing to criticize someone, but I never knew exactly why until I read the first chapter. But now it makes sense why people act the way they act in situations like:
1. A diehard liberal and hardcore conservative fighting each other non-stop.
2. Children growing resentful after being criticized by their parents.
3. Students being scolded by teachers for misbehaving.
4. Teammates pointing fingers at each other after losing a competitive sport or game.
You can even stretch it a bit and go as far as to say that it happens in sales too. When someone tells you why you should use their product and pitches it to you, you can argue that it’s an indirect criticism of the current product they’re using and why it’s not good enough.
Just something interesting to think about.
Hopefully, you’ll reach a new level of realization like the first chapter of the book has done for me.
That’s all for this week.
Enjoy your New Years and I’ll talk to you again in 2022.