Seth's Blog : 2 new articles
Surrounded by yes
It’s good news and bad news.
The web knows what you like and it’s working hard to surround you with reminders that you’re right.
This is good news because it can help an outsider feel more normal. If you have something you’re interested in, you’ll see more of it, news about it, affirmations… all of which will help you find the confidence to speak up and lead. Everywhere you look, you’ll see reminders that the world is actually just the way you hoped.
And this is bad news because it amplifies bad behavior. It normalizes behavior that successful cultures work hard to diminish. This reinforcement makes your bubble ever thicker and makes it easy to believe that in fact, the world does revolve around you.
Everyone doesn’t agree with you, the web just makes it feel that way.
Of course they’re wrong
It seems like our take on culture is that we’re right.
We shake hands properly, use a napkin properly, speak up at events problerly and even greet one another on the street properly.
When I’m in a foreign city, I’m always amazed at how (friendly/offputting/aloof/intimate) everyone else is.
But of course, everyone else is right as well. They’re the home team, so they’re even more right than I am.
The conflict seems pretty obvious:
We can’t all be wrong, which means we can’t all be right, either.
Culture, by its very definition, isn’t the work of being right. It’s the work of being in sync.
Culture is people like us do things like this.
So sure, the way WE do this is ‘right’ if right means, ‘the way we do this.’ But there’s little room for absolutes. Culture abhors the absolute, it is based in the specific instead.
The next time you bump into a culture that you disagree with, perhaps it might be more useful to wonder about how it got that way, and would happen if we did it that way?
How long would it take us to go from, “this is wrong,” to, well, sure, “that’s how we do things around here”?
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