I’ve been doing a deep dive on story telling here recently. I think it dovetails very nicely with sales and is an essential skill that every man should develop. Not just for practical reasons but also for life enjoyment as well. Something I’ve noticed with stories, the ones that resonate with time, is that they often make very harsh and very pronounced moral judgements.
They are in no way, shape, or form ambiguous about what the authors believes and thinks is right. And this includes “open minded”, progressive, and other types of literature too. As a matter of fact literature like that usually speaks more forcefully than any other literature ever has. And this isn’t a bad thing. This is how humans work.
We’re constantly making judgements trying to determine what is right and what is wrong. Not so much what is right and wrong on a arbitrary or universal moral system but rather what is right and wrong to achieve fulfillment and the accomplishment of your goals. As humans we can’t be unbiased and really shouldn’t be.
We have the ability to learn and being unbiased would mean is throwing out all that prior experience. And so every day we’d be destroyed. That’s not to say that being close minded is the answer, of course it more nuanced than that. But rather this whole idea of open-mindedness, tolerance, and the like, doesn’t really exist in humans and never has.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Existence Is A Value Judgement
Humans are constantly gathering data to make sense of their environment. We are constantly making value judgements. Even saying that making judgements is wrong is in and of itself, a judgement. As humans trying to be judgement free is trying to be life free. We can’t do it. And we shouldn’t. Judgement was one of the greatest gifts that was ever bestowed on man. To use past experience and knowledge to make better informed choices in the present is what has allowed the human race to thrive.
Fire and judgement.
Without them we would have died out a long time ago. Of course judgements can be wrong or limiting, we are after all, human. But yet they are still needed for proper functioning. It’s not so much is judgement right or wrong, but rather what judgements are right and wrong in general and then specifically. Hence the need for morals. Even a person who believes in “moral relevance” really doesn’t because even by saying “moral relevance” is superior is making a value judgement and therefore a moral judgement.
Humans are constantly trying to figure out what is going to work for them and what is going to work against them. Humans make more value judgements than times they blink in a day. Trying to change this is like yelling at the moon for controlling the tides. You can yell all you want, it isn’t going to change a damn thing, ever.
So what’s a more productive avenue of thinking?
Open The Mind To Close The Mind
You need to be open minded but while maintaining a steady core. The whole point of open mindedness is to absorb more perspectives and more data to have more information to make better value judgements. Being open minded to not make value judgements is, first off, impossible, but second off even if possible, still foolish. You want to always scan the world around you, looking for fresh and new data. Expose yourself to different perspectives, while still maintaining what you have come to understand about the world.
When you learn and grow two things tend to happen. The first is what you realize how much you don’t know. Like the old saying goes, the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. So you end up asking higher level questions and getting to deeper, more specific knowledge from a generalized start.
The second thing that happens is the knowledge begins to reinforce itself. The more knowledge that you have the more connections that you can make within that knowledge. Thus making learning into something that leads to exponential growth as the more knowledge you acquire the more it connects and the more it connects, the more you can make an accurate model of problems and the world with it.
Go Out…And Judge
It’s the only way to get anywhere. Gather knowledge, connect that knowledge with other knowledge that you have, and the make informed hypothesis from that knowledge (AKA value judgements) and then test them out in the world to see if they work. Then get feedback from reality and adjust as needed. All the while gathering new information and learning all that you can about the world around you.
You’ll become a better and better judge. And that, after all, is what success is about. Along with discipline, consistency, and things of that nature, being a good judge is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, regardless of what the particular endeavor may be. Business, dating/mating, making a mark on the world, whatever.
The successful are better judges.
So go out and gain knowledge.
So that you may judge better.
If anything I said here interests you I’d highly recommend you check out The Ultimate Alpha Collection which is a compilation of 16 of my books for the price of 5. It covers everything from being a man to making money to getting the right mindset to getting girls to fighting and more and is a resource no man should be without. Pick up your copy today!
-Charles Sledge
