I like it when people agree with me. I think most of us do. It’s hard not to enjoy hearing that others think our ideas, attitudes, and beliefs are right. In fact, I’m sure the world would be a much simpler place if everyone just agreed with every single thing I ever did or said. Who among us hasn’t thought that before?
In fact, there are only two problems with that particular utopia. One is that I have occasionally said and done really stupid things, just like everyone else. But my massive missteps are thankfully few and far between, and outnumbered by my better moments. So I could probably get over this one.
The bigger problem, though, is not that I occasionally make mistakes or say foolish things, but that I don’t think about anything that I don’t think about. That sounds like a ridiculously obvious statement, but it’s actually the reason that it’s important to interact with people who don’t have the exact same experiences or worldview as you do.
I’ll give you an example. When I was growing up in small-town Illinois, I didn’t even think we had a culture. The Midwest doesn’t have the sharp brazenness of the stereotypical New Yorker, or the laid-back surfer vibe of the stereotypical California, or the affected politeness of the stereotypical Southerner. So as far as I was concerned, we Midwesterners didn’t have a culture. We were normal, and all those other people were various deviations from the way a normal person was supposed to behave.
I think a lot of us think that way. The farther away a person gets from our own experience, the more ‘strange’ and ‘incorrect’ their ways of doing things can seem. There are people living lives so foreign to my experience – think Siberian reindeer herders or Amazonian tribespeople – that they almost seem like a completely different species. What could we possibly have in common? How could we possibly ever get along?
Then I met my wife, who is from Spain. At first, I didn’t just think that the typical Spanish way of doing things was “a little different” – I thought a lot of it was flat-out wrong. They make decisions as a group, not individually. They wear their emotions and opinions on their sleeves, openly and brazenly. They don’t do alone time very well. All of those aren’t the ways a person is “supposed” to act, I thought. And the feeling was reciprocated; they felt the exact same way about me and my American approach to life. I’ll be honest, there were a lot of arguments in our first couple years about the ‘right’ way to do things.
And then you know what happened? All of us started to understand things a little differently than we had before. I began to realize that I actually do have a culture – slower to anger, slower to forgive, quietly independent – and that there are both benefits and drawbacks to living life through such a specific lens. I didn’t realize the advantages or limitations of my worldview until I was presented with an opportunity to contrast it against something else. I began to see the value of arguing openly and honestly about points of contention, rather than just “going along to get along” in the classically passive-aggressive Midwestern way I’d been raised to. My wife began to appreciate the value of making some decisions unilaterally, instead of waiting for everyone in the group to get on board.
In short, our worlds got bigger, not smaller, as a result of our differing backgrounds running up against one another.
Since meeting my wife, I’ve often said that the best way to live is somewhere between the American way of doing things and the Spanish way of doing things. I don’t mean that America or Spain are the only two countries who’ve figured things out. What I really mean is that nobody knows everything, and all of us can learn something very valuable from people who think very differently than we do. So this month I hope you have some conversations with people from different backgrounds or who hold different opinions than yours. If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to bet that you’ll gain something worth having.
