Our Strongest Bond

We connect with people who interest us.

We have fun with people who know how to have fun.

We bond with people who believe what we believe.

But our deepest relationships are with people who have shared our pain.

Think of the people you can count on – always – to have your back. Chances are, you’ve been through hard times with them at your side.

Adversity is a whirlwind that tears friends apart if they don’t hold on to each other, but bonds them tightly together if they do.

An acquaintance is someone with whom you can laugh.

A friend is someone with whom you can cry.

I am not suggesting we celebrate adversity.

I am suggesting we celebrate our friends.

The seeds of commitment are watered by tears.

“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”

– Oscar Wilde

“The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough… There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms… but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”

– Bob Dylan, Divine Madness, p. 166

If you want to be persuasive, if you want to convince people, you must abandon the myth that you – or anyone else – is capable of being perfectly objective.

We see things not as they are, but as we are.

Exactly 4 years and one week ago – during this season of Passover and Easter – I wrote to you about cognitive bias:

“You’ve heard it said that, ‘Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ Yet we routinely craft our own facts from the fabric of personal experiences, preferences and prejudices. A stereotype is nothing more than a pattern we’ve observed. This pattern isn’t always predictive, but it is a pattern nonetheless and we trust it. We do this in the misbegotten belief that we have correctly interpreted our past experiences and that our preferences and prejudices are, in fact, correct and reliable interpretations of objective reality.”

– The Monday Morning Memo for March 24, 2014

Preferences and prejudices cannot be trusted.

But pain is neither a preference nor a prejudice. And sorrow is hard to escape. To willfully walk into them for the sake of a friend is the signature of someone who cares.

Do you have a friend in crisis?

Don’t send flowers.

Send yourself.

Roy H. Williams

PS – Don’t assume from today’s memo that the wizard is feeling blue. He’s not. It’s just that he and I know a lot of people who need a hug. I’ll bet you know people, too. – Indy Beagle

PPS – Leonardo da Vinci clearly understood cognitive bias. He said, “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”