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It might seem obvious in retrospect, but 100 years ago people married the neighbor girl, the girl at work, the girl at church, the girl at school, or the girl that was introduced to them by a friend.
People married the person that was in front of them. That was the key criteria for their future.
In other parts of the world of course arranged marriages have been and continue to be the way that MOST people get married on this planet. People outside of those cultures have thought the belief that you could marry someone without having met them as ridiculous. Result? Those in arranged marriages report being just as happy or not as those in western marriage models.
In a sense, nothing has changed.
What is in front of you is what you attend to.
What is in front of you is what you believe.
The coronavirus is this single hottest topic online in 2020. Nothing comes close.
Out of the 15,000,000 people that have died around the world through early April this year, 70,000 of them died from this specific strain of flu.
It’s not 1%. It’s not 0.5%…But it’s compelling for a number reasons. If you ask people what they are scared of dying from, it’s pretty likely that they will tell you “the CV19” or similar.
The chances that someone you deeply love dies from the coronavirus, at least in 2020, is a lot smaller than someone dying in a car accident, from cancer or from a host of other respiratory illnesses.
I’ve made it a point to watch the nightly news for the last 10 consecutive days. There have been no stories unrelated to the virus or the viruses impact on the economy. (I’ve watched NBC and NPR) And now I will stop for 10 days to see what I observe in my own little world, aka, my own objective reality.)
Media MUST show me the coronavirus because it triggers off fears inside of people which cause them to obsess and then worry about their own safety. That means I’m coming back to the media tomorrow and the next day. People are once again glued to the news. It’s been a LONG TIME since that has occurred in the world.
In a few months you’ll be living in a closer to “old normal” world and you will see video of people dying in fires and you’ll begin to think that firefighting is a dangerous profession. You’ll believe your chances of dying in a fire are FAR greater than you could ever imagine. Neither of course is true, but you might be like millions of who believe it. You’ll forget about the flu for a few months until flu season hits again.
You might also see video this year of people dying in hurricanes. You might think they are a cause of huge losses of life. And of course nothing could be further from the truth.
People BELIEVE what they SEE, what they FEAR, what they WANT, what they have been TAUGHT, what they have EXPERIENCED.
If you want people to CHANGE what it is they believe you must compete with their current beliefs, where there attention is, where there emotional investment is and their personal history.
I was in Chile last month having dinner with friends.
I was offered a dish that was loaded with pork.
I don’t eat pork because my diet starts at a 2500 year old book called Leviticus. It always has. But I’m not religious in 2020. I have no real “beliefs” about going to hell if one eats lobster, crab, shrimp, pork or any of a host of other foods. But I haven’t eaten pork or shrimp. Ever. I simply don’t.
It’s not “belief based behavior.”
It WAS at one time, and it STUCK.
But here’s a secret. If you were truly compelled you COULD cause me to CHANGE my mind.
There are two fundamental approaches to get your viewpoint accepted.
One works. One doesn’t.
…It’s interesting. Only highly evolved people will ever call into account their beliefs about anything. Beliefs about “how life is” or “how the world is” or “how you are” are all developed (and usually with little or no evidence beyond a single observation or repetition of being told something is so) fairly quickly.
To actually “think” about a belief (or an opinion, an attitude) takes mental work and therefore people don’t want to do it. Most people are pretty lazy. Persuading an intellectually lazy person to take up mental action (change) is like getting a couch potato to run laps.
Persuading an intellectual genius can be just as hard because they have spent so much time defending their beliefs on every level…what to do when you encounter smart people who are wrong? See the next page…
