A good friend of mine has wandered full force into the positive thinking, humanistic, Dale Carnegie type of success training that is popular in professional circles these days. Now, I don’t necessarily disparage it, and there is a lot of good stuff to learn. But sometimes, the overly simplistic, boiled down talking points lack sophistication, and give an unbalanced idea of what is good and bad.
Case in point? Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work, which lists the characteristics of Judgers (bad) vs. Learners (good). Now granted, I only skimmed the book, but the charts below reveal what I think is our culture’s buy-in into subjectivism, and our rejection of any objective morals or truths.
There are two extremes here, of course. One is being so open minded that you are continually learning, but unwilling to make decisions, or to defend the truth. The other is to be so sure of what you already believe that you are always trying to be right, and failing to learn. The middle ground is what is missing from the examples below, but I have added a middle column.
Rather than comment on them, I’ll let the middle columns below speak for themselves.
