Ever been stuck in a messy web of entangled thoughts? Do half of them quite literally relate to people in and outside your life? Well then, it’s time that you develop a knack for dealing with people, and who could offer better wisdom than the infamous Youtuber, philosophical thinker, and professional problem solver Shwetabh Gangwar himself?
In his magnum opus titled, ‘The Rudest Book Ever’, the author provides several perspectives to deal with things of everyday importance like knowledge, ego, happiness, satisfaction, rejections, success, failure, relationships, approval-seeking behavior, and so on. His punchy persona makes the book unique in its own style and is indubitably a successful attempt at rewiring our social conditioning.
So, here are the top six perspectives/lessons that can help shift your paradigm of people:
People are weird
We gotta remember this three-worded golden phrase, for it can save us a lot of energy and enhance our mental peace. The term weird has connotations of positivity, self-acceptance, and a tinch of strangeness attached to it—allowing people to act bizarrely at times. Instead of making blind assumptions and meaningless perceptions about someone and getting hurt later when they fail to live up to our expectations, we must look for real and raw data that can justify our expectations of them and our behavior towards them.
This is because our understanding of a person’s behavior and personality traits are based on our experiences and encounters with them such that they compel us to categorize people as ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘unreliable,’ ‘calculative,’ etc. Shwetabh rightly elucidates that these terms are too specific and may not always hold true because our definitions of people regularly change depending on our context, mood, and bias. This is precisely why it is too difficult to pick a single adjective to describe a particular person with conviction. So perceiving humans around us as weird creatures help us to be least affected by their actions and accept them as they are, unfettering us from a vicious cycle of expectations and disappointments.
Screw first impressions
Since people are weird, we may never know of their true intentions unless we have data. According to Shwetabh, real data is any pattern of behavior and thought that backs a person’s actions, not words. People around us say a lot of stuff just to sound amazing and sell charm, looks, attitude, and whatnot. But all we have to do is observe before buying into the hype around them or judging them based on rumors when meeting for the first time.
Therefore, until and unless we have real data, the perception ‘they are weird’ (essentially meaning we do not know them at all) helps us avoid falling into traps that take so much of our precious time away. We must realize that people are weird, and even we, as individuals may appear weird to others. We need this general perception of people being weird because we are rejected by them all the time, and it hurts later when they fall short of our expectations. The irony is they are never aware of such expectations. It is our mind that fails us. Because they are weird, we shall never anticipate anything from them, corroborating our peace of mind.
Screw People Pleasing
People, including us, are most interested in themselves and nothing else. They honestly do not care about us as much as we think they do. After all, if self-interest drives us, then it drives them too. Moreover, people from all spheres of life perpetually enter and exit our lives. So, how many of them are we going to continue pleasing?
Oft-times we find ourselves irrationally indulged in activities that help us become influential and important in the eyes of others. We do this because our self-interest drives us to be liked, desired, and looked upon by them. We depend on external validation to feel special about ourselves. Our urge to prove our mettle is sporadically not fuelled by pressure, competition, culture, etc. And, this is something we must refrain from ASAP! Because in a sabotaging process like this, we lose our ‘self’. Our lives become about the people around us as we hand over the anchors of our being to them. We just cannot let our ”self” die and our feelings bury under the carpet to please somebody who doesn’t even care about us.
Stop seeking approval, validation, and acceptance from people. Chuck them out!
There’s no denying the fact that each one of us is approval-hungry, approval-famished rather! And over the years, this has murdered our individuality. All those people who are better than us are viewed as not people but godheads placed on a pedestal. We put them in an authoritarian position, and all that we undertake is to impress them in order to satiate our ravenousness for their rubber stamp.
The fact of the matter is that people may not care about us, but what they indubitably do is make observations, and their commendation of us is nothing more than one of those many observations. They do not proactively sit and think about us, but their observations reside at the back of their heads. So, there lies a possibility that upon these observations, they may step forward to connect with us, offering an opportunity that may help us add another feather to our caps.
Don’t you think opportunities as rewards are so much better than appreciation? So, let us stop accumulating self-worth from external applause and instead make ourselves the center of our lives, derive satisfaction from within, and create opportunities sans forceful extraction of praise and acclamation.
Screw Heroes
Do you remember all those phantasmagorical times when you were asked who you look up to, who your idol is, and the like? Well, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Role Models’ are two such powerful terms whose meanings we have been programmed to believe as people who are above humans—untouchable and awesome to us.
We have been labeling people as our heroes and role models without any skepticism or scrutiny. All they do is sell us an image of being perfect, successfully and consistently through television broadcasts, movies, and various social media platforms, thereby accumulating followers, profit, and power for themselves. We even tag people around us as paragons based on our limited interactions and no real data about them. We tend to crown them with such titles because of their impressive achievements, that as rightly asserted by Shwetabh, we have been tutored to worship. Quite unknowingly, we become followers, and they, our heroes. And this is where we bark up the wrong tree.
The word ‘follow’ instills a desire to emulate and become like them. But we need to understand that we cannot change and become like them just because we would like to. We will remain as we are. What we can do most is take whatever we admire and try effectuating that into our behavior and everyday thinking. And this brings us to the last lesson.
Admire, Never follow.
Once we call somebody a hero, we exclude them from being homo sapiens, and this is where we get wrong. Our heroes are simply people. No matter how glamorous, impressive, commanding, rich, celebrated, famous, and respected they are, they too have feelings and flaws just like us. They cry, struggle to do things, face disappointments, and have inner evils. They also wonder about things like what is the point of everything, question their achievements, have regrets, and make mistakes. After all, they are humans, aren’t they? Nobody is perfect. We are all people with plenty of flaws.
So, instead of getting fascinated about their lives, we can admire them and take inspiration from their extraordinary acts and achievements that they have to their names. We should leave those personalities to be people—thereby sparing the person from our baseless expectations and assumptions regarding things we have no data on. The only thing we can do is learn from them.
There are no heroes, no good or bad people. We are all flawed beings as we blend egocentric tendencies, biological urges, impulses, and desires. Time passes, people come and go away. They really don’t care about us. So, we must better start caring about ourselves forthwith. We can’t control anybody. What we can control is ourselves, so why not put all of our focus there? Let’s view people as people. If at all you expect anything from them, expect the unexpected.