Biased

Lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of bias. 
Where are we biased? If you spend enough time on Twitter or on social media in general, everybody seems to give off the impression that we’re all perfectly adjusted, self-aware people who know our blind spots and all the areas where we fall short or we can be biased for or against people or things.

I’ve come to find out as I continue exploring myself more that there are biases that I carry, sometimes I’m not even fully aware of them. 
And that’s the thing with biases. They’re often largely unconscious, rooted in different micro-aggressions, your background, your experiences and things like that.

For example, if you were scammed by someone of a particular nationality or race and you proceed to navigate the world with that lens of, feeling like you can’t trust that group of people and that becomes normal for you, people might look at you and say ah, you know, you’re negatively biased in that regard. But who’s to say that you, your truth is any less important because of how you arrived at said truth, right? So I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

For example, since I started working out in 2022, I have lost a lot of weight. And oftentimes I have to check myself whenever I look at people or see people who may or may not be at the beginning of their fitness journey. There’s a second, a microsecond where my brain almost goes,
“hmm, I did it so why can’t you?”

But then again, I find that that’s not my place to do that, right? I can’t determine where people are at in their journey or in their story and I have to check myself and check my biases because again, I can imagine when I started my fitness journey in 2022 or when I ballooned in 2020 that people were probably looking at me and saying why can’t you just, you know, get fitter? 
When in reality, you know, I had been nursing a bad knee for years where I stopped playing sports and wasn’t able to work out as much as I wanted to.

So it feeds into something I always say that kindness needs to be your currency of how you navigate the world. Kindness and understanding. Full stop.

An understanding of people and their experiences and knowing that you don’t know it all. When you come in contact with someone, you don’t know it all. And today, something got me thinking.

I was at the gym working out and someone just being super friendly came to talk to me. I typically don’t like people talking to me at the gym but this person came to talk to me and a part of me was initially almost irritated but then I thought to myself, you know, within seconds of the person talking to me, I was like, hmm, what if today was that person’s day? 
And what I mean by that is, let’s say everybody has prepared for a day, right?

A day, the first day you’re going to go to the gym, the first day you’re going to perform spoken word, the first day you’re going to go on a solo date or whatever the case is, right? 
And then they come in contact with you and you or I shun them or make them feel less than in that moment. That, you know, we always joke about people’s 13th reason but that could be the interaction that sets them on their way towards even greater success or that could be the interaction that pushes them back and takes away all of the work that they had done to get to that point.

So in all your interactions after you read this and going forward, lean on kindness. Let it be your default because you never know what stop you are on someone’s journey. Let it be a memorable one, a memorable for good.

Speaking on bias, I continue to find that I am biased towards action less than ideation. 
I think growing up with my grandparents, my grandpa was very principled. I won’t say strict because he had his moments but I would say he was a very principled and disciplined man.

And I found from observing him that there was a tendency for people to be afraid of offending him or afraid of disappointing him with the standards that he set or the standards that he had. And I find that when people grew up in those types of environments where they are criticized for their actions or their thoughts or creativity, they often spend a lot of time thinking. 
So you hear, “oh, I was gonna do that.”

I find that as I get older, wiser, more experienced, that I am just more appreciative of doers. People who just do.

Look, life is hard work. Anything you want is on the other side of hard work. Whether that is your life goals, your career goals, even your creativity, right?

Oftentimes, unless you’re born with like God-given talent, you can be Usain Bolt, but you still need to learn how to come out the blocks, right? Not false start. 
You can have the arms and legs of a Michael Phelps.
The agility, strength, determination of a Serena, but if you don’t know how to wield a racket properly, it won’t be anything, right? So life is about doing. And I find that for us to have the lives that we want, to enjoy the life that we want, we have to be doers more than we have to be thinkers.

Thinking is important and thinkers are essential to any society and environment. 
But ultimately, you want to spend most of your time actively doing something that you want. You might not be the best at it immediately.
You might not be the best at it for a long time, but you’re doing. So here’s my thing to all of you out there, whether it’s that content you want to post, whether it’s that, chapter you want to start, whether it’s that project, whether it’s that trip, do it. 
Just do it.

You’ll be better for it. And the world around you will thank you for it. 
Till we talk again, take care of yourself.

Be well and stay up. 

Wordsmith, Out!