Sometimes it’s good to reflect back on why you made a decision, started or stopped doing something, or made some other significant change to the way you do life or business.
I thought about this today while my mom was over visiting. I was watching the UFC fights when she observed how strange it was that I was into it. I admit, it is a little strange, though to this point I’ve always rationalized it via my childhood obsession with Power Rangers (lol).
I took a moment to think about it, and remembered seeing the fights on in various sports bars in restaurants over the years, thinking “I don’t get it.”
That’s when it hit me—the problem all along was that I didn’t get it!
Once I understood it, I really liked it. I was “forced” into understanding it during a men’s gathering with guys in my Sunday School class. There’s no guarantee I would have sought to understand it on my own, so maybe it was…luck? I don’t know. But once I understood it, I found that I really liked it!
It strikes me that this framework works in other contexts too.
Like, who becomes a chemist? I’ll tell you who—someone who really gets chemistry. I doubt if someone went to college to learn how to be a chemist, they didn’t know anything about it beforehand. They were probably passionate from hands on experience.
This is good news for you—here’s why:
I’ll bet there are things you are not willing to do because you think you won’t like them, but if you were to dig deeper, you’re probably just frustrated that you don’t understand them.
People who make YouTube, or Twitter, or learning the guitar, or something else work for them are having a great time. When you understand something, it feels good to engage with it. That’s always been my experience.
What’s the takeaway?
Become more curious about how stuff works.
Next time you’re tempted to avoid something that you haven’t tried because you think you won’t like it, consider instead that if you made an effort to understand it, you might be able to leverage it in some way.
I never would have made the effort on my own to understand the UFC.
Now that I do, I watch it more consistently (and am a bigger fan of it) than any of the other guys I was with the night I begun to understand it. There’s power in understanding.