Some Great Gems Worth Sharing

It was sir Winston Churchill who said that one of the greatest life lessons is to know that fools are sometimes right. I have realized how true this can be. In Biblical terms, the person who calls another one a fool is a greater fool him/herself.

This biblical concept shows the magnitude of the word foolish. Foolish is never good. But at some point, in a more worldly standard of what pertains to perfection or sound, we must measure up to foolishness. The only downside is the metrics of measure.

Imagine for a moment, the time you call somebody foolish or note that someone has done stupid things, what measure of standard exists to show that whatever they did is after all stupid or foolish. Most of the time the measure is a kind of psychological understanding of our own selves which can simply be termed as perception.

Back in the day, when for example Steve Jobs dropped out of college and went in a sojourner of self-discovery in India, it was termed foolish. In the year 2004, when current Google CEO Sundar Pichai decided to join Google especially with the dot.com bubble still flesh in most people’s minds, some of his friends thought it a stupid idea.

But looking back today, after the achievements of these individuals, one decides for real that theirs were never foolish decisions. In another scale, they agree that they weren’t foolish or stupid back then as they looked but somehow wise.

And that is why perhaps Socrates wisely noted of himself that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing. That if he was going to call anybody foolish, then he was going to start with himself and thus make himself the standard.

Not just any standard but the greatest standard. The greatest fool. This was quite smart. If you are the greatest fool of them all, then there is no fool before you. Even those people that others deem foolish are wise in their own way before you and it is the only thing that gives you the ability to appreciate that even them that you can think as foolish can be right in some way.

Not long ago somebody, who meant it – forget those who joke around, called an action I took as foolish. I felt bad for a moment and then I remembered the Mark Angel comedy and how when Mark is called a fool looks at the caller straight in the eye and asks them how they did know. I also asked this guy how he managed to know I was a big fool.

However, it didn’t take long before my action was vindicated and I wasn’t a fool any longer. It taught me a big lesson, that of being cognizant of the fact that in this life, the measure of our success is never how much we have but how we behave with the little we have even as can be said of matters to do with smartness in its entirety.

Another big lesson I learnt out of this encounter was the appreciation of diversity. We should begin to appreciate the fact that we are born different. We are very different for fact. We think differently, we understand things differently, we come from different areas and cultures, we perceive things differently and we are so different even when we are born of the same father and mother.

And that is why I am convinced that as we move forward, we will begin to see more people incline themselves towards appreciating those people with a mastery of the soft skills. Soft skills are not dependent on the level of academia, social success or wealth and the like, nay. They are simply dependent on the fact that you look at other people as people first.

People who have had their own pasts. Some tougher than yours. People struggling with so many things and baggage. People weighed down with the cares of this world and in need of solace. And instead of devaluing them, you appreciate the far they have come.

You look at them and decide to emphatically get into their shoes. You look at them and decide to give them a listening ear so that at least they can think there still exists people who care in this world. You offer them guidance on where they can get help with their challenges if you yourself cannot help.

Once you do this, then one strengthens their footprint in terms of promoting diversity and inclusion. Something that even the SDGs are seriously working towards ensuring that they are met in on a wider scale in both economic, social, political and developmental aspects.

Now the world needs more people with human hearts. People with soft skills. People with love. People who can sacrifice to spare one meal a day to share it with others. People who can look at other people not as foolish ‘goats’ or ‘Idiots’ but as people endowed in their own ways.

The world needs more people who operate within the confines of humanity as opposed to the illusion of self-human perfection.

End.