Do you approach to learn from others or do you hold closely to stipulations before you would even take in their ideas? We all hold to stipulations for what we will do or not do with the thoughts of another. It is often these constraints that will defer our full learning and adaptation with a matter.

If we have always thought the same way, we will eventually be wrong. Change is inevitable, but clear and open thinking is not. If we protect ourselves with stipulations and conditions when listening to another, we will fail to learn. Stipulations are guardrails to control how we will comfortably remain the same.

We needn’t think and learn precisely to be the same as another in our thinking, but we should have open consideration before we would decide for ourselves again what is best. Pause to authentically listen and to take in those thoughts for our own good. Because a thought or an idea has been good for us for some time doesn’t mean it should be our forever thought on the matter. Continue learning.

“If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe —

MITM