It’s so amazing to me how we make uninformed decisions every day.

Politics would be the easiest example to cite because the electorate rarely, if ever, votes on the facts at hand but on the emotion they are feeling at the time.

Uninformed voting is the only thing that seems bipartisan these days.

But “fact-less” decisions go on in every area of our life – the least of which is politics.

Take peoples’ rules for example. I’ve mentioned it before, but our rules are usually inherited before we know what inherited means. That means our rules are somebody else’s rules that we got conditioned to.

You can easily observe an uninformed tenet when someone states a personal rule and indicates it should apply to everyone. Two things are in play here that these folks are unaware of.

1. They don’t know they didn’t independently arrive at that rule.
2. It doesn’t apply to everyone just because it’s bible for them.

Yet, they will continue to make their uninformed case as though it is fact instead of opinion.

Exchanging opinions is the grist of conversation. Some can converse for hours without a fact entering the discussion. Listen to just about any caller to a talk show if you need examples.

The mark of us becoming informed is to have the presence of mind to fact check our opinions. That doesn’t mean to go looking for people who agree with you. That’s just putting gasoline on an out of control fire.

The first step in this procedure is to examine your beliefs and determine how factual they are. It’s an eye opening experience to find out how much of what we believe is devoid of evidence. Step two is to take that belief and put it in the opinion file. I don’t know who first said it but it bears repeating here, “We are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own set of facts.”

You become more informed and more believable when you label your position as opinion. When something is an opinion, it doesn’t need the “fight to the death” mentality that many employ when they believe they are arguing for their “facts.”

Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” He could have easily substituted the word “Uniformed” for unexamined and the statement would have been just as relevant.

The examination’s purpose is to find out how much of you is not you. When you begin to strip away all that has been added, you become informed.

I would never want to have my opinions taken away from me because they are so much fun to have. I just want to be able to put them in the pile that works best when push comes to shove – the uninformed pile.

All the best,

John

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