When You See It, Believe It
“The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.”
The world can get pretty crazy, pretty overwhelming, and it can be very hard to know who to trust when it seems like there's an endless parade of people and businesses constantly—and loudly—vying for your attention. The stress of the constant stream of small decisions required to navigate through your day can be exhausting. Here's a simple trick we all probably know, but it bears repeating as an aid in making good decisions: Rely on what people do, not on what they say.
In the context of private relationships, this means that, though we all think and talk about many courses of action (some with great enthusiasm), we won't end up following all of these to successful completion. We all have to make value judgments in order to land on decisions about what to do with our limited time, and this happens in an ever-changing medium of context. While talk will tell you what people would like to do and experience, only their actions will reveal what they are willing to work and sacrifice for.
Some people's value judgments will be easy to understand. Others' will seem erratic and inscrutable to you. Still others' will be reprehensible in your eyes. It simplifies life and reduces stress to align yourself primarily with those whose actions you can mostly understand and approve of ("mostly" because let's be honest—no one is perfect, and everyone's viewpoint is slightly different based on the cauldron of experience, good, bad, and ugly, that has shaped them). While we can't expect faultless reliability or other flavors of perfection from anyone, we can expect that interactions with some people will feel good to us because they're fun to be around, and a good match for some of our most important values. Others won't. This matters. But if you're not also watching their long-term actions and allowing those to educate you about this person, you'll miss all the best indicators of where they're actually going.
Predicating your life on someone's potential rather than on who they actually are in this moment will open you up to a world of hurt and disappointment. I believe that people have boundless potential, but a happy life requires that you learn to choose relationships with people on a similar enough wavelength that you can love and enjoy them as they are now. By all means, challenge yourself to appreciate and love people who are outside your current comfort zone, but don't expect to live peacefully if you've allowed a whole bunch of people whose actions betray wildly incompatible values into your inner circle.
In a business context, you're looking for something similar—how does the business treat its customers? How do you feel when you interact with it, respected or played? Are its sales pitches showing you value that might help you and inviting you to participate, or seeking to manipulate you and your emotions through pressure and control tactics? How the business and its representatives behave is more important than the words, which may turn out to be acutely self-serving, just as any single person's may be.
As you move through your life, I hope you'll let the actions of others inform your actions, and that you'll find it a lot easier to make healthy decisions for yourself this way. It can cut down on the confusion in making all the judgment calls that make up a day in a modern life. Anything that provides clarity and greater ease so that we can all be less stressed and have more time to live out our purpose is definitely what I'm after! Feel free to comment below on how observing others' actions has helped you, or would have had you managed to do it!