Beauties and the Beast (The most important story you’ll ever rewrite)

I’m going to tell you a true story. You’ll think you know what you are supposed to learn from it. You are wrong.

The Barbie House

The student apartment across the street was full of gorgeous women. So much so that the other girls apartments had taken to calling it the Barbie House. It attracted a lot of guys, my friends and roommates spent a lot of time there, trying. I went over a couple times, but it wasn’t somewhere I wanted to spend a lot of time.

Why? I was very self conscious. I didn’t think that any girl that beautiful would be interested in a guy like me. Honestly, this place would have been nothing more than a side note to me if it hadn’t been for 2 very important lessons that I learned from it.

Some years later I was talking with a female friend of mine. She brought up that apartment, and proceeded to tell me that one of the girls there had been interested in me.

I was shocked,

It was so far out of my range of belief that it wouldn’t even register as possibly true. The fact that I couldn’t even believe it taught me something about myself.

I began to see a pattern in my life of self limiting beliefs which caused behaviors which kept me away from successes, not just in dating, but in many aspects of my life. This was a powerful realization for me and has changed the way I view the world.

But that’s not the REAL lesson.

Here is the rest of it. This lesson is so much more important and powerful than knowing about self limiting beliefs, it has the power to change your world.

See, I wasn’t just limiting myself in that situation, I was placing other people in a box and limiting their ability to be more than the very shallow version of them which I had created. I literally believed that none of these women had the capacity to care about more than looks.

That’s worse than limiting yourself,

It hurts our relationships.

It hurts our society.

It hurts our profits.

It hurts our souls.

It limits others opportunities to grow and progress.

But, it’s easier to fix than self limiting beliefs.

When we create a limiting box for people, it colors all our interactions with them. They most likely are more complex individuals than we give them credit for being. In my case, I put this young lady in a box of being superficial. I placed limits on her ability to care about people outside of a social strata which I had created.

These limits had nothing to do with reality, they were creating a false reality. Limiting others hurts us all. It deprives us of deeper, more meaningful interactions. The limits we place on others actually hurt ourselves. We categorize people and then base our interaction with them on that fiction.

This is normal human nature. We need to categorize in order to live efficiently. We create categories so we can quickly judge between good/bad, safe/dangerous, profitable/nonprofitable, etc. It’s part of how we evolved as humans and society.

However, this ability to categorize kills our creativity, profits, and society. We have to know when to stop creating categories. We have to know when to step outside our highly curated heuristics.

As creators, we have things that need to go out into the world. We create things of importance or beauty, but very often we are afraid to share. We believe that the thing we have created has no place in the world, that no one will like it.

This is how artists, creators limit other people. We fear a negative reaction, so we don’t put out that amazing new creation into the world. The truth is that some people won’t like it, but those people aren’t who it is for . Putting creative work out into the world is an act of both courage and humility. Courage to get over the fear of rejection, humility to recognize that it isn’t about you. Your creation doesn’t belong to you, it isn’t for you. It belongs to the world, it’s there for others.

If you stop limiting others, you will release more of your creations into the universe. You will understand that the chances of your creation connecting with others is much higher than you believe, because people are much more accepting, capable, and caring than you give them credit for. By putting your creations out, you are giving people the chance to connect and to find meaning.

If you stop limiting others, you will find that you are much more alike. That their ideas have value, that they aren’t your enemy, they might even be your ally. The limitations you are placing on them are the lie. Calling them racist, fearful, closed minded, etc. These limitations most often come from you. Caveat, bad people exist, but in much lower numbers than you are imagining, but in high enough numbers that you’ve had some terrible interactions. These people are just a very vocal minority. Remember, if you have haters, you are probably doing something meaningful.

Why it’s easier to overcome

It’s easier to change our beliefs about others than it is to change beliefs about ourselves. We are hyper self focused, we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves all day. Most of these stories are there to support what we believe about ourselves.

Our stories about strangers are much less concrete. It’s easier to reimagine a story about a mystical group of strangers who could actually care about us and our quest is to find them. Of the billions of people out there, sheer probability suggests that at least 1000 of them will absolutely love what you do or who you are. And that’s a great start.

Chances are that the majority of people won’t connect with you. That’s okay, it’s not for them. It’s for the people that connect with it, and you’ll never know who those people are without broadcasting you and your work.

How to change it.

Just tell yourself a new story. Tell yourself that we are capable of more than what you are seeing. Tell yourself that we will want what you have to share. Tell yourself that it’s your duty to share so that we can have the chance to grow because of what you do. Tell yourself that you have 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 true fans out there, you just have to find them.

You don’t have to change the story about you. You just have to start believing that there are enough people out there as weird as you are, struggling like you are, thinking like you are, who need you to put out your work so they can stop feeling alone too.

And maybe, just maybe, by learning to change your beliefs about others, you can change the beliefs about yourself that hold you back.

You are the masterpiece, now show us.