My mother didn’t like milk as a child. Her dad (my grandfather) would say, “Donna, drink your milk. Puts hair on your chest.” She thought this was great and would drink her milk. She used the same approach on my little sister.
This same man once told me about food colors. “See all those colors on your plate? Do you see those same colors in your poop and pee? No? That’s because those colors don’t come out. When you start to fill up you get old and wrinkly like me, and when you’re completely full of colors you die.”
I believed that until I was about 10 years old. I wasn’t very good at understanding jokes.
We used to believe illness was caused by bad “humours” in the blood (so we bled people), that butter was good for burns, that heroin was good for skin conditions, and a whole host of shockingly untrue things about medical treatments.
What about “management” and “leadership” mantras? Any goofiness there?
We used to believe that only men could be effective leaders. Common convention for thousands of years was that people from some families were inherently smarter and more gifted to rule than others.
We used to believe that workers must absolutely be told what to do and how to do it. Good ideas only came from the senior leaders. We almost always believed that it was the worker’s fault rather than the leader’s poor decision-making.
We used to believe that people were “set” after about 8-12 years old and couldn’t change. We used to believe that the past forever dictated their future options.
Review your beliefs and make sure you aren’t clinging to any goofy ideas.
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