I love to observe people.
Yesterday, I was at a party where a bunch of people played a mime-word-guessing game.
All players are divided into two teams. First team chooses a word and tells it to a selected player from the other team. The task of that player is to display this word to his team and they have to guess it. The catch is he cannot speak and is allowed to show it only using mimics and gestures. If his team wins and guesses the word – they get to choose a word for the other team to guess and so on.
It was very funny to see all the different reactions some people had to the same word or concept and their attempts to display it using only body language. But at one point, I caught myself on a thought that I was enjoying this game for another reason. I found a unique opportunity to observe how different people think and act. And then I started drawing conclusions about their personalities, knowledge or sense of humor. Here’s an example.
We thought of “conservatism“. When the player tried to show it to his team, it took him a while. The team had no idea what he meant (hey, it’s not an easy word to show with only gestures!) and were shouting out lots of funny, yet totally unrelated things.
At this point, a girl from my team got up and started jumping up and down and screaming – “It’s MY word! MY word! I thought of it!”. We asked her nicely to settle down (“Sheesh! – OK, we got it, it’s YOUR word!). She’s been quiet for 2 minutes. Then she jumped up again and shouted, rather enthusiastically: “How great was MY word?”, “I rule!”, and other stuff of this sort. Some people simply stared at her and said nothing. Some calmed her down. After the other team finally guessed “conservatism” – you could see the joy on her face once again – “Haha! You guessed MY word!” “I’m so great!”…
Here I started inspecting and judging this girl’s personality. Here’s her obsession with the fact that it was she who thought of this word. Here’s how she puts her uncontrolled pride, egoism and immaturity on display. How is she unaware of this? Everything seems just fine to her! There’s no problem!
And then it hit me. Here I am, sitting and judging this girl in her time of pride and childish joy.
Why?
I always try to find new angles for introspection – and this tiny, insignificant, and seemingly stupid incident gave me a lot to think about our own behavior. Do we ever jump in and interrupt with “I’m the best!” sometimes? Maybe we do it without screaming and jumping around, but the outcome is the same? Maybe it might offend or upset other people?
The answer is YES. We do it all the time. Sometimes “I’m the best!” is our confidence that we’re smarter than some people and try to prove them wrong. We’ve got to set them straight! This instinct of judging others is definitely there, in us. And it’s so easy to let it out, too – we hardly control it.
This game illustrated to me the thin line between knowing, guessing and concluding. Becoming aware of this line was the first step. The second was the realization that it’s better to stay clear from judging or “correcting” people we hardly know, without knowing all the facts. In fact, I even question judging this whole girl incident – she may be a wonderful person and this incident doesn’t overshadow her possible many positive qualities, that I’m unaware of.
So for now I think I’ll stick with observing 
