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Understanding life entails making constant comparisons. There can’t be a definition of good without an understanding of evil. A palm tree is difficult to describe without comparing it to trees your audience has already seen. A peach is somewhere between an apple and a plum. Music is somewhere between piercing noise and numbing silence. You may not have thought about it in depth, but your ability to express yourself depends greatly on your ability to compare dualities. Slowly but surely, the ideas you aim to express will formulate, following a string of poignant comparisons.
There’ll be times when you have to compare things you enjoyed against things you did not. Particularly if your audience holds a stake in both items you’re comparing, it’s essential to be cognizant of how you make that comparison. For example, if your mom baked two cakes and asks you what you thought of each, labeling one of them as worse than the other is a sensitive undertaking. She may have worked harder to bake the one you label as worse. She may hold pride in how it turned out, and may be happy with its golden brown hue.
Ride the Train of Positivity Without Making Any Stops
“I didn’t like this flavor, can you please pass the other bag of chips?”
“I like that flavor more, can you please pass me that bag over there?”
Though you may not consider it to be, expressing that you dislike something is an expression of negativity. The positive atmosphere around you receives a dose of a substance which doesn’t serve to propagate its growth. Your addition of negativity may be small, however, a successive streak of expressing what you dislike will ensure the disappearance of people’s desire to be around you.
Strive to keep your dislikes to yourself. If needing to make a comparison, simply state what you liked more, not what you disliked. When there is an opportunity to avoid it, expressing what you dislike doesn’t seem to do anybody any favors. It is simply an attempt to voice your negative opinion, and a negative opinion is difficult to turn into something valuable. Even if you want to change the behavior of those you care for, positive reinforcement seems to be the way to do it.
Some People Love Ugly Things
If a person were to walk by you and express how ugly they thought your dog was, it’s safe to say you wouldn’t think highly of that individual. The things you dislike can be objects of adoration in the minds of others. Be careful expressing your dislikes, as those who express dislike about the things we love, don’t attract our love themselves.
Our inability to guess what factors drive others to form a liking toward the things we hate, should entice us to not voice our hatred toward those things. The things we love become a part of what defines our interests, and thereby ourselves, as a person. Expressing negativity about things others like can be analogous to expressing negativity about their interests. Whenever possible, strive to only express what you like more, not what you dislike.