Take your own POV with a grain of salt

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Happy Sunday & thank you for opening this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

April is flying by just as quickly as the rest of the year has so far, and for me this month has already been quite a fun ride, especially as Jamaica enters its 2025 Carnival season. 🇯🇲 

One of the things that I love to do with my newsletter is to re-visit my articles from months ago, to re-assess my feelings in past moments and to determine whether there’s more I can build on or another perspective I can take.

In this past week, an article I re-visited was this one: Learn how to tune in and out of the opinions of others.

In that article, I talked about what it means to value others’ opinions of you, but to simultaneously know when to ignore external opinions because people may lack context or a real understanding of your situation to count their opinions as valid.

Today, I wanted to expand a bit on the concept of being disconnected from someone else’s context, and to indicate how that can be problematic.

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What I meant by taking someone else’s opinion with a grain of salt

When I talked about not always validating others’ opinions, it came from a personal place of other people not understanding the decisions that I’ve made in my own life - like moving back to Jamaica after resigning from my big job in finance - and from people asking me a lot of questions, passing judgements and making sly comments or remarks with their opinions on my life decisions.

A lot of the times, these people make these comments from a good place, trying to tell you what they think is best for you based on their own life experiences.

It’s frustrating, because you will never fully know or understand someone else’s life, no matter how close you are to them, so you will never be able to fully know or understand all the reasons behind their decisions. And at the end of the day, you’re not the one living that person’s life.

So frankly, most of the time, despite whichever place of love you’re coming from, it’s usually best to just say nothing and show love and support to those people in your life who make decisions that you don’t understand. I promise you, most of the time, when we pass our judgements in the form of “well-intentioned advice”, it comes off as arrogant, especially when not coupled with a reasonably well-founded attempt at understanding what led them to those decisions.

So, with all that said, take others’ opinions with a grain of salt, because most of the time, people are not as well-intentioned as they seem. If you haven’t had multiple long judgement-free conversations with those people, and it’s a passing comment at a dinner table or small gathering, chances are, they just want their opinions to be heard, rather than to actually be productive for you.

How disconnection from context plays a role in ill-informed opinions

Most times, people are short-sighted when they project their opinions onto other people. For example, say you - as an American or Western-minded person - visit another country and they’re eating food while sitting on the floor.

“How odd!” may be your first reaction.

Or more close to home for me, as an employer in Jamaica, there’s a stark difference in lifestyle when it comes to myself, who was privileged enough to go to an Ivy League university and work at a Fortune 500 company by age 24, and the average worker that we employ who dropped out of high school and is working in Jamaica at age 24.

For me, being able to sit and talk to those employees has made me so much more attuned to my own privilege and to this aforementioned disconnection from others and subsequent inability to understand others’ contexts that can exist as close to you as in your own place of work.

I think it’s important to share because these conversations need to be had so that we can give attention to the dualism of experiences that exist within our day-to-day lives, and how this disconnection affects - in a very real way - our ability to bond and form valid opinions of the people around us.

How, without sitting and having multiple in-depth conversations with those employees, would I ever be able to understand the context and environment that they come from? And then, as a manager, how do you handle employees’ behaviours, personalities and work ethics, when they too are not a monolith, yet also come from a vast variety of contexts and backgrounds - all of which are different from my own experiences too?

Conclusion

It’s interesting to me - the capitalism construct - and the way it wants to be able to group everyone in terms of productivity; while simultaneously dehumanising people for deriving from contexts and backgrounds which have not done the same work as US colleges for example to build perfect workers who can fit seamlessly in a system designed to oppress and limit innovation and creativity.

It indicates to me a larger lesson about the world which is to stop making the assumption that people will understand you (or that you understand people).

Stop assuming that when you meet a new person, they’re socially engineered the same way as you. Fine, the small talk of “Hi, how are you”, “Good, and you?”, “I’m good too haha!” goes a long way in terms of initial conversation, but think about how diverse and varied your own experiences are, then multiply that exponentially for every person and social circle that you enter.

There’s no way that what you have experienced will apply to every person around you, and so as you navigate the world, always keep in mind that you probably don’t understand 90% of what informs other people’s decisions, motivations and interests.

You are bound by the limitations of your own experiences, and to peacefully and lovingly navigate this world, I think it’s imperative that we drop assumptions and opinions, be open-minded, and stop trying to project our own opinions onto other people - especially when you know deep down that it’s not coming from a place of love.

To put it short and sweet for you to take away this week - take your own point of view with a grain of salt.

Until next Sunday,
Justin