There are false beliefs about people that often look like apparent contradictions, yet turn out to be true when we dig deeper, and we need to understand them if our goal is to get to know people. Without further ado, here are some of those contradictions that, over time and at least in my own experience, I have found to be completely true. Anyone is free to add more or to disagree with some of them.
1. People who criticise a trait in someone else the most do so because they see that trait in themselves.
The traits we criticise most in other people tend to be parts of ourselves that we deny. We have discussed this point several times before; it is what Freud called projection.
A woman who worries about putting on a few kilos will call other women fat, just as the people who criticise homosexuals the most tend to be people who have doubts or problems with their own sexuality. An example: a former Ku Klux Klan leader was arrested while getting intimate with a Black transgender woman, which was everything he apparently stood against. As I always say: “people who are comfortable with themselves don’t waste time criticising others for who they are.”
2. The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know.
I think it was Socrates who said that as you acquire more and newer knowledge, you raise more questions than you answer. That gives rise to another old saying: “if you think you already know everything, it’s because you haven’t learned anything yet.”
3. The harder you try to impress someone, the less impressed they will be.
I imagine more than one person, on falling for a guy or a girl, has tried to impress them in order to win them over and ended up causing the opposite effect. The thing is that, to impress someone, you often have to start acting like someone you are not. And when you stop being yourself, the other person picks up on the lack of authenticity and rejects you, even if unconsciously, because we like things that are genuine.
4. People who find it hard to trust others are not very trustworthy.
If you ever meet someone who says they have been badly hurt and that is why they can no longer trust anyone, get ready to carry what I call “the Holy Week procession”: if you go ahead with the relationship, you will be carrying a huge cross. Most of these people have a defence mechanism that consists of hurting others to avoid being hurt.
On other occasions, when it comes to business, it rarely fails: people who don’t trust their colleagues and employees assume those others will behave the way they themselves would.
5. The less you care about people, the less you care about yourself.
On the surface, people who don’t care about others can seem selfish and self-centred, only concerned with themselves. But the truth is that people treat others the way they treat themselves. When they treat people like crap, it’s because they think of themselves as crap. That much is obvious; otherwise they would treat everyone with respect.
6. The more accessible something is, the less interest it will generate.
We are genuinely drawn to difficulty. That is why many people end up seeking a complicated relationship with a complicated person. If the situation were easy, it wouldn’t appeal to us.
7. The best way to meet someone special is to not need to be with anyone.
When you need someone by your side to be happy, you are really an incomplete person, and therefore a flawed one. When you don’t have that need to be with someone else, on the other hand, you are a complete person, and that is why people like you. An example: plenty of people will have experienced first-hand how they get nowhere while they are single, and then, a few weeks into a relationship, opportunities keep popping up. There is an even simpler explanation: on the one hand you now feel complete (and the opposite sex picks up on that), and on the other you are no longer looking, so you find. This brings us to the next point.
8. The more pressure you feel to achieve something, the less likely you are to achieve it.
Pressure is the bane of every goal. That is why, when companies look for “someone used to working under pressure”, they have no idea what they are really looking for. What many people call pressure is, for a few, their comfort zone, their ideal playing field. Anything else would bore them. In sales we call them people of action. Looking for “someone used to working towards targets” is a different matter.
See also: Finding a job in Spain: the rules have changed
This happens for a simple reason: the brain doesn’t make good decisions when it feels pressured, and sometimes wanting something so badly and so quickly makes us skip steps that require patience. Pressure leads you to look for shortcuts, and shortcuts, as a rule, take you in the opposite direction from where you want to go.
9. Talking about your mistakes and flaws makes you seem more perfect.
It took me a long time to reach this conclusion because, like everyone, and perhaps mistakenly, I tried to impress people by talking about my achievements and virtues. When I started showing my flaws first on my dates, I noticed I became more attractive and interesting, because the other person felt more comfortable showing themselves as they were. Things that some would see as showing weakness turn out, over time, to make you a much bigger person.
I have applied this to every area of my life, including my working life. In fact, someone once told me: “beware of people who seem to have no flaws, because their flaws must be enormous and unspeakable.”
10. The best way to drive someone away is to try hard to keep them from leaving you.
Probably the best example is a jealous person, who is so afraid of losing someone that they end up losing them because of their behaviour. But let me tell you a story, as comical as it is true, about a guy I met some time ago:
“He was a very attractive guy who had zero difficulty getting practically any girl he set his sights on into bed. The problem was that many of these girls fell hard for him, and he didn’t want anything serious; but he wasn’t your typical heartless jerk. He felt bad when he realised these girls were suffering. Then one day he changed his strategy after reading a book, whose title I can’t remember right now, about female psychology.
From then on, whenever he slept with a girl, he would tell her right afterwards that he had fallen in love with her, that he thought she was his soulmate and that he pictured her as the mother of his children. With all this and a few more romantic touches, it was now the girls themselves who never wanted to hear from him again.”
The moral: do you want someone to walk away from you? Do everything you can to keep that person close.
11. Everyone asks for honesty, but nobody likes honest people.
As a rule, people want you to tell them the truth, but their thinking will go on the defensive if your truth is not the one they wanted to hear. A simple example: a friend of yours changes her look and asks you, “what do you think?” Tell her you don’t like it and you’ll get a look as if you had killed one of her relatives.
That is why the people in my inner circle think twice before asking for my opinion: they know that, for better or worse, I am going to be very honest. At the same time, they know that when they need an honest opinion, I won’t just tell them what they want to hear.
12. People want objective opinions, but they don’t like objectivity.
When there are two sides, being objective means looking for the good and bad points of each. Curiously, neither side will thank you for your objective point of view; on the contrary, you will become the enemy of both. Machiavelli wrote about exactly this.
And that, basically, is what most people are like. People believe they know what they want, but they don’t. They believe they know what they are looking for, but they don’t. They believe they know themselves, but they have no idea what they are really like, even though they boast of being a certain way that is far from who they really are.
That is why knowing people much better than they know themselves is a great advantage when it comes to getting close to them in any field, whether we are talking about relationships or business.
Everyone thinks they are special or that they know someone very special, but the truth is that everyone is really very simple, and we all share a similar psychology when faced with similar circumstances and events.
Further reading
- 10 life lessons that go against popular belief
- How to understand other people and yourself
- 10 things you should know in the pursuit of success
Featured image: Marcelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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