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Should We Be More Forgiving To Young Power Movers?
I first asked this question on my journal and I think it deserves its own topic.
The point is as follows, no person is an eagle from the start. When you are child, or are young, you don't have experience, value and mindset to be a high quality person. Even if you are naturally inclined to eagle mindset it will take time until you become one.
Realistically, from child to young adults, percent of eagles will be miniscule.
But it also has other side to it. If young people will have less eagles among them than adults, then that means in the future there will be some young people becoming eagles, better quality at least. It's common story after all that a teenager or young adult rebels against their parents and years after they bring up the conflict again admitting that the parents were right and only now they understand.
For a parent this is obvious, you can't hold child to the same scrutiny as adult. You can't just stop cooperation with them if they power move on you, but you also have greater influence and power over them.
What interests me is when it's someone you have similar or not much more power than. For example skilled young coworker, he may be an ass towards others but going with the idea above, there is far greater chance of him changing than middle aged asshole, as he will still be learning a lot of things about life and decide he did something wrong.
Let's look at this from machiavellian perspective. If you distance from someone who is low quality at the start but will later grow to higher quality, you will lose compared to those that were closer to him as he may don't know you if you kept your distance or don't like you if you reprimended him or attacked back harshly.
There is still a chance that he will understand he made a mistake and you won't lose out much.
Ultimately I would act similarly to young and adult asshole, as it's hard to guess if they will change, and even if they do they may do it after years, and you will be better just improving your status and going as if there is no difference if they are young or not, if they improve, you will start a cooperation, if not, you keep with those that are already high quality.
But it still gives some space for questioning if it's not more beneficial to at least act somewhat differently, or above that, it may be a good thing to have some patience for them so they have this margin of error to improve from ethical perspective.
Feel free to share your thoughts.
Hello DGX37
If I understood the matter correctly, I would say that it depends a lot on the personality of said individual, as well as how he acts:
- Does he consider himself better than the rest, even exhibiting narcissistic tendendies?
- Does he consider himself a victim?
- Is he a proud value taker?
- Does he have a huge ego?
- Is he a manipulative individual that poses as a learner/naive/ignorant but actually does know what he's doing?
- Does he recognize and apologize for some of his mistakes if any?
However I would say that the most important thing here is: Is life going good for him? Because if his assholish behaviour isn't bringing him any problems (or at least big problems) he probably isn't going to change.
I know some people that haven't changed in their whole lifes, and if they have, they still aren't what one would consider high quality individuals.
Overall, I believe that it's best to check the WIIFM with said person and decide whether or not to maintain contact or to cut ties completely.
About behaving differently and having more patience I would say that it depends on WIIFM, I know a guy to whom I showed this website and was really interested in it (he could be reading this btw), however he made one upping comments and other power moves from time to time plus I was no longer interested in the subjects he liked to talk about. In the end I cut ties with him, he could become a high quality guy in the future for sure, but I'm not going to waste time and energy with him, specially considering that whether he changes or not isn't up to me.
Of course in other situation if said individual wasn't very value taking I wouldn't mind having a bit of patience.
That's my take on the topic :)
Cheers.
Agree with both:
- I'd generally act the same independently of age
- Exceptions depend mostly on the individual (and circumstances)
In general, most people don't improve, so always start with that.
Some do, though, and who does, often... You can get a good guess.
The ones with good odds are:
- Look up to you and be ready to accept your influence
- Have a strong growth mindset and welcome feedback and criticism
- Seek self-development, including character-based one
- Has at least some inborn sense of fairness/ethics
