Confront Your Biases to See the World from Another Point of View

David Foster Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon college has gone down as one of the better pieces of life advice out there. His suggestion is pretty simple: when you're annoyed with another person, think about why you would do what they're doing.

Of course, this is easier said than done. We have all kinds of biases that prevent us from seeing another person's point of view. One of the problems is our bias blind spot that suggests we can't really compensate for our own biases because we don't believe we have them. As Wallace suggests, the best thing you can do is try to think about how you think. Scientific American has another similar approach:

Mindfulness, in contrast, involves observing without questioning. If the takeaway from research on cognitive biases is not simply that thinking errors exist but the belief that we are immune from them, then the virtue of mindfulness is pausing to observe this convoluted process in a non-evaluative way. We spend a lot of energy protecting our egos instead of considering our faults. Mindfulness may help reverse this.

It's not easy, but choosing to think a different way can make plenty of life's annoyances less frustrating. You can read Wallace's full speech here.

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