When I looked through my news sources this weekend, my eyes were caught by a few articles about Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech on Friday. The titles: “Jordan’s Night to Remember Turns Petty” and “On Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame Speech – 48 Minutes of Hell” left little to my imagination as to how the night went down. To be fair, the second article turned out to be the name of the blogger’s website (Which, if you like your sports with a healthy dash of snarky, I would recommend reading more of his content.), but the sentiment was the same around the world: the speech was an air ball.
Because of Jordan’s relentless dismantling of my beloved Phoenix Suns year after year, I was smugly excited to watch his speech and point at him with disdain. If it weren’t for Michael Jordan, I could be writing this article in a faded, purple and orange 1993 NBA Champions t-shirt that was autographed by Richard Dumas. I mean, Jordan even owned us in his 40s when he didn’t even have to shave his head any more:
I began to prepare the article in my mind. It would be a cautionary tail about how some people take their self-esteem and self-worth too far and begin to truly see themselves as different than others in an unhealthy way. After all, where would Jordan be without all of his coaches, teammates, and even opponents along the way? A successful person has a healthy understanding of their self esteem and self worth to be sure, but the reviews of his speech had made it clear that he had crossed that line into a place where he was superior to all.
I was excited to find the speech online, and to see which points of his speech would best illustrate my point about an ego gone wild.
So, I found it on youtube. And I watched it. And a funny thing happened. It didn’t seem as bad as I had expected it to be. He did thank his teammates. He did thank his opponents. Whether the entire speech was classy, respectful, or appropriately humble, I won’t comment. But, I was struck by my own perception inhibitors that I nearly put on myself with the notion that the speech was a spectacle of arrogance and braggadocio. I had put aside one of the key concepts of TPI’s education:
I am a selective perceiver.
In fact, we all are. There are several great tests and games you can use to illustrate this point. I just saw a friend’s status update on Facebook that spoke of a group of Christians sitting behind him at Starbucks trying to convince each other that Jesus turned the water into non-alcoholic wine. Now, a quick visit to the entry for wine at reference.com describes the grape’s fermented juice as “alcoholic” in the first word of the definition. In my opinion, their attempts to perceive and understand the first recorded miracle of Jesus are being heavily influenced by what they believe about the nature of alcohol. Namely, that it is the devil. ;)
We all journey through life with blind spots. They don’t keep us from moving, but they have a good deal to say about what we will and will not perceive as we experience something new, or even something familiar.
“Attitude is everything.” is a trite and tired cliche, but I believe that it does point to truth. How we feel about something or somebody will tremendously effect how we experience it/him/her. We tend to move into the future in our minds first, and then walk into it with our bodies. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, or something that we should try develop an antidote for. Rather, I just believe that it is an important principle to consider when you feel the time has come to pass judgement on a situation.
It’s good to be reminded of one’s mistakes of prejudice. I was absolutely positive that I would enjoy the film “Adventureland” recently released on DVD. It features Ryan Reynolds as a amusement park maintenance man. I would have bet large sums of money that this could not be screwed up. I just ordered my copy of Ryan Reynolds reading the phonebook from iTunes. How could this movie disappoint me?
…….
I’m still trying to come up with an appropriate synonym for disappointment.
How pure is your perception?
