A blessing or a curse?

I caught all of 3 minutes of a documentary on Sky the other day called “The Real Dirk Diggler”.  It was the story of John Holmes, the man  on whose life the movie, Boggie Nights, was loosely based.  Without getting too bogged down in the specifics, this man was a very well endowed chap.  The interesting thing is that this apparent blessing became a curse that destroyed him.  He seemed to define and think of himself solely in terms of this ‘gift’.  Other people can take an event that would crush another person in their stride, just think of the Para-Olympics.  Why is it that an event that most people would label as ‘good’ can harm, and equally a ‘bad’ one can almost make someone?

I think the secret is that the events and things are not intrinsically good or bad, it is just how we chose to label and respond to them.  The same is true of people, if we label someone ‘no good’ then that is all that we see and all that we get from them.  Someone else with a more positive view almost certainly gets a much better response.  So our labels have huge power to affect not only our own lives but also those who we work and live with.  Labels, are just another handy, labour-saving devices, but they need reviewing or they can be dangerous.

So today maybe a good day to take stock of your labels and check they are all still valid and serving you.

“A name is a label, and as soon as there is a label, the ideas disappear and out comes label-worship and label-bashing, and instead of living by a theme of ideas, people begin dying for labels… and the last thing the world needs is another religion.”   Richard Bach

Resources:

1.  The real Dirk Diggler

Tags: labels, short-cuts, thoughts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 18:53 and is filed under General, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.