Compassion problem: How Do We Understand Others?

I made a mistake in my understanding of others that cost me tens of thousands of dollars, the mistake was not in poor customer service or a failed partnership, it was much simpler because I didn't understand how people read blogs.

Note: This article is by Scott H. Young, who tells us about his experience in understanding others.

I thought people read blogs as I do, they only subscribe to a few, and the list of unread articles is mostly empty, when I stop reading a blog, I unsubscribe from it, I usually rely more on my RSS feed than checking my email inbox with hundreds of messages each day.

But it turns out I was wrong because people are paying more attention to email, and I've been getting more responses to my newsletters by email than the comments the blog receives despite having only a small portion of subscribers, this is the first, and, second, some people cancel their subscriptions to the Latest News Delivery Service (RSS), which means that the e-mail is read, while the news from the RSS service is not read.

Because I didn't understand how people read blogs, I spent the first four years after my blog was created emphasizing the use of the Latest News Delivery Service (RSS), and based on my blog subscription rates, I probably lost thousands of subscribers and money.

Others Misunderstandings: Why Do We Fail to Understand People?

I misunderstood others, I failed to understand how people think. Although we believe that misunderstandings are caused by our lack of interest in others, this is not the case, my bias towards the latest news delivery service wasn't because I didn't care about my readers, nor was it because I lacked common sense.

The real problem of understanding is more precise and more expensive than we can imagine, we all remember the days when we failed because of poor communication, but we can't remember all the relationships that didn't start at all because we didn't take the opportunity.

The problem of understanding the other extends beyond the problem of relationships only, designing, programming, selling, and even email writing are all linked to our ability to communicate and understand people's way of thinking, I have noted that most of the failures of others' understanding fall into two categories on the assumption that you are trying to understand the other person:

1. The belief that others think like you when the truth is not.
2. Not understanding how you think.

My story was a clear example of the first case and, of course, if most people used the latest news delivery service (RSS) as I did, my strategy would be correct, I often browse emails in a hurry, but I read almost every article or cancel my subscription.

My failure to understand others was to use myself as a model for them, and in the second case, you have a perfect version of how you think and behave, but it doesn't fit into reality.

As a writer, I had to intentionally train myself to understand that almost all people rush through reading, and this seems unnatural because, after spending so much time writing, you think people will care about every word you wrote, good writers can separate themselves from their writing and see their work from the reader's point of view.

Improve the Ability to Understand Others

If understanding problems are too expensive, how can you treat them?

A good first rule is to monitor what people do, not what they say, I am always skeptical of any polls that depend on people's expressed opinions, and expressed opinions are biased, and we reveal ourselves through our actions.

There is a good example that was an article I wrote about adding a pop-up subscription window at the bottom of my website, most comments were negative, which I fully understand, but this does not mean that they did not work, the number of new subscribers each day increased from two to 20-30, a tenfold increase without any significant impact on site traffic.

This does not mean that opponents were wrong - I was one of them - ease of use is important and I am still trying to make the pop-up more user-friendly. However, there must be someone who sees it useful otherwise I will not have much better results.

I think the behavior suits the second case of the other's failure to understand, people don't understand their actions, and we consider ourselves largely rational and intelligent, but our actual thought processes become more impulsive and easier to bias.

Avoid Unbalanced Attention

Another good inference is to pay attention when you find yourself more interested than the other person, when I write a sales letter, for example, I spend hours trying to choose the right words, but eventually, the reader will read them in a minute or two, this means that it's easy to miss out on clearer information and focus on details that don't matter to the reader.

Another example is the writing of an email to a person who receives an enormous number of emails, he may only have a few seconds to browse the email to see if it's worth a reply.

Dealing with unbalanced attention requires a lot of testing and the ability to accept criticism, knowing that the error is exaggerating conclusions and inferences that may be wrong, I've made the mistake in the past of assuming a sales letter failed because I thought the product was doomed to fail, or that an email didn't get a response because the person was uninterested, but in fact, it could simply be that the title of the letter is unremarkable.

In Conclusion: Learning to Understand Others

We usually think of understanding as something instinctive, and that it is something you are either good at, or you are not, but I prefer to see it as something learned, this means that the only sure way to be more understanding is to interact with people constantly, and I think that most of the problems with others' accurate and costly understanding stem from not spending enough time interacting with people you're trying to understand.

The problem with the other's understanding is that we do not think it is important enough, we invest hundreds of hours trying to get results - in business, relationships, and life - and less time trying to understand how others think and feel, but if we get results from others, understanding them is the most important thing we need.