Project Vision 21

I recently needed the services of an electrician and when I called him, he told me he would come the next day at 10 am. More than half an hour later, the man called me saying that during all this time he had been standing in front of my house and that he had knocked on the door and rang the bell, but that I had not answered him.

I told him that he was probably going in the wrong direction, but he didn't believe me. So I went out to see what was happening and saw the electrician several houses away, talking to a neighbor who surely told him he was in the wrong house. I waved him over to me and the electrician finally came to my house to make the necessary repairs.

But before starting he congratulated me on being Russian and asked what part of Russia I was from. I told him that I am not Russian, nor do I come from Russia, nor do I speak Russian. Again, he did not believe me.

At that moment, I was already thinking of asking him to leave because he first went to the wrong house and then he did not get that I was not (I am not) Russian. But there was still one more topic that, I must say, took me by surprise. The electrician congratulated me on my retirement. In fact, he asked me what I was doing now that I no longer worked.

I asked him why he had asked me that question and he told me that since it was a weekday in the middle of the morning and I was at home, that meant that I was no longer working and that I had retired. I explained to him that I was at the house because  the electrical problem was in the house.

After that exchange, my patience was already beginning to waver. And that patience ended when the electrician told me that my name was misspelled (as if I didn't know how to write it) and even suggested that I check the documentation of the house to see if I was really living at the correct address. So, I did ask him to leave.

The next day another electrician came and in a matter of minutes he detected the problem and in less than an hour he had solved it, without questioning my nationality, ethnicity, address, name or employment status.

But the first electrician is a remarkable example of the attitude of many people who are so clinging to the belief that they are always right that they do not change that belief even when shown clear evidence to the contrary. It's like that man who was driving the wrong way down a busy avenue insulting other drivers for not going in the right direction.

Clinging to our beliefs easily leads to self-deception and, therefore, disconnecting from reality. And it all starts when we convince ourselves that we are always right.