I’ve been spending some time pondering the question, “Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences, or by who we are?”
When it comes to understanding behavior, whether your own or someone else’s, one concept is “nature or nurture.” It tries to examine the balance of what makes a person who they are. How much of the personality comes from experience/environment, and how much comes from our nature of who we are?
I always liked the first day of school. Everyone started off with a blank slate. Some people feel that a newborn baby is a blank slate, and the child will become what the parents pour into him. These concepts demonstrate personalities formed by environment and experience.
If it was as simple as that, then each student in a class would end up with the same grade at the end of the term, since they all went through the same environment and learning experience. Of course, this doesn’t account for other external factors such as individual home life.
It doesn’t take much parenting to realize that no two babies are the same. I’m not a twin, and none of my children are twins, but from people I know who are twins, they can sometimes have very different personalities. What makes one behave radically different than the other? They both have the same environment and largely the same experiences across the board.
All a parent can do is to provide as equal as possible nurturing experiences, it still up to the individual to supply the missing piece. That missing piece would be the nature that we are dealt in our DNA.
Maybe you’ve heard this story that tries to illustrate that nature we have wired into us.
A father had twin sons. He made every effort to clothe them the same, educate them the same and within his power to do so to treat them the same. It became clear that one son was an extreme pessimist, while the other one was an extreme optimist. He thought he would put their personalities to a test.
He bought the pessimistic son all manner of toys for him to play with for his birthday. A wagon, a bicycle, a ball and glove, a shiny red fire truck, every kind of toy a young boy might like. For his optimistic son, he visited a local farmer and had him deliver several wheel barrels of horse manure, which he deposited in the middle of his optimistic sons bedroom. Surely, this would make the pessimistic son happy, and his optimistic son sad.
After turning the boys loose on their birthday gifts, the father popped in to check on them. It didn’t take long for the pessimistic son to be bored with his treasures, complaining about each one. The father began to realize that sometimes there is just no changing people’s attitudes.
He figured he might as well check on his optimistic son to make amends for the horrible gift he gave to him. Expecting to find his son crying, the father opened the door only to find his son digging through the piles of horse manure. The excited boy was digging through the mess and shouting, “I know there has to be a pony in here somewhere!”
The moral of the story, if there is one is: no matter what life dishes out for you, your attitude and success is 100% built into your nature. To put it a different way, it’s not so much what happens to you, but how you deal with it.
Here’s a music track for you to enjoy:
