There are always four sides to a story

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and What really happened. By Jean-Jacques Rousseau

— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

In the book

Now perspective, which is simply perception widened — the same scene read from more than one seat. There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened. The trick is to get off your own side long enough to see the others: solicit the other person's point of view before you decide you have the facts, and ask yourself, plainly, what is another way I could view this, and how would someone else see it? As Proust said, the only true voyage of discovery is not to seek new landscapes but to see with new eyes. […] Learn, too, what to stop attending to — awareness is as much about what you ignore as what you watch. Cross-check every important perception against fact. Before you act on a reading, ask the two questions that have saved me more than any others: Is this actually true? and What is another way I could see this? Get the other side first — solicit the other person's point of view before deciding you have the whole picture — and hold the humility that there are four sides to every story. Set expectations you can survive being wrong about. Begin by being mindful that you even have expectations, which most people never notice; then deliberately temper them, the way a good investor enters a position seeing things as they are rather than as he hopes. — The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

Also belongs to

Related