A lovely little girl was holding two apples in her hands. Her mom came in and softly asked her little daughter with a smile: My sweetie, could you share one of your apples with Mommy?"
The girl looked up at her mom for a few seconds, and then suddenly took a quick bite of one apple, and then a bite of the other. Her mom froze and tried hard not to reveal her disappointment. Had she raised such a selfish child?
Then the little girl handed one of her bitten apples to her mom, and said: "Mommy, here you are. This is the sweetest one."
No matter who you are, how experienced you are and how knowledgeable you think you are, always delay judgment. Give others the privilege to explain themselves. What you see may not be the reality. Never conclude for others. Perception can be misleading.
If what you see is what you get, make sure that what you see is the whole picture, not just a small slice of it. And if you can't see the forest for the trees, just imagine what you are missing.
Our preconceptions can dramatically alter the way we perceive the world.
The Roman poet Phaedrus said: "Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden."
I have another way of saying this in my speeches: Things are not necessarily as we perceive them to be. I often share the story of the man and his son who are in a car accident and are badly injured. The younger man needs emergency surgery. But at the hospital, the surgeon says, "I cannot operate on this person. He is my son." But wait, wasn't the father injured too?