Don’t go bullshitting me about how a kind and compassionate life of mediocrity is a “different kind of strength” or some such cope.
There is, in fact, no reason why being compassionate should doom you to a life of mediocrity. A lot of very compassionate people manage to simultaneously be extremely self-critical, even beyond the point where it’s helpful for their productivity.
What is a “cope”, is an idea that you are either nice or brilliant. And you seem to be a victim of it. So in the spirit of tsuyoku naritai, stop coming up with excuses not to learn a valuable skill, deluding yourself into thinking that it somehow going to make you less successful in other domains and go put some effort into acquiring it.
When I try to empathize with that woman
That’s because you are not actually empathizing with the woman. You are empathizing with a man who notices the nail in the head. This is understandable because the point of the video is to make you do exactly that, it frames the situation in this particular manner that makes empathizing with the woman very hard, while empathizing with the man as easy as possible. Essentially you are being manipulated into empathizing with whoever the author of the video wants.
As a practicum of empathy and withstanding this sort of manipulation, try to re-frame the situation in such a way, where it’s the woman who is in the right. And no, just switching genders of the characters won’t do—that’s not the point of the exercise. The point is to come up with a situation in which a complaining character who wants to be listened to, isobviously in the right, while a character who is proposing a solution isobviously in the wrong. Just like in the video it’s obvious that the woman with the nail in the hand is wrong and stupid.
There is, in fact, no reason why being compassionate should doom you to a life of mediocrity. A lot of very compassionate people manage to simultaneously be extremely self-critical, even beyond the point where it’s helpful for their productivity.
What is a “cope”, is an idea that you are either nice or brilliant. And you seem to be a victim of it. So in the spirit of tsuyoku naritai, stop coming up with excuses not to learn a valuable skill, deluding yourself into thinking that it somehow going to make you less successful in other domains and go put some effort into acquiring it.
That’s because you are not actually empathizing with the woman. You are empathizing with a man who notices the nail in the head. This is understandable because the point of the video is to make you do exactly that, it frames the situation in this particular manner that makes empathizing with the woman very hard, while empathizing with the man as easy as possible. Essentially you are being manipulated into empathizing with whoever the author of the video wants.
As a practicum of empathy and withstanding this sort of manipulation, try to re-frame the situation in such a way, where it’s the woman who is in the right. And no, just switching genders of the characters won’t do—that’s not the point of the exercise. The point is to come up with a situation in which a complaining character who wants to be listened to, is obviously in the right, while a character who is proposing a solution is obviously in the wrong. Just like in the video it’s obvious that the woman with the nail in the hand is wrong and stupid.