Eating Crow

Above, you can see an AI-generated image of the Parks and Rec cast. If you kind of squint, you just about see what Midjourny was going for but overall, the picture is still a pretty hard miss. I'm sure if I spent a half hour on it and used some footage as image prompts, I could massage out something that would be a bit closer but that wouldn't be super productive for the purposes of this post.

Today, I'm writing about eating crow. For those of you not familiar with the idiom, eating crow refers to being proven wrong after taking a strong stance on a particular matter. Parks and Rec is my go-to mental example for when I need to remember to check my tendency to form strong opinions that are unfounded on facts. As the story goes, I kind of thought the show was dumb growing up. I had the same board opinion of The Office. Then, in an experience that's highly relatable for most young men, to get closer to a girl, I ended up watching both shows from start to finish. The office takes about 74 hours to watch. Parks and Recreation isn't far behind at about 63 hours. I loved them both.

In this case, two shows I thought were dumb turned out to be some of the best TV I've ever watched. Looking back on the situation, I ask myself, why did I think they were dumb in the first place? The best answer I can come up with is that I was basing my assessment of the shows on a few episodes I'd seen on TV and on the type of people who watched the shows. For a decent period of time, "The Office" was a personality that was pretty common among girls. I ran into a fair number of "Likes: Tacos and The Office" girls as well. Girls aside, instead of judging both shows on their own merits as a whole, I was basing my assessment on a small sample of data. This is a very bad idea.

I wish that was my only example of this kind of behavior but unfortunately, it's not. I used to think that Crocs were stupid. Ironically enough, I'm writing this while wearing a pair of Crocs that I got as a Christmas gift a few years back. That was another healthy serving of crow.

Another example would be breakfast. Growing up, I thought that breakfast was essential to a healthy and happy day (propaganda by the breakfast industrial complex). I believed this so firmly that I gave a friend at the time quite a bit of crap because she seldom ate breakfast. Fast forward to the present, I haven't eaten breakfast since 2018 unless I was obligated to out of courtesy because I was at a family event and it was prepared for me. The shift in this case was on account of the discovery of intermittent fasting in combination with the realization that skipping breakfast saves me ten minutes in the morning that can be reallocated to more useful tasks, such as sleeping longer.

Unfortunately, the list could go on and on. Realistically, this is a good thing. It's a sign that I'm still growing and developing as a person. On account of that, eating crow is probably part of a healthy diet. However, that doesn't make it taste any better.

What does make the crow at least palatable is a growth mindset and lots of humility. I think Charlie Munger might have said this, or at least something similar, but "Don't have an opinion on something unless you can argue the other side better than they can." If you follow that adage, you'll find yourself having a lot fewer opinions. You'll also eat a lot less crow. I think this is a fair trade but to each their own I suppose.