The cost of a closed mind

I heard my mentor spoke about an interesting topic which had me thinking for a while. So I decided to do some research on the subject to see what I could find. He mentioned that the most expensive thing we carry around as individuals is not our houses, nor our cars and not even our jewelry. The most expensive thing we carry around is a closed mind.

I recently read a post about Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and how he initially invited about 6 persons to his dorm room back in college to listen to an opportunity (which was Facebook at the time). Only 2 of those individuals showed up. Today those 2 individuals are billionaires.

Have you ever been told that you have a closed mind? Or that you need to open up your mind?

The best example of open mindedness is within a child. A baby literally has no opinions and will try just about anything that comes their way with an enormous amount of curiosity. I usually describe this as potty or clay. In the early stage of designing a masterpiece, the artist has significant controlling ability over what he wants the outcome of his work to be. The clay is soft and receptive to his creation.

As we become adults, we realized that if we stuck to a child’s non-judgmental approach, we would be living the best life we can imagine.

But why do we close our minds so much?

It is because we loose that readiness to experiment with the new. We lose that child-like mentality of openness. As adults we get accustomed to organize our minds according to our previous associations with thins we like and do not like. We use these archives as references to our daily encounters, and once there is confirmation that a reference exist that we do not particularly like, we shield ourselves from anything that doesn’t have prior approvals.

This mechanism makes us feel secure and comfortable. And the price most of the time is very costly.

When we stop changing and developing, we don’t learn anymore. We don’t improve because we bar ourselves from all the ranges of potentials that exist that we have a right to access and enjoy.

In order to achieve our goals, we must have and approach things in our lives with an open mind. This will help us to find truth from others and things to get us to where we want to go. We must get perspectives that are not aligned with our way of thinking from people with knowledge and ways of seeing the world from a very different place.

Let us copy that non-judgmental mentality of children and apply it to our daily encounters and we are guaranteed to have a much better life.