Don’t Jump to Judgment

You will never believe it but sometimes – very, very rarely – I jump to judgment too fast. For instance, I sent in a proposal to a conference on testimonial literature. Every email I get from the organizers mentions that “we check our messages twice per day at 10.00 am and 5 pm UK time.”

“Gosh, what a bunch of pretentious snobs,” I thought. “Do I even want to speak at a conference where people are so stuck-up that they need to pretend they are British? Jerks.”

Of course, if I’d paid attention to who was organizing the conference, I’d have known that the organizers checked their messages according to UK time for the simple reason that they belonged to a British organization located in the UK.

In my justification, I can say that I have a very special logic of selecting conferences to go to and that logic usually is, “Will going to the conference allow me to visit Montreal?” If the answer is “yes,” I don’t care what the conference is about and barely even read the conference flyers. What am I supposed to go to conferences for instead? To network and meet useful people? Can you imagine me in this uncomfortable pose?

The good news is that the conference’s steering committee is less judgmental than I am and it accepted my proposal. So I’m going to Montreal. Yay!