Who Says

A few days ago, I received the following email from my grandpa:

I read a news item some months ago. Most Italian boys go to their parents' house for dinner even after they are married because they are so attached to their Mom's cooking. Italians call them Mammoni.

At face value, the email was as random to me as it might seem to you. But it still touched me. It made the 8700-mile distance that separates us feel like nothing. It made me realize that my grandpa, though older and much wiser, uses email the same way I do -- to quickly share with people content that reminds me of them. A symbolic "Thinking of you." Having spent most of his life crafting letters to be worthy enough of a postage stamp, my grandpa's deep understanding and appreciation for the wonders of email is behavioral change at its best.

Yesterday evening, I was sitting across an elderly woman and her friend as I rode home on Caltrain. I inferred from their conversation that they had just watched West Side Story at the Orpheum Theater is San Francisco. The elderly woman was comparing her recent experience with that of 1957, when she attended the original production. Who played Bernardo in the original again? The elderly woman asked as she simultaneously pulled out her iPhone4. Within seconds she had found her answer and was continuing on with the conversation. She and her friend looked up pictures from the original showing. Oh! Can you pinch that one and zoom in?! The friend asked in excitement. The elderly woman was a step ahead of her. The iPhone was seamlessly integrated into their conversation.

When we reached the friend's stop, the two women suddenly had a doubt as to the date of their next musical. Shoot. I gotta get off. We'll talk, the friend offered as she ran off the train. Moments later, the elderly woman had searched her email and found the date. It's on December 5! She called after her friend, knowing it was too late. The woman looked at me and smiled. It's fine, I can just email her. In fact, I'll do that right now! She got back to her phone.

I looked off in the distance, feeling a bit silly. When the woman had initially pulled her iPhone out of her purse, it was to call her husband and notify him of her arrival time. I was immediately certain that she didn't know how to use her phone for anything other than calling. I didn't expect anything more of her. As I played Fruit Ninja on my iPhone, I arrogantly assumed that the device is much more useful to me than to the woman sitting across from me. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that the woman was using her phone more productively than I.

Over the course of the train ride, I realized that the woman held an admirable outlook on life. Every word she uttered was positive. Every conversation in which she engaged revolved around experiences and events to which she was looking forward -- A luncheon on Tuesday; Her next musical on December 5th. Turns out, I could learn a thing or two from her. She held such positive expectations for the future, never once complaining about people or tasks she had to complete.

The danger in becoming too confident in ourselves and our abilities is that we forget how much we can learn from others. As we go through life, it becomes easier to think we are better than everyone else than to humble ourselves. We thrive on self-fulfilling biases, when instead we should be eating our preconceived notions for breakfast. A stereotype is just that. A stereotype.

None of us is perceived as a blank slate. Each of us can be stereotyped by the snap judgments provided by culture, past experiences, and the human psyche. This is out of our control. What we can control is our own actions. We have the power to destroy those stereotypes. To, as Colin Powell once said, "Fit no stereotypes." In my opinion, the secret is to forget about exceeding expectations and to simply ignore them altogether. Don't try to break a mold. Instead, make one from scratch.