You're not that Important...

'You’re not that important' 

By this I don’t mean to say that you are not at all important because of course you are important, I mean the most important person in your life is you yourself, what I’m implying here is you are not that important in other peoples life and not everything revolves around you like most of us tend to believe. To an extent feeling this is very normal and we all succumb to this but some people tend to take it on extreme heights those people are just a bunch of kids who have progressed in age but not cognitively. According to stages of cognitive development given by Jean Piaget there are basically four stages of cognitive development Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete-operational and formal-operational. Something happens in the second stage which is the pre-operational which is usually from 2-7 years.

Concepts called Centration and Egocentrism come into play. Why I am telling about this? Because I have even observed 35 year olds to behave like a kid who has yet not successfully crossed the stage.

Now when I explain what centration and egocentrism is you might find examples in your day to day observation (of people who behave like this). Centration as Piaget explains it; is a tendency to focus only on one aspect of situation at a time now this he said about kids between the age range mentioned above but I have seen a lot of people who very conveniently focus only on their aspect. And they give utter disregard for the other person or in general the other aspect.

Egocentrism is the failing of the kid (in this case the big, very old kid) to understand the situation with others point of view or their preoccupation with the thought that everyone has the same point of view as they have. Now does any example come into your mind? A person for whom anything that happens has only one interpretation that is theirs.

Anything you do which comes to their notice is now their agenda and the only right thing is what they have in mind and if you have a different opinion then you are wrong. Now is there any need to talk about these people? Yes there is because we sometimes are surrounded by these kinds of people and when they don’t understand the other aspect or our point of view, we tend to make a lot of efforts trying to make them understand. Not knowing the fact that they would never understand and you’re wasting your time.

Then what should we do? What we can do is let them believe that everything revolves around them, let them live in their Personal Fable (concept first given by David Elkind in his book Egocentrism and Adolescence). And if they do poke their noses in your business you should still not battle them. What you wanna do instead is remind yourself this quote,

“I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed…”

 -William Shakespeare