Rumors get spread everyday. Most of them aren’t true, but some are.
I once believed a classmate of mine wrote a letter that contained a bomb threat to our school. I never got a chance to talk to her about it and the next year she just kind of disappeared so I had just assumed it was true.
How could everyone be wrong?
About 15 years later I ran across that friend on facebook and somehow we got to catching up and that very rumor got brought up. She had never wrote the letter or made the threat, she just ended up moving with her parents.
Man did I ever feel like an idiot.
That’s when I realized that the more people that are talking about a rumor, the more likely it is to be wrong because people assume that someone along the line would have validated it, but that’s not what humans do.
I read a story about someone getting beat up in the middle of the street where at least 40 neighbors looked out there window and saw it. About half an hour later the person that was getting beat died. No authorities or help arrived till some hours later when someone walking by noticed a dead person in the street.
The neighborhood was questioned by the police one at a time and the response was the same, “I noticed a lot of people were around and watching so I just assumed someone had called the police.”
Turns out no one did, everyone assumed someone else did.
This is exactly why widespread rumors go unchallenged, everyone else assumes someone did the fact checking.
If you want to know the truth, then you need to ask yourself some questions.
There are three questions you can ask yourself about any information you receive.
Is it True?
Many times people will spew out stuff they see or hear, mainly from television.
Take a minute to ask or determine as to whether or not it’s true. To do this you will need to get to the source of the information. Just because Bill O’reilly, President Obama, or some other talk show host or news anchor said something, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Even if you support any of these people or you’ve found other things they’ve said to be true — that doesn’t mean you should accept everything. Most of the time their information comes from their staff. These people are wrong a lot or provide information out of context to get you to believe something.
The one person you should be able to trust the most is your spouse. Unfortunately, the average person tells 4 lies a day, and over 50% of marriages end in divorce because of cheating or deception.
The only person you can really trust is yourself.
Track down the source of the information. It sounds a lot better to say, “according to a study conducted in Switzerland by Dr So and So, vegetables cure cancer.”
It doesn’t sound good to say “vegetables cure cancer” or “I watched a show this one time that said vegetables cure cancer.”
The source is everything — validate the truth of things before you repeat them.
Is it good?
If you’re going to spread rumors don’t spread ones that are bad or contain harmful information. Even if it’s good you should still validate the source of it because bad stuff can come from good rumors.
If you told everyone in town Larry has a 12 inch penis, then it might attract the wrong attention from many ladies in town and set Larry up for failure.
If the information you are about to spread can have have any negative consequence in the future, don’t repeat it, even if it is valid and true, nothing good can come from it.
Is it useful?
Does the information have a use at all and does it have a use to the person you are going to tell?
While it may be okay to tell your best friend that you heard his wife was cheating on him, it’s not okay to run around telling everyone else because it’s not useful information for them.
People make this mistake all of the time.
Why tell everyone that Larry has a 12 inch penis? That information isn’t useful to almost anyone except a few hookers with big vaginas looking for a good time — they don’t need the help let them stay on craigslist.
Who would even want to validate that information besides the hookers?
Information that contains threats or other harmful things shouldn’t be validated if it’s an emergency, you can do that later.
But telling everyone Bill is a loser because he cheated on his wife for the third time and is getting a divorce really isn’t useful to anyone. Nothing good can come from it, let Bill and his Wife deal with it.
Just because something is true doesn’t mean you have to repeat it. If you ask yourself these three questions on everything you hear or see you’ll be able to stop the spread of rumors for good.
don’t worry what people say about you just keep on walking.if you see someone getting bullied show them sympathy. don’t let them see you cry and remember don’t show any respect just ignore them you are perfect in every single way and three nothing they can do about it.