Witness

Witness is a powerful transformative element of the human condition, that calls us to live up to our potential.

Look at how you behave. How you present yourself how you conduct yourself. Your posture.

Notice that your behavior is different depending on who you're around. If you're by yourself, you might be in sweatpants and have BBQ chip crumbs all over your face. Maybe that's just specifically me but maybe you're somewhat similar. You know you would behave in a more respectable, presentable form if someone else were around to see you, witness you.

Witness is good for you, it helps keep you honest, it's easy to lie to yourself if there are no witnesses. You can just ignore the fact that you picked your nose and flicked it across the room, but if someone you respect is in the room with you, you wouldn't dare try to write that off. Immediately it becomes very apparent how disgusting and embarrassing the action is.

Imagine the college student who never calls home, their grades start to lag behind only the professor knows. Now imagine the student who calls their mom weekly, with updates on what they are studying in each class and what they earned for their most recent grades. I don't even have to ask you to contrast and compare, you know already how this turns out. You know this mom doesn't have to provide extra instruction, she doesn't have to chastise, she doesn't have to praise, the mere act of providing witness to her child pulls the student toward their potential.

Remember when you were a kid and you had a friend over and you immediately noticed all your toys that were too young for you? All of a sudden because someone else's eyes are on your room you want to put more effort into making your room look awesome get rid of those kid toys and make it awesome.

The attention of a pretty woman will do this for a young man. This is why young men get so nervous approaching or talking to women. Women have millions of years of evolution preparing them to figure out whether a potential mate is living up to their potential or not. The attention of a pretty woman a young man wants to impress is like a spotlight, focused witness. Notice the young man wants to impress her, he is being called to live up to his potential. A man's posture improves when he has witness it doesn't degrade.

You're a better person when you have witness, you should pursue witness. Try it out, as a homework assignment put yourself in a position where you have more witness than you're used to report back to me with what you noticed. Was it uncomfortable? Why? Did you notice things that could be improved, did you want to improve them?

Witness is a powerful transformative element of the human condition, that calls us to live up to our potential.

Again I'd like to thank Jordan Peterson and James True for influencing my thoughts on this subject.