Underestimating The Old Man

Never trespass the house of a blind man whom has never asked for your help - Methion

This article is actually inspired by one movie I was watching on my way back from work. I'm sure you've probably seen it too. It's worthy of note that I'm not a movie person, but if the movie has some valuable elements (plots, theme, lesson), I do see them or when I'm completely bored.

So, in the movie, there's this old blind veteran whom had just lost a daughter in an accident and had received a huge sum as settlement from the rich family of the culprit. There's also three typical 'Hollywood' teenagers;the one with the brain and mastermind, the brute, uncivilized and brawn, as well as the occasional girl child with a drunk of a mother whose jobless and drug addicted boyfriend is also living in with her. This teenager is forced to be responsible for taking care of the family need.

Well, these three kids form a crew that carry out well orchestrated and conditioned theft around a deserting neighborhood where the old veteran happens to live. They had been mostly successful because they had a number of codes such as, not stealing cash, not stealing a total that's above $10,000.

Having planned on leaving the city for another, they realizthis,hat such small fishing wouldn't cut it. The brawn been the idiot as always suggested they go for the veteran's settlement against the advice of the smart one.

They scoped out the old man's area and concluded he was alone, with no neighbors, hence not even a police patrol vehicle will come to the area if things got wrong. The night came and they tried to enter the man's building but to no avail. They finally accessed the building through a window.

While they roamed his house in search of his stash, he was asleep until they found a tightly secured door with multiple bolts and lock. Having tried all their usual tools without success, the brawn pulled out a gun the others never even knew he had. Again the smart one tried to tell him bringing again gives the occupant the right to shoot them and that they should leave, but fools will fools. He fired at the bolts and got them open and attended same woke the man up.

The smart one tried to leave them behind until he heard a second and a third gunshot, want to guess what happened? The old man did head out to where he heard the shot come from and stumbled upon the other two teenagers who had no clue what to do. Long story short, three minutes later, two shots had been fired, and a person was dead. I'm sure you think it was the old man, but it wasn't. It was the brawn , shot by the old man with the gun he brought.

How could that possibly be, you may ask? It's simple really. That's what happens when you underestimate your opponents. We as humans always find ways to make things less hard for us, and one way we have devised is to underestimate the appointment. This opponent could be a person, a problem, a situation, a task, anything really. We look at these things that they are not worth been concerned about even if they are. We have even devised a way to make it look good through inspirational words, telling ourselves things that are not as if they are.

I'm not one to speak against hope or faith, but I'm one to also make a case for objectivity, logic, reason and preparedness.

Why Do People Do It And How To Correct It

You might ask, why do people do it, underestimate things? Here are after reasons

Senseless Faith and Hope: In a world where we have been taught to have faith in ourselves and in God, as well as to hope for the best, people no longer make the effort to objectively analyze what they are getting into, because they have faith that they can do anything ( literally ). When it seem not to be so, they continue on the same path, but this time with hope. This can easily be fixed by having a good dose of objectivity to check one's hope, and a good dose of logic and reason to balance the faith.

Overconfidence: Having faced a lot of a particular situation, humans have the tendency to start to give it less value and less attention. This is due to the confidence they have in their ability to deal with it. This most times lead to a lack preparedness and proper analysis of the situation at hand. The result is an overconfident individual who's ill-prepared for the coming task. Referring to the story above, they ought to have seen the fact that he was formerly a soldier as a good enough reason not to do this but due to the ease of their other operations and high success rate, they got overconfident. This can be overdosed by always staying humble and believing there's always something different about a situation, something that can be learned.

Lack of information : Sometimes we underestimate a problem or task because we overestimate our own abilities relative to the challenges that we have to deal with. This is sometimes caused by our lack of adequate information about the situation we're dealing with. We are usually prepared to the extent of what we know and not what we don't. If the kids above had bothered to know about how the old veteran manages to live all by himself without any help whatsoever, i doubt they would have thought twice about burgling his house. Getting adequate amount of information about a potential opponent is a great step towards success of dealing with it.

Overestimating our abilities: Humans always want to feel good about themselves and one way to do so is for them to always think they are better than most, if not everyone in certain qualities or for some lame ones, all qualities. This is as a result of overestimating one's qualities and ability, and will definitely create an error of equation when been put against a problem, as one will enter the situation with less than he actually believe he has, or less prepared than he thinks he is. All we need to do here is to stay true to ourselves and just know,our limits and accept it that way. Of course we can always seek to be better, but don't put yourself where you are not.

Underestimating the opponent: We sometimes have all the information we need, but due to human subjective and emotional state, we might not fully appreciate the information we have and this might result in not fully knowing what your opponent is worth or capable of. It is not just enough to get adequate information as stated above, we should learn to be as objective and thorough when analyzing this info and when deciding strategies to deal with it.

Closing Thoughts

These are simply my opinions, I could be wrong, but I really do believe what I've written here.

I'm actually yet to finish the movie, I'm going to get back to it now. Good night/morning/noon my friends

Plenty thanks to all my fans here, I love you guys