How you can make the world a better place is one of the questions most commonly asked in beauty pageants and alike. Then goes the frequent response of world peace or saving the dolphins. Guy Spier, the author of The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment, gave a simpler yet powerful answer to this query: Change yourself.
A social study, called 'The Halo Effect' was conducted by physiologists to determine how a person's trait affect other's view towards him. It explains that a person who has an appealing personality tends to attract more people to like him. In the experiment, a man recorded two videos for a dating website. The first video showed a man reading a script in a cheerful way. In the second video, the man looked sad as he reads the script.
The first video was given to a group of girls and the second to another group. Both group watched the videos in different rooms. The study showed that the women who've seen the video of the cheerful guy found him attractive while the girls who watched the second video did not create the same impression and found the guy unlikable, in spite of reciting the same script that the first guy read.
The experiment proved how people perceive others is dependent on their traits and personalities. Guy writes, "When you begin to change yourself internally, the world around you responds." Thus when a person changed his attitude and behavior the view of others toward him is being affected and can change as well.
A person might ask however, how change in one self happens. One message that Guy promotes is that a person's surroundings is significantly important on the changes that happen to him. Guy says, "It's important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable-to get sucked into the wrong environment and make more compromises that can tarnish us terribly."
A person's environment or his social circle could influence the level and frequency of changes that happen in him. Hence, a person who wants to quit smoking would find it difficult to stop if the people around him smoke constantly.
Thus, we can make the world a better place by refining ourselves first and our view on things and we start the change by transforming our environment and choosing the right people to be with.
