Why It Is Important To Act In Good Faith In Life
Because there is nothing you gain doing it in bad faith.
My father and I used to play a card game called “Magic The Gathering” which some of the nerdier people will recognize.
For those that don’t, it’s basically a collecting/trading card game. You build your own deck and fight against one another.
My father was always a very calculated player.
He would sit in the basement for hours thinking about the next strategy and how to protect the strategy so that no deck could do anything about it.
Sometimes it would take the entire weekend to come with a deck, which he desperately wanted to test out, usually against me.
I, on the other hand, always stacked my decks.
I had a theme in mind, looked for the best cards that would work within that theme, and stacked the deck to synergize as best as possible.
It took me about 30 minutes to build a deck from scratch this way.
I would win ~80% of the games against my father because there were too many ways in which he had to protect his one way to win.
When you live your life in bad faith you keep trying to protect yourself from whatever you know; the problem is that there is always something you cannot account for!
While you are busy building up wall after wall after wall you are missing out on life only to be screwed over by something you didn’t foresee at a later time.
And when you do build the walls you are constantly thinking about the bad things to protect yourself from.
When you live your life in good faith however you at least allow yourself to think positively and save yourself some time!
Instead of trying to prevent the bad things from happening live your life in good faith, have as much fun as you can and act to overcome the bad things when they do happen and only then.
The true trick is to stay in good faith and be strong enough to face life when it screws you over; Be as optimistic as you can but as realistic as you need to be.
Originally published at http://quora.com.
