Why Polarization is a Good Thing

So many of us learn growing up that polarization is a bad thing.

Instead we decide that being friendly to a fault is the path to success. We bend over backwards to make everything easy-peasy, copasetic, honkey-dorey, and we wonder why we don’t get what we want.

First let’s get something out of the way up front: Polarizing doesn’t mean bad.

Here’s why polarization is a good thing.

1. Polarization means you’re being clear.

A namby-pamby sissy-wissy leaves people unsure of how to interact with them. It’s infuriating. It’s like, “c’mon, just tell me who you are so I know how to move with you… or move without you. There’s effing 8 Billion people on the planet. Ain’t nobody got time for this sh*t.”

Being polarizing makes your needs known. It makes your preferences clear. It shows people who you are and what you stand for, and lets people know how to interact with you.

It’s brave to polarize because you’re honoring yourself, and you don’t know if you’ll be received or rejected.

It gives other people breathing room.

Someone may be afraid to polarize, but they feel the fear and do it anyway. Too many people learn that feeling fear means there’s something wrong, that they’re doing something wrong, that they are wrong. Running from fear is not a recipe for doing anything worthwhile in your whole entire life.

The cold truth for the person who runs from polarization is they don’t get what they want because they’re afraid to lose what wasn’t theirs in the first place. They’re living in a fantasy of what could be, without acknowledging what’s real.

Part of my practice in re-teaching myself this 4-dimensional flying technique is, if fear is the only reason not to do something I’m eager to do, I know that’s exactly why I need to do it.

Life is hard enough without having to dance around the toes of people who refuse to make things easier because they’re too busy running from what makes them uncomfortable.

For me this comes down to the education system — where we’re forced to go back to the same place where we can’t get away from the same people. This idea deserves a deep dive in a whole other article.

The Takeaway — when you keep your personal polarization first, you’re being kind to others in the process.

2. Wisdom in polarization

I recently heard someone say that telling someone the truth is the greatest form of flattery. You’re not trying to give them a story, or make it more palatable for them because you don’t want to upset them.

You’re flattering them with a potent dose of Real, and you’re not tricking them into wasting their precious time believing something that isn’t true.

It’s so good because you’re subconsciously validating the truth they sense but don’t have words for, and that helps them be more present to themselves in the present moment. This, in turn, empowers them to respond to whatever life throws at them, rather than react.

Telling someone the truth is self-respect as well. It means you respect yourself enough to feel all the feelings that come with the other person receiving the truth, not knowing how they’ll respond.

When you make up a story, a.k.a. “a lie”, what’s really going on is one of three things:

1. You don’t know who you are and what you want, and you’re afraid of saying “I don’t know”

2. You’re bypassing your truth because you don’t want them to be upset with you

3. You’re being manipulative, trying to get them to bypass their own truth without knowing it. This may work in the short term, but never works in the long term.

3. Polarization makes you a good team player

It takes personal boundaries to stay in your lane, to play your position, to do what you’re here to do. It’s like elementary organized soccer where all the 4–5 year olds chase after the ball together. There’s no space, so they end up kicking it into each other, and when the ball finally squirts out of the swarm of hip-heighted-hellions, there’s no one there to receive it, let alone pass up the field and put it in the back of the net. The swarm chase continues.

Those kids, who I’m sure are all going to be doctors and lawyers, are not displaying integrity to their positions. It takes discipline and focus to resist chasing, or wasting all your energy in the first 5 minutes of a game.

You have a team to play for and a whole game to play. Don’t waste your energy playing out of position.

4. Polarization is completely natural

It’s not just personal — everything in nature has polarity.

Including the popular and polarizing figure, Tony Robbins, who’s website says:

It’s important to me that I point out that opposites are still related to each other. Their opposition defines their relationship.

This goes deep into physics — it’s a rabbit hole that opens to an Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland — but for a surface level example, let’s look at sunglasses.

Even this straightforward example gets into the technical weeds with similarities and differences between electricity and magnetism, but to keep things as light as possible, I’ll offer this explanation of polarized lenses:

This reduces glare.

The takeaway I’d like to leave you with from this section is that polarity, polarization, being polarizing, is completely natural. In fact, harnessing polarity is essential to create anything meaningful in your life.

5. Polarization takes guts

It takes guts to tell someone a truth you know they don’t want to hear.

It’s nice to say nothing, but it’s not kind. By being nice and saying nothing, you’re convincing them to live in the lie you won’t acknowledge, like the mom in that kids’ book, “There’s No Such Thing as Dragons,” who won’t acknowledge the dragon that her son keeps pointing out. The dragon grows and grows throughout the book, until it’s wearing her house as a shell and running down the street chasing the mailman.

I’m not saying to demonstrate your commitment to kindness by running around and yelling that the world is burning because the sun is going to turn into a supernova someday and swallow at least half the solar system.

I’m saying, don’t be afraid to point out a dragon when you see one.

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