I learned so much - you too?

[Guest Anton]

Hi everybody,

The thread of lurkerspeaks "name three things a day that you are thankful for" made me realize something.

We have been lucky to have these kinds of forums where we can post our questions, share our experiences, advise others, or read what others want to tell us online.

A few months agao I started posting again. In the thread of JoeyBryant a colleage poster made me a really nice compliment and I thought "hey, how nice that someone is making me this compliment". Most of all I thought "Boy, I don't make compliments that often". Admitted, I'm Dutch and the Dutch don't have a name for making compliments. Maybe that's why I took his compliment also as a lesson and I decided that I should do that more often.

I'm convinced all others here must have learned some really useful things as well while visiting these forums. In my case it's making a compliment more often, but in your case it may be something entirely different.

So to all you out there ;

What is the main thing that you learned from these forums?

Warmest, Anton/Amsterdam.

ps : LOL, what I also learned is that these forums are visited by a lot of wonderful people, and I'm proud, happy and grateful of being a member of it all.

[Guest lurkerspeaks]

Something I might not have actually learned from the forums but have had it "refreshed" to me is to be careful HOW you say things.. People's perception of something is their reality of the situation. You might mean something one way, but if others interpret it another way, then that is their reality..

Another good one is "If you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always got.".. or in other words, you can't expect anything to change if you aren't doing anything different.

[BiBottomBoy]

The thing is the default position on the Internet seems to be "if I can find some way to be insulted by a comment I'm going to assume the comment is malicious, even if any rational reading of the comment would suggest it's neutral."

People need to back up and start assuming that things are positive until proven otherwise rather than the negative default option.

[Guest restless]

We have been lucky to have these kinds of forums where we can post our questions, share our experiences, advise others, or read what others want to tell us online.

Just signed up, and yeah, that's how I see it right now. A relief, frankly.

[BiBottomBoy]

Yeah, it's nice to know I'm not the only one to pay for gay.