How do you separate fact from fiction?

Actually, a more important question is, how often do you take the effort and time to separate fact from fiction?

Facts and fiction get muddled together all the time, ultimately giving you a distorted view of reality. This is especially true when fiction is built upon a fact or two that gives it a sense of credibility. The distortion could be a simple as someone telling you that a person behaved a certain way, but because they used the person’s name you conjured up a story about them in your mind, which in turn moves you to believe or not believe the story.

Although daunting, separating fact from fiction is your responsibility. It’s hard, tedious and time consuming, but if you don’t develop a system to do so, then you will begin to believe everything you hear and are told.

Now there’s no easy way or shortcut to separating fact from fiction, but there is one rule of thumb that might be able to guide you. Take everything you hear and see with a grain of salt, essentially go with the premise that what you hear and see is not true unless you yourself can prove it.

This might sound like a very had lined approach to take, but not if you understand the majority of information being conveyed to you is someone else’s fiction.

And it’s not just you; we’re all victims of compounded fiction.

The best part of realizing that almost everything you hear and see is fiction is that you can now begin to make up your own stories. Maybe you’ve been living with stories that haven’t served you, but you believed them because they were told to you by people you loved and trusted, and so you willing adopted the stories as your own. And they didn’t tell them to you out of malice, it’s just that’s all they knew too.

The fact vs fiction ratio leans heavily in the favor of fiction and you can use this to your advantage. Once you’ve identified the few facts that do exist, you can use them as a foundation to build a fictitious world that can now benefit and support you.

P.S. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it please share it with one person you love.