There’s a quote by Bernard Shaw that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
We’re taught that being reasonable is always a good thing. How could being “sensible” or having “sound judgment” be a bad thing? And true, a lot of the time it’s good to be reasonable. You can’t butt your head against everything in the world, choosing not to accept reality. But sometimes we go too far.
We accept things just because “that’s the way they are” forgetting that most things can and should be challenged and changed. That’s the only way anything get’s better, that’s the only way progress happens.
Hearing this quote, it’s easy to either presume to be the unreasonable man or resign ourselves to the fate of the reasonable man. As tempting as it is to think of this as a binary unreasonable or reasonable thing, for most of us, it’s a scale. Sometimes we end up being the reasonable man, just going along with the status quo. But at our greatest moments, we’re the unreasonable man. We make change the world around us. We change our own lives, the lives of those closest to us, and even our communities.
So, let’s adapt the world to ourselves, for the better. Let’s change things. Let’s be unreasonable.