Most of us have heard the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." For years when we are growing up, that saying is drilled into our heads. But, there is another lesson that goes hand-in-hand with this one that my best friend taught me: Don't judge a book by its first pages.
Judging a book by its first pages is when you judge someone before you completely get to know them. Judging them before you try to understand why they do the things they do, and what made them who they are today. Countless people are guilty of this, and I used to be one of them.
We try to make ourselves feel better by saying "Oh well I didn't judge a book by its cover!". While this is true, at the end of the day, we did still judge them before getting to know them and trying to understand the motives behind their actions or words.
You may think you are getting to know them, but you have to really read the chapters, dig a little deeper, see what their passions are, who they are as a person, what shaped them. Once you have read some chapters, you are a lot more accepting of people, and you start to understand why their first pages were the way they were.
A lot of people think that first impressions are everything, but they're really not. Getting just the first impression and judging someone is reading the first pages.
The first pages of a book aren't everything, and neither are the first impressions of a person. You cannot get just the first impression, or read just the first pages because it is the failure to accept the one thing that we all have in common:
We are HUMAN.
That means we all have bad days. On a bad day, you can't be expected to make the best first impression ever. When someone doesn't make a fantastic first impression, and you start to judge them, remember that they are human, just like you and might be having a bad day.
You never know what a person could be going through when you first meet them and start reading the first pages. That's why you have to read the chapters. It isn't about how good the first pages are, it's about how good the chapters are.
