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You’ve probably heard people say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Your teachers, your parents, maybe even your friends and relatives have told you this. But what exactly does this mean, and why is it so important?You
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Wow. . . I bet you weren’t expecting that. Who would’ve guessed that a book with flowers on the cover and heart balloons on the first page would suddenly transform itself to reveal a completely different side at the turn of a page? If you only looked at the cover of this book, you’d never suspect that scenes of superheroes fighting space monsters would be a part of this story.
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That’s what it means to not judge a book by its cover. Just like books, people are filled with all sorts of wonderful surprises that aren’t apparent from the outside. If all you do is pay attention to the outward appearances, or if you judge them based on something someone said or something you assume they did, you’ll never know the bigger picture. You’ll never know about all the wonderful things that lie deeper within, or uncover the surprises they have in store.
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Like ninja dinosaurs. You see, just like this book, people will reveal hidden sides of themselves that aren’t apparent at first. As you spend more time with them, you’ll discover special talents or traits that you never knew existed, or inner goodness that you never suspected was there.
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The deeper you dig, the more interesting things get. And the more you uncover, the more it transforms your understanding of what other things (or people) could be.
Those who study space know this truth quite well. As astronomers kept building bigger and better telescopes to peer deeper into space, an interesting thing happened: they kept discovering that places they previously thought were just “empty space” turned out to be filled with entire galaxies we couldn’t see at first. And those galaxies were filled with billions of stars. And as we look closer still, we find those billions of stars are surrounded by planetary systems all their own. To think all of this can be found in an area of the night sky that at first glance appears empty; it makes you wonder what else we might be missing. It’s a lesson we should all take to heart: the closer you look, the more you discover, and the more you discover the more it will transform your understanding of what’s actually there.
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People are filled with many more surprises, so many more deminsions than you could ever get from the pages of a book. So when you form your opinion of someone based on how they look, or what someone says, or when you judge them based on one particular aspect without getting to know them through and through, you’re going to be wrong every single time. It’s like pretending to know everything about a big long story after reading the first paragraph.
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So don’t you judge a book by its cover, or even its first page for that matter. Take the time to keep turning pages on people. Otherwise, there’s no telling what you might miss!
The end!
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