How a thought can change everything

It is interesting how a thought, an idea, or a comment can fundamentally change everything you think about something or someone.

It can be the smallest thing, or a huge career-changing statement. But one day you can think one thing about someone, something, or an issue, and it all suddenly changes.

If you could cast your mind back to a couple of months when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. This was a huge thing for the Nobel committee to do, considering the relative amount of time Obama has spent in the Oval Office. It caused a huge controversy. People seemed to forget that the nomination process for the Nobel Prize closed only days after his inauguration, and that it is a long and complicated process to go from a “mere nomination” to holding the medal in your hands. It’s not a trivial thing to be won. I can only imagine the huge deliberation and conjecture it would have caused amongst the judges.

But I digress. I was fully of the opinion that Obama won it for the work he had done before he became President. The Nobel judges defended themselves, and said they gave him the award for the work he has done, and the work he will do.

But then…from one little comment in an article from the New York Review of Books Blog changed my understanding, and made a whole heap of sense. It said this:

“They may have tied his hands—making it harder for the President, as a Peace Prize laureate, to take military action against Iran or escalate in Afghanistan.” (full article)

This notion intrigued me from the get-go, but unfortunately no other articles I have read have picked up on it.

It is entirely possible that the decided to give him the Nobel Prize in an attempt to force Obama to think long and hard about entering or starting any “unnecessary” armed conflicts while in office.

This idea I find huge. And brilliant. Of course, a Nobel Prize cannot be revoked. Once it is awarded, that’s it.

That doesn’t matter, however. He might not be critically hamstrung by the prize, but it will always be in his mind that “I won the Nobel Peace Prize. What should I do?”

I truly love this idea, and it changed my opinion of the matter. I agree with the prize committee’s actions even more.

There have been other utterly game-changing ideas. Recently, artist Damien Hirst, the richest living artist in the world, recently came out and virtually said that his entire oeuvre has been a joke.

All his ridiculous ideas, putting a shark in a formaldehyde tank for instance, was an inside joke poking fun at the art world and art critics (to be fair, most respected art critics have always been against Hirst).

This revelation does not make me a fan of his work. But I now respect him. It seems that he may have completely killed off the huge prices his work have been attracting recently. Which, I admit, wouldn’t really matter to him as his net worth was estimated in 2008 to be just shy of US$400 million. I just find it great to see the man who has been labelled as responsible for the downfall of contemporary art admitting the jokes been on us (not that I believe him. His is just trying to extract some form of credibility). But admitting it is an genuinely intriguing thought.

I now present Exhibit C in how a thought, statement, opinion can change everything. When their first album came out, I was a fan of Wolfmother. I happily admit that.

They had been spoken about in the press as sounding like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I don’t agree with that, but whatever, I still knew that I liked their sound. I then read an interview with Andrew Stockdale that stated that Wolfmother sound like some of these 70′s bands, to which he replied that he didn’t understand all the comparisons, because he had never listened to a Pink Floyd album in his life.

Great, I thought. That doesn’t bother me. I’m not someone that would judge someone for not having listened to a specific band (of course, many people who know me may be surprised by this).

But then…everything changed. A week later, Andrew Stockdale appeared on Rove, wearing…a Pink Floyd tshirt. At which point I thought “well, that’s it. Goodbye. You have now achieved hatred from me, Wolfmother”.

I feel vindicated by the fact that the new album is called Cosmic Egg for god sakes…and it is rubbish. But that’s an opinion for another time.

What thoughts, ideas, opinions, whatever, have completely changed what you think about something? Let me know in the comments!