Every time I read a book, I highlight passages that inspire me, that cause me to think more deeply about an issue, or that stir up emotion in me.

Even when faced with challenges to our ideas, opinions, and beliefs — in those times when we believe that no common ground exists — you and I should be able to continue to be good people.

You must ask questions that reveal what people truly care about — the things that matter most to them because they affect their family, their friends, their livelihood, and the beliefs and ideals they hold dear and true.

We too often see examples in movies, popular media, and especially in politics and in discussing charged issues, that shouting and waving our arms in the air and being ever-more demonstrative means that our stance must be right if we are so passionate about it.

Avoid using humor to belittle the defenseless, the taken advantage-of, the destitute, the downtrodden, and the marginalized.

When the response to an idea you disagree with is to take aim at an entire group of people with broad-sweeping strokes that stain them with the funk of dehumanization, it is unfair to the people — the individual human beings — who absorb our mass judgment.

When examined through the lens of building rapport, as well as Chris Hadnagy’s advice to leave people feeling better for having met you, how many of us can look at our lives and our interactions and say we lead with these intentions in mind?

When we merely seek to see the "other side" of complex issues, it oversimplifies and categorizes us into warring factions, and it prevents us from seeing the vast, gray middle where most of us actually reside.

I share these thoughts with you this week not to beat you up, but to help you get past any fear you might have of asking questions that have answers that might be uncomfortable for you.

We must get curious about what it is we believe to be true, and what someone else’s experience might tell us about the world around us. Dig in and ask questions. Be curious. Strive to learn more, even if the truth — the facts — don’t line up with our opinions.

Over the past week, seemingly everyone and their mother had an opinion about U.S. gymnast Simone Biles withdrawing from the Olympics for mental health reasons.

For reasons I do not understand, people cared... like... A LOT.