Plant the Seed

I was speaking with a friend at work today about a person who was trying to exaggerate a claim well beyond the point of fraud and didn't see anything wrong with it. We'd caught her, obviously, so she wasn't going to get away with it. I'd become very frustrated with the claimant and lost patience. My friend said that she was planning on having a conversation with her in which she didn't expect the claimant to fully understand that what she was doing was wrong; she hoped only to "plant the seed" for her to eventually realize it in her own time.

This struck me as a remarkably intelligent idea. Even if you can't convince someone that they are making a mistake or behaving badly at a point in time, you can make sure that you say something that might stay with them long enough for them to learn from the mistake later, after they've repeated it a few times (which most of us tend to do before we learn).

I've often gotten frustrated with people who clearly didn't want to listen to what I was saying and just gave up after a while. Thinking this through, maybe I'm not wasting my time if I can figure out how to at least plant that seed and benefit that person later, if not now.