Taking something personally does not mean getting mad or assuming some motive, but being that you're the only recipient and are a person, makes it personal by default.
When there is a conflict, poor communicators make it about the other person, using labels, rather than making it about the situation by indicating specific behaviour in a given moment. This is sadly very frequent and people are trained to expect things to be made personal.
If someone is labelling you and saying "don't take things personally" you can asume ignorance rather than evilness, and try to explain the difference, between personal labels and pointing a given situational behaviour.
It won't be over, because then the conflict will be about behaviours, and people have different expectations for those, what's ok and what it isn't.
Culture is a collection of expected behaviours, this is how it finally clicked for me that actually defining a culture in a startup is important when you think about it.
That's why hiring people you have worked with works so well, you don't expend time making expectations explicit.
If you don't want to read 10,000 words, why do you want to comment on the words? It makes little sense to read a four-word title and just assume that you know what the rest of it says.
Cognitive biases like the ones that are described in the article are the proverbial colors of the glasses with which you look at all what happens around you. If they are too negative you will react with fear, anger, rage, and then, like a self fulfilled prophecy, people around you will start reacting accordingly. Or put it another way, if you believe that something bad is going to happen, something bad is bound to happen but in an unexpected way.
Learning about one's cognitive biases is a powerful tool but is also really hard.
