Year: 2020

Look again at the picture at the top of this post. What do you see?

Most of us see a black dot. We overlook the white space and focus on the one, small dot.

Now think of the entire picture as representing a person’s life—it symbolizes the essence and totality of who a person is and what he has done—and the black dot denotes his worst moment or worst trait. Just as our eyes are drawn to the black dot, we often tend to focus on the “black dot” in people’s lives, discounting their more prevalent positive areas. We often judge others based on a single issue.

But we shouldn’t form our opinion of someone based on their worst moment (she had an affair; he got fired from a job; he blew up during a staff meeting.) or their worst trait (he’s always tardy; she’s financially imprudent; she’s vain about her clothes.) While our observations may be accurate, it’s unfair to focus exclusively on them and emphasize them.    

There are two main reasons why we shouldn’t judge others.

1. It’s impossible to truly understand why people act the way they do. 

Henry David Thoreau asked, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” It’s that difficult. Every person has a story; there’s a reason behind who they are and what they’ve done, but we’re usually not privy to that information. 

Imagine walking through the woods and you see a dog. It looks cute and friendly so you approach the dog to pet it. Suddenly it snarls and tries to bite you. The dog no longer seems very cute and now you’re both afraid and angry. Then, the wind blows away the leaves on the ground and you see that the dog has one of its legs caught in a trap. Now, you feel compassion for the dog. You realize it became aggressive because of its pain and suffering.

We’ve heard the adage, “Never judge another person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” It’s good advice—try to see life from another person’s perspective—and it essentially eliminates judging others because it’s impossible to truly experience someone else’s life. You can’t “walk in someone’s shoes” for a few feet much less a mile. The moral is: Don’t judge.

2. All of us need grace.

Someone has suggested: Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you.

In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” Then he tells an anecdote to explain why: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” The key word in the story is hypocrite. 

Jesus is exposing a blind, ignorant, hypocritical, self-righteous judging that overlooks one’s own faults and focuses on the sins of others. His anecdote is intentionally extreme and a bit humorous: There are two dudes working in a woodshop. One guy looks at the other guy and says with a mixture of disdain and contempt, and with a smirk, “You nincompoop, you’ve got some sawdust in your eye. Come here and I’ll help you with that problem.” All the while he’s got a two-by-four sticking out of his own eye.

I think it’s part of the dark side of our human nature: It’s easy for us to see other people’s faults but we’re blinded to our own. 

Of course, there’s a need for balance relative to recognizing and responding to right and wrong. In society and in our personal relationships, we need reasonable and fair laws, expectations, and boundaries, and sensible responses to violators. I’m not going to address that important topic here because it may distract from my main point. 

Referring back to the picture at the top of this post, instead of obsessing on the black dot (people’s foibles), let’s train ourselves to do the opposite—focus on people’s best moments and their best attributes. And hopefully they will extend to us the same grace. 

In his terrific book, Precipice, Australian philosopher Toby Ord talks about existential risks that threaten the future of humanity. Some are natural risks: an asteroid hitting the earth, or super-volcanic eruptions. Another category is anthropogenic risks which are caused by humans, like nuclear weapons, climate change, and unaligned artificial intelligence. 

But the risks that are most alarming to me are the risks that may develop that we currently can’t even imagine.

It’s happened before. 

• • The possibility of nuclear holocaust was inconceivable until 1942 (the year physicist Enrico Fermi initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction).
  • The field of artificial intelligence wasn’t formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term was coined.

So 60 years ago, nuclear catastrophe and unaligned artificial intelligence would not have been mentioned in Ord’s book. 

Chances are good that in the next 50 years, an existential threat will be identified that we have never even thought of.

Which leads me to a discussion of the end of history illusion.

Humans have a tendency to acknowledge that change took place in the past but we discount the possibility of change happening in the future. For example, a 20-year-old’s prediction of how great a change he will undergo in the next ten years will not be as extreme as his recollection, as a 30-year-old, of the changes he underwent between the ages of 20 and 30. The same phenomenon is true for people of any age.

We can clearly see how our lives have changed a lot in the past, but we are reluctant to anticipate how much our lives will change in the future. Psychologist Dan Gilbert says we are “works in progress claiming to be finished.” In his research he discovered that young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. [Click here for more information about Gilbert’s work.]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion 

We need to disavow ourselves of this illusion. 

Relative to change:

Change is inevitable so we should anticipate and embrace it.

Every individual (and organization) has its own unique attitude toward change. We can be change-averse (resistant to change); we can reluctantly acquiesce to change (change is seen as unavoidable but undesirable) we can be change-friendly (view change as inevitable and probably necessary), or change-eager (view change as desirable and the key to growth and health).

The rate of change is going to accelerate.

In their must-read book, The Leader’s Voice, Clarke and Crossland say, “In ancient times, work was performed on an almost stationary stage. Visionary inventor Ray Kurzweil explains the rate of change in terms of paradigm shifts. During the agricultural age, paradigm shifts occurred over thousands of years. The industrial age produced paradigm shifts, first in a century and then in a generation. At the start of the information age, paradigms appeared to shift at the rate of three per lifetime. Kurzweil suggests that beginning in the year 2000, paradigm shifts have begun to occur at the rate of seven to ten per lifetime.”

Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only thing that doesn’t change is change.” Let’s anticipate and embrace changes that will occur in the future.

Years ago, conventional wisdom (or was it an urban legend?) taught that before you open a can of soda, tap on the top. Ostensibly, it calmed down the carbon dioxide inside the can so it wouldn’t spray when opened. So I adopted the habit of tap-tap-tapping on the lid before I pulled the tab.

One day, I saw my eight-year-old daughter tap-tap-tapping on the top of a can prior to opening it. I asked her, “Why do you tap on the lid?” She paused, and said, “Because you do, Dad.”

Oh my…

It caused me to wonder—in what other ways is she mimicking my behavior? Then I thought, for better and for worse, in what ways do I imitate my family of origin?

For instance, relative to my family of origin:  

• • Often, my father would be impatient with my mother. It saddens me to admit: I struggle with that issue in my marriage.
  • My father neglected holidays and special occasions (birthdays, anniversaries). I also neglect those events.
  • Mom was kind. I hope that rubbed off on me.

I recently asked my grown daughters (ages 40 and 42): “What did you ‘inherit’ from Mom and me (other than tapping on cans)?” They struggled with answering the question and Mary and I weren’t much help because we’re too close to it to be objective. Eventually, though, it led to interesting conversation. 

How should we respond to these learned-from-our-family traits? How can we overcome the negative influences and strengthen the positive ones?

Mitigating the unhealthy traits is very difficult. They’re so deeply engrained we’re probably not even aware of them. It usually takes a third party’s involvement to help us identify them and change. But predisposition need not be deterministic. We can and must work through these issues.

Every two years (why don’t I do this every year?) I perform a detailed audit of my personal finances. I realign investments, adjust our annual budget, and update future plans. 

An important part of the audit is analyzing all reoccurring bills and services by asking these questions:

1. 1. 1. Am I paying for something I no longer need or value?
      2. Has the price for this product or service gone down?
      3. Can I negotiate a better price from the current vendor or should I get new bids?
      4. Am I paying for a service I could provide myself?

In January 2020, my financial audit prompted these changes:

• • • A service representative from AT&T helped me tweak my mobile phone plan, saving $29 per month.
    • I renegotiated my internet service plan, saving $49 per month.
    • I canceled my subscription to the local newspaper because I can find most of the information online, saving $35 per month. 
    • I changed storage facilities and reduced the rent I’ve been paying from $119 per month to $35—saving $84 per month. 
    • I asked Chase Bank to eliminate the monthly service charge on two of my six checking accounts. They did, saving me $20 per month. 
    • I purchased a new battery-powered hedge trimmer and started trimming my bushes instead of paying to have it done, which will save me about $800 annually.

Savings: $3,404 per year. 

The same technique should be used in organizations. At my church, we recently renegotiated the contract on our copy machines, saving 40%. We canceled two of the four shuttle buses we lease on Sunday mornings, saving $800 per week. Installing LED lights in the sanctuary has a 24-month ROI after which time we’ll save $1,000 per Sunday on electricity. We discovered that we can get twice the internet bandwidth for less cost.

Senator Everett Dirksen (1896-1964), concerned that federal spending had a way of getting out of control, reportedly observed, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

For the average American, I’ll tweak Dirksen’s statement and say, “A hundred dollars here, a hundred there, and pretty soon it adds up to a significant amount of money.” Why not save money if you can do so without significantly changing your standard of living?

Audit your finances at least every two years.