How will you know when you get there?
“Know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” —Stephen R. Covey
If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, he liked to say, you’ll only get to the wrong place faster.
There’s a line in Crucial Conversations worth memorizing:
“Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?”
Most of our behaviors aren’t irrational. Some of them are unconscious, but people rarely do things for “bad” reasons.
Everyone sees themselves as the “good guy” in the story. This means they must be doing this action for a rational reason. It’s solving a problem for them. It’s in service to something they value.
And it might be completely and totally awful to a great many other people. But the first step in fixing something is to understand it.
You might not know why right away, but it’s worth sitting with the question. It might help you find the solution to irrationality.
If we don’t know what we mean when we talk of fairness, we can’t make informed decisions on whether something is fair or not.
The first step is to set an agreed-upon expectation of what fairness means to the group.
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses the concept of paradigms—ways of looking at the world or a field of study.
His argument is that these paradigms are like maps of places in the real world. If we have the wrong map, then we are looking at the “place” incorrectly.
An example:
If you’re trying to navigate Chicago but have a map of New York City, nothing you do with that map will help you achieve your goal of navigating Chicago.
Another example:
In Ancient Greece, physicians believed that all medical issues stem from an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If this is your “map” of the world of medicine, you’ll end up with a lot of dead people on your conscience.
You’d be working from an incorrect map—an incorrect set of assumptions and paradigms of how the human body and medicine work.
We are dealing with a lot of this today in numerous fields. And that’s why the study of philosophy—the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things—is vital.
Teach.
Make videos. Write blog posts and articles.
Host a workshop or a live social media “conference”.
Teach what you’re learning and you’ll get better at it.
It’s a practice. And you don’t need permission.
(Though it helps if you know what you’re talking about.)
The same holds true for just about any other practice or identity you wish to adopt.
“Just do it” isn’t a slogan reserved only for Nike.
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One of the essential habits in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is #2:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
The premise behind this habit is that before starting something—a career, a hobby, a marriage, a life—you should project yourself into the future.
By doing so, whether three years or five (or even all the way to your 80th birthday), you can lay out a map for how you want to live your life or complete a project.
I love this habit, and the idea behind it, but it’s also the only habit out of the seven with which I struggle. Why?
Because it’s overwhelming! Sometimes I don’t even know what I want life to look like tomorrow, let alone in 47 years. (God, is 80 really that close?)
It’s also overwhelming because at times, the daunting idea I have in my head seems so impossible that I become paralyzed, unable to do anything.
I know I’m not the only one.
The negative thoughts creep in with a seeming inability to solve them.
The solution?
Start.
Decide on the very next small thing you can actually do.
Julia Cameron calls this “filling the form”—taking the next small step instead of leaping ahead to some giant thing you might not ready for.
Using the examples from above, you can…
It’s the oft-cited cliché that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You have to put a destination into the GPS. But then you must focus on the directions and look for the next turn.
If the end in mind is too big to tackle, focus instead on the tiniest first step.
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There is exactly ONE THING that all human beings have in common with each other:
We are all completely different.
We all see things differently. We’ve all had different experiences, good and bad. We were born physically different. We were raised in different cultures.
And we’d be fools to believe this didn’t affect the decisions we make and the things we want.
Once we understand that, we can begin to work with each other to actually make things better.
I hope that I can inspire other people to find their voice and make the impact they were born to make on the world.
There are few ideas I’ve come across that have resonated more with me than Stephen Covey’s 8th Habit:
“Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.”
I want to help make people better. That is all.
Almost everything that’s ever happened in your life has been the result of a choice.
A lot of it has happened because of your own personal choices.
But even those things that have happened to you completely and totally outside of your control have usually resulted from a choice…
Someone else’s choice in that case. And it created circumstances, good or bad, that affected you.
Interesting, and quite sad, to think about.
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