Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my seventy third episode. Tonight I want to talk about the value of taking action toward a goal – even if you have to start out by doing it badly. The Bible is full of examples of people who made a raft of mistakes and still arrived at their destination. The first thing you need to know is that there are infinitely more ways to do something badly that there are to do it correctly. So if you have this idea that you can be careful enough to never make mistakes then you need to dispense with that. Even holding such an idea classifies as a monumental mistake that will pop up and damage you when you least expect it. So what I want to do is categorize the major mistakes four ways, and then finish by explaining the danger of indecision and why it’s worse than any of the actual mistakes.
First let’s talk about the late start. You’ve also heard of this as the late bloomer. A late start or a late bloomer can be a consequence of indecision – but that’s not always the case. Tragedies are commonly to blame for late starts. Imagine a person who is just about to graduate high school and go off to university when a death in their family requires them to take on a whole new set of responsibilities. Or imagine the person who is in the process of interviewing for their dream job when they get diagnosed with cancer. There’s many reasons for a late start that are not the fault of the starter. The problem occurs when the starter looks ahead to where they would have been if they had started normally. Maybe they compare their progress to the progress of those who did start normally and it disheartens them.
There’s really two things that I want you to consider when comparing your progress to others. The first is that you are making an assumption when you claim that your destination matters more than your journey. It’s not obvious that human beings can sustain happiness for very long once they’ve arrived at their destination and there’s nothing left for them to do. Dostoevsky said that if you gave humanity perfection and they had nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the procreation of the species – the first thing they would do is tear it down so they would have some purpose in rebuilding it. Sounds kind of like the Garden of Eden, huh? It looks like we are designed to be continuously pushing in a positive direction. Our sense of meaning and purpose is tied into this pursuit and so when the pursuit ends, so does the sense of meaning and purpose.
The second thing I want you to know is that your sense of progress is bound to your illusion of mortality. You might feel that you only have 60 years to do all of the things you want to do in life. Mortality is not part of the picture when you trust in Christ that He will bring you into everlasting life. You might say: aren’t I staking a lot of my life decisions on an idea that I can’t even be certain about until I die? Well let’s think about it. We already have good evidence to suggest that the pursuit of a goal matters more to your well being than arriving at the goal. But arriving at the goal does matter, because much of your motivation to pursue it is bound to the realistic possibility of achieving it. So, you pick a goal that you have a reasonable chance of achieving. Maybe you have to aim lower because you had a late start. But once you are actively pursuing the goal, it’s in those moments that your life happens. The quality of your life and your well being depends largely on the manner in which you pursue the goal. If you are frantic, stressed out, and loaded with anxiety, you’re going to miss out on a huge portion of the joys of life.
Belief in eternity becomes very important here. If how you pursue the goal determines how good your life is, isn’t it worth it to adopt the belief in eternity so that you can be liberated from the stress? After all, as a late starter, much of your stress and anxiety is connected to the fact that you lost so much time compared to where you could be. But what is time in the face of eternity? Do not make the mistake of going through your life stressed and panicked. The pursuit is what matters, not how far you get in the final analysis.
The next mistake I want to talk about is overshooting. This happens when you think that you are more effective than you actually are. Imagine an athlete who plays on a small town team. He’s head and shoulders better than everyone else around him. Then the athlete moves to a much bigger team in the city and he finds out he’s actually in the bottom 30% of the talent pool. So everything he thought he knew about himself has turned out wrong.
How do you prevent something like that from happening? You must always challenge yourself. It will be very tempting for you to put yourself into a place where you are the smartest person in the room. You’ll want to be the big fish in a small pond, so to speak. But if you don’t continuously challenge yourself to grow and improve, one day a bigger fish is going to come around and crush you. Then you risk feeling like an impostor. You might even think that everyone around you has been lying about how talented you are just to flatter you. You don’t want that measure of chaos coming into your life. You can prevent it by living on the edge of your comfort zone. Keep one foot in order and one foot in chaos. It’s on that line between the known and the unknown that you will feel the strongest sense of purpose and you’ll be able to prepare yourself for when a bigger challenge comes around.
Another form of overshooting happens to Christians after their conversion. Sometimes they burn really hot with a new sense of meaning and then once that fire slows down they think something is wrong. The fact is, that newness you felt at the beginning of your relationship with Christ is mostly a human thing and not a divine thing. You can feel this same thing when you buy a new car. You can feel it when you start a new romantic relationship. Or even when you start a new job. Never make the mistake of thinking that the newness comes from God or that the thrill is meant to last forever. If you pathologically believe that you must always feel that thrill, you will never stick with anything for very long – romantic partners included. And then you will end up bitter and alone.
Christians also overshoot when it comes to holiness. After conversion, they feel like they need to become the holiest person in their circle. Holiness is a good goal, but it’s a terrible goal if you leave God out of it and chase it down on your own effort. Without God, only two things can happen. One is that you overcome the sin by your own work. This will make you arrogant and ruthless in your judgment of others. You’ll become like a Pharisee. Second is that you’ll fail to overcome the sin on your own effort, and then you will drown in your guilt. You’ll feel like you aren’t good enough for God, when in reality you just took off and left Him back at the start line. Walk patiently toward holiness with God beside you so that you can depend on His grace. Remember that some sins are harder to break than others and that you will need His forgiveness. Don’t overshoot when it comes to your expectations for sanctification.
The third mistake I want to talk about is not really a mistake at all. But when it happens to you, you’re going to feel like everything has been a mistake. I’m talking about betrayal. When someone betrays you, particularly when a romantic partner betrays you, chaos rushes into your life. In an instant, your partner changes from being the most trusted person in your life to being a stranger. Not only is your partner a stranger, but you find yourself questioning whether you even know who you are. Your home is now just house. Everything you wanted for the future with him or her is gone. Everything you did in the past is not what you thought it was. And everything in this present moment has warped and twisted until you no longer recognize it. Is it possible that other people in your life are betraying you as well? Do you have some fatal flaw that prevents you from accurately assessing whether a person can be trusted? These are the questions that rush in when you are betrayed. It is possibly the most painful experience you can endure.
But many of these questions are in fact mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nearly impossible to prevent your life from burning down when you’ve been betrayed. But you will prevent yourself from putting it back together appropriately if you obsess over these questions. This is one of the reasons why having faith in God foremost above anyone else is imperative to your well being. God will never betray you. If your worldview is anchored in God, then there will be a foundation left to build on after the storm of betrayal tears you down. Jesus said: if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. If you’ve been betrayed or suspect that you’re about to be betrayed – go get a Bible. I’m serious. Sit down and study it. Resolve to learn everything there is to know about it. Understand that the Scriptures are so sophisticated that you’ll spend the rest of your natural life learning them. But rest easy knowing that the worldview they will help you to produce is trustworthy and will never let you down. Understand that Christ is with you always – even to the end of the age.
So we’ve talked about late starting, overshooting, and betrayal. The fourth category of mistakes I want to discuss is called ignorance. The height of ignorance is believing that you know everything you need to know. If you believe that you know everything you need to know, you are guaranteeing a future of unnecessary pain and misery for yourself and possibly for your family as well. Very seldom will you mistake made that could not have been prevented by knowing what you didn’t know. The best way to correct ignorance is to close your mouth and open your ears. Pay attention to your surroundings and be a good listener in all areas of your life. Treat every individual as if they know something that you need to know to promote your own well being and avoid suffering.
How do you listen properly? The biggest mistake people make in listening is that they spend most of their time trying to think of what they will say next. So when the person is talking to them, they aren’t giving much consideration to what the person is saying. One way to tell if you are guilty of this is to try restating what the person said back to them at least as well as they stated it originally. If someone disagrees with you, assume that they have good ideas and listen to what they have to say. Then do your best to make their own case back to them at least as well as they made it to you. This is called steel manning. Consider this: God is always sending people into your life who possess the information you need in order to live effectively and promote your well being. If you’re totalitarian in your mindset and you believe you know enough already – you’ll completely miss these valuable exchanges. Paying attention and listening is one of the single greatest things that you can do to gain the information you need. It takes humility, God values humility, and so a good listener is blessed.
Part of this discussion of ignorance includes failing to prepare. If you want to do something effectively – you must prepare. Preparation will determine your success. I’ve heard many people say that they don’t prepare because they want the Holy Spirit to use them and speak through them in their work. At best this is a theological misunderstanding. At worst this is an excuse for laziness and complacency. The verses in the Bible which discuss the Holy Spirit speaking for you are directed exclusively toward individuals who are put into dangerous situations for their faith or are on trial for Christ. God is not going to imbue you with magical ability because you refused to prepare. He’ll just be there to forgive you and help you up after your train wreck of a failure. Give everything you got when it comes to preparation.
Okay so we’ve gone over the four major categories of mistakes when it comes to taking action toward a goal. Now I want to tell you about the danger of indecision. There is no such thing as status quo when it comes to your spiritual well being. You’re either pushing forward and growing or you are sliding backwards into chaos. There are many people in the world who are too afraid to begin the pursuit of a goal because of failure. The problem is, you have to be a rookie before you can be an all-star. You have to be chump before you can be a professional.
The only way we can learn to do anything well is to discover all the ways of how not to do it. There’s evidence for this in infants. Infants are born with the capacity to recognize and repeat all of the phonemes of any potential language. A phoneme is a perceptually distinct unit of sound in a specified language that distinguishes one word from another. For example, p, b, d, and t. So the words pad, pat, bad, and bat have different phonemes. As the infant gets older, he learns to ignore the phonemes not used in his native language – until eventually they are gone to him. So the infant loses the capacity for foreign language in the process of learning his native one. The same thing happens when you learn anything. You have to dispense with all of the movements that are inefficient for completing the task until you record the correct movements into your muscle memory. Failure to do this results in what people know of as bad habits – like when someone has a bad habit in their golf swing.
All of that simply means that you have to be terrible at something before you can be great at it. You must practice, and all of the four categories of mistakes we talked about in this episode are killers for your practice. Getting stuck in those mistakes will make you want to quit instead of getting better. So if you’re thinking about starting out in something new – don’t be afraid to show yourself as incompetent at first. Just go for it anyway. Do it badly.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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