Telling It Like It Ain’t

How is it that those with the least amount of experience with something often have the most to say about it?

Everywhere you turn nowadays, someone, somewhere, is offering to teach others the keys to financial abundance, the secrets to success, the ways of the wise to unlimited health, wealth and prosperity. More often than not, these want-to-be experts, gurus, influencers and thought-leaders boil it all down to something trite like positive thinking, feelings of self-worth or complete congruency between one’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Anyone who fails, they will tell you, just did not apply the aforementioned techniques correctly. What a bunch of rubbish!

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:…

6.) Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

from On Duties by Cicero

Many highly successful people will tell you that their greatest epiphanies, concerning their biggest successes, often came about after the fact; they decided the reasons for their success in hindsight. In other words, in the midst of their wave of good fortune, they really did not know, for sure, all the factors involved. Being successful at something does earn them the right to talk about what things they did that they feel led to their greatest successes. But, suggesting that anyone who fails to reach the same zeniths as them does so because they did not do exactly as they did, or at least without as much sincerity as theirs, denies the fact that there are a whole host of other factors in play at any given moment, most of which are not in any way under anyone’s voluntary control: changes in the weather, the economy, health status, zoning, capital improvement projects, technology, public perceptions… The list goes on and on. And, the factors that they believe contributed most to their success might actually not have had anything whatsoever to do with it.

Imagine, if you will, a business owner who opens a business, partially dependent upon drive-by traffic, on a busy city street. Then, one day, a new state mandated roads improvement project closes his street down and detours traffic away from his business for the next 3 years. As his business withers away, was his thinking just not positive enough? Was it just that his feelings of self-worth were not strong enough? Perhaps his thoughts, feelings and actions were not congruent enough? Maybe, like Linus, he just did not have a sincere enough pumpkin patch!

Can this same argument be used to rationalize the suffering of the approximately 6 million people of the Jewish faith who perished during the Holocaust? What about the thousands of Native Americans who were slaughtered during the time of American colonialism? Would these same success techniques have benefited the tens of thousands of Africans who suffered during the time of slavery? And what about the epic suffering of Job in the Old Testament and of Jesus in the New Testament?

Unless someone has weathered epic loss and failure themselves, they have no business passing judgment on those who have. (And, by the way, those who have weathered such calamity would never pass such judgment in the first place.) Blaming the victims for their suffering and loss does not help anyone. It builds a further wall of division between “them” and “us”, fostering feelings of separation and superiority in the accomplished. Everyone wants to think that their beliefs are the “right” ones; and, maybe they are the right ones for them. But, that does not necessarily mean that what others believe and do is categorically wrong either, just different. I, for one, think we would all do well to have a little more different, mixed in with a hefty dose of compassion, in our lives.

by jon m ketcham

Offering hope to the hopeless & helping the broken re-kindle their dreams