One ordinary man's thoughts on character, relationships, and our walk with God, with parables and pithy proverbs on friendship, leadership, learning, teaching, gossip, sex, spiritual integrity, and others, offering guidelines toward a quiet life well lived.
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Introduction from Chapter 1
My intention with this little book is not to dictate how you should live your life but rather to share my own life—my rules for living a life well—to encourage your own reflection. I offer my thoughts on character, relationship, and God, three great components in the journey of life.
When my children entered their teenage years, growing up and growing strong, ever less dependent on me and ever more their own person, I decided to write for them a little book on living life. It is on that book that this one is based. A friend shuddered at my bold presumption in offering advice to teenagers. It was indeed bold and presumptuous—I knew that my thoughts were still a work in progress, that my children had to develop their own rules for living, and that a father's well-intentioned advice can feel heavy-handed.
I offered my children these short essays and pithy anecdotes as an invitation to self-examination, an examination that takes an entire lifetime to complete. How convenient. A lifetime is exactly what we have.
Rules for Living Well includes short essays on Learning to Learn, Spiritual Integrity, Gossip, Friendship, Sex, Leadership, Communication, and others.
Excerpt from Chapter 3: Knowing Ourselves
Learning to Learn
To know ourselves, others, or God,
we must first learn to learn. I find that three characteristics are most essential
to our progress toward being learned. These are humility, curiosity,
and faith.
Humility
Through humility is born our
conviction to search for new ways to understand ourselves and our universe. Humility
teaches us to listen.
Don't be too quick to think you
have arrived . There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Cultivate iterative
thinking. That is, continue to revisit ideas, beliefs, and understandings,
allowing them to evolve as you grow and learn. Too often, we think through
something once, make a decision, and act upon it. This may be the way of the
leader, born to action and decision. But it is not the way of the learner. There
are no final answers in life, only our progression toward ever-better answers.
A friend told me once that it's not the things you don't know that are the
problem, it is the things you do know that are wrong.
Don't think of understanding as a destination to be
reached, but rather as a journey. I Cor 8:2 says Whosoever thinks he
knows anything, knows nothing yet as he ought to know it. Knowing is not a
state a being, but rather a way of living, always pursuing, always growing.
Don't be patronizing or condescending in your thinking,
but truly value every person's thoughts, diligently seeking them out.
Don't think you know ahead of time which ideas are the truly good ones, because
you don't. Any sufficiently advanced idea is indistinguishable from
gibberish. Quantum mechanics is gibberish to the three year old. Wisdom
is gibberish to the fool. Therefore, find the wisdom in everyone.
Don't think that you know ahead of time what you need to
know. Take what is given you and find learning in it. Sometimes you must
do what you don't want to do in order to learn what you did not know to learn.
You are not your ideas, and their failure is not your own
failure. Think of your ideas as works in progress, and everyone else in
the world as your coworkers in perfecting them. Don't feel rejected, grow
defensive, or be overly protective of your embryo ideas, as this will only
preempt learning.
