The Self-esteem Secret

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You can either let your self-esteem ride on the answer to questions like:

Do people think I am smart?  
Am I shaped like a model?  
Do I look weak and foolish? 

Or you can let your self-esteem be based on the knowledge that you are of value because you are made in God's image and that he has set his affection on you.

You've made quite a journey already, struggling to keep going and learning to rest in that knowledge. Won’t it be enjoyable to march down that path, head held high and a big smile on your face? It’s there, not because you are ignoring your trouble, but because you know the secret.

 
Stephen Goforth

Take a deep breath

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A famous classical musician slipped on jeans and a baseball cap. He then took his million-dollar Stradivarius violin into the Washington, DC metro and played for passengers. They were not impressed because he didn't look the part of a professional. He wasn’t wearing concert attire or playing in a concert hall. 

A mother brought her toddler into the emergency room of a hospital for three straight days. But doctors dismissed her symptoms because of her mother’s behavior. On the third visit, the girl died.

In their book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman say these are examples of premature labeling. 

Before you determine the inherent worth of someone or something, take a deep breath and make sure your first impression isn’t keeping you from seeing what's actually going on. 


Stephen Goforth

Questions and Answers

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Albert Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”  A friend who heard this wrote to me asking, “Why?  Why?  Why?????????”

I think Einstein was assuming there were answers to be found—as opposed to people (some of them I bumped into while studying philosophy) who dare not find any answers because it’s the "search" for truth/answers/reasons that appealed to them. Finding answers would require an identity shift from aggressive critic to defender of a viewpoint and that’s not as much fun. It’s like the search for romantic love—fun to chase but boring or frustrating to find it and try to live with it.

Our choices show whether we are asking questions because we want answers or whether we draw pleasure from shouting question marks and hearing empty echoes in response. 

Stephen Goforth

tell me a story

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We naturally avoid ambiguity. We want black and white, right or left, up or down. The greys of life are so distasteful that when a cause is attached to any set of facts, we assume the "facts" are more likely to have really happened.

Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swain points out that if you ask someone, "How many people are likely to have lung cancer in the U.S.?" you might get a response like "half a million." But if you make one change to the question and ask, "How many people are likely to have lung cancer in the U.S. because of smoking cigarettes" you would get a much higher number. Why is that? Taleb suggests we tend to believe an idea is more likely to be true when a cause is attached to it.

Joey seemed happily married but killed his wife.

Joey seemed happily married but killed his wife to get her inheritance. 

The first is broader and accommodate more possibilities. The second statement is more specific and less likely to be true.  But if you ask people which is more likely, more of them would say the second statement. Why?  The second statement tells us a story.

The narrative misguides us. We want an explanation, a back story. That's why it’s hard for us to look at a series of facts without weaving an explanation into them and tying the factsto the because. We like a good story-even when it misleads us about what is true. That's why you should be careful whenever you come across a because. Connecting causes to particular events must be handled with care.

Stephen Goforth

Together

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“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in 1624, as he lay ill with a persistent fever, fearing death. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” In the solitude and delirium imposed by his illness, his connection to all others became manifest. Americans have always viewed the communitarian ethos with some ambivalence; our founding ideals are rooted in a rebellion against authority and duty, and reverence for individual liberty. Epidemics, Anne Applebaum recently pointed out in The Atlantic, “have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.” This one has caught us in a moment of profound weakness. Faith in science, government, media, and all our institutions has badly eroded, and we are deeply divided politically and culturally, viewing each other as enemy tribes, not countrymen. The coronavirus cares nothing for these distinctions; it is a reminder that our separateness is an illusion. We Americans, and all of humanity, are at war with a common foe. We can only defeat it together.

William Falk writing in The Week magazine

Love and Death

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Love is a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family dies, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. But there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some -perhaps most - human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone's death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. Abraham Maslow is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we'd never die

Rollo May, Love and Will

Casting Doubt

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A lot of people still think of propaganda as the art of making lies sound truthful, but...they want to make truthfulness an irrelevant category. It’s not about proving something, it’s about casting doubt. Most political ideologies have not been about casting doubt — they’ve claimed to be telling the truth about the way the world is or should be. But this new propaganda is different. Putin isn’t selling a wonderful communist future. He’s saying, we live in a dark world, the truth is unknowable, the truth is always subjective, you never know what it is, and you, the little guy, will never be able to make sense of it all — so you need to follow a strong leader.

Sean Illing & Peter Pomerantsev in a Vox  interview