70 – Causality For Business or Personal Success

This topic is probably my favorite on many, many dimensions, and that is causality. Causality, what do I mean? Causality means something that causes something else, or is a partial cause for something else. The study, the watching, the asking of questions to delve into the depths of causality are critical for everything, from anything you’re going to do in business because it’s going to have an effect on the customer, or: What do you do that has an effect that’s negative or positive for the customer now? If you don’t understand that, what are you going to do in the future, all the way to your kids. Just take a look at what your kids do and how they do.

I’m not saying there’s right or wrong answers, but what I am saying is: Always look underneath the covers. Some of the examples are really kind of interesting. You take a look at kids, for example: What do you do if your kid does something wrong? What happens if your kid doesn’t study? If you repeatedly don’t do anything, are they going to study? What happens?

Watch any time—you may have done this, or caught yourself in this, or one of your spouses or whatever—what happens when a baby cries? You’ll see very often that the mother picks up the baby, and then the baby stops. There is sometimes that that’s necessary or appropriate, and other times you shouldn’t pick up the baby. Now, I don’t know the answers to that, not at all. I don’t have the foggiest idea, but watch how sometimes babies train their mothers because they want to be picked up, they want to be held. Heck, I do, too. (But I’m a little too big for the pick up part.)

Anyway, also take a look at education, everything that’s happening in education today. Here, again, ask questions. I see all the time, and it really, really gets to me when I see these flyers outside or the thing in the mail that says: “It’s time to vote for a new bond issue,” or this, or that, or the other thing, and it’s usually about something like: We need lower classroom size, or new classrooms, or more classrooms, or more teachers. First of all, there’s an over-supply of potential teachers out there. There’s all kinds of women, in general, (some men but mostly women), go through the education departments at our universities and then can’t find jobs. Why? Because the unions close them off because of the tenure, etc., role.

Then you think of: What’s the cause in there? The tenure causes not only the good, but also the bad teachers to be retained. The idea is supposed to protect the teachers. Why are we protecting them? They’re not supposed to be giving political speeches in class, either. They’re supposed to be teaching our kids. It’s also not a popularity place. They’re not supposed to be winning over the students, not in the sense to be popular, but in the sense to be respected, well thought of, and to be teaching.

Back to classroom size, much smaller than when I went to school, so the problem isn’t the classroom size, it’s that they can’t have discipline. The problem is other things that they have to figure out, but they have to go back to the root cause.

Take a look at government programs, how many programs there are for poverty, etc. None of them ever get deleted. What are they doing, what do they do? What is the purpose behind them? Okay, yes, to make somebody so that they’re not destitute or unhealthy, or something like that. But if it doesn’t work, why doesn’t it work? What happens when we supply or provide something, and make it easy to get? How easy should it be to get? I mean, these are difficult questions without easy answers, but they should be discussed and they should be thought about. The idea that when you have a program that makes it so that somebody has the ability to get income, and food, etc., and if they start making money, they’re going to lose that – they’ll be afraid to go out and make money. There’s a disincentive.