Yes, I’ve been asked what my opinion is about all this change. “Dean, how do you feel about being told you have to build houses a certain way?” First of all I’ve always been told how I have to build, but I’ll be honest with you … the jury is still out on this one. It’s an extremely complicated issue. It feels like we’re over-reacting and over-reaching, but I can’t deny we should have done far more long before now. Every solution creates its own set of problems, but the same is true of not acting at all. It’s complicated.

When I was a child growing up in Glendale I remember when my father and his friends use to complain about having to pay more at the pump for the new unleaded gasoline. But when I was a child growing up in Glendale I also remember not being able to see downtown—even though it was right there—because of all the brown smog. And I remember red flag smog alert days when we had to eat our school lunches in our classrooms because running around outside at recess wasn’t safe. Today, the skies over Los Angeles are bluer than they’ve ever been in my lifetime. So, unleaded gasoline … good idea? I guess it depends on where you stood. All my dad wanted to do was have enough money to raise his kids. All his kids wanted to do was see more than two miles in any direction.

The world is messy and complicated. You know why? Because you and I are messy and complicated. And I only see one way through it … humility. The older I get the more all I want for the world is humility. I demand it more and more of myself. I cherish it more and more in my friends. I now actively seek it out in business, and search for hints of it in politics. Life has humbled me in so many ways that these days the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know much of anything at all. And here’s the truth … I feel safest in the hands of those who feel the same.

It’s the knowledge of not knowing that makes me want to listen to others as if there’s value in what they have to say, because there is. Listen past all their rhetoric and stories and try to hear they’re pain, because that’s where it’s all coming from anyway. And I’d encourage you to listen to others as if your own perspectives are imperfect and incomplete, because your perspectives are imperfect and incomplete. Remain open to change, because the world has never stopped changing and will never stop changing. Don’t reject a solution because it is imperfect, because all solutions are imperfect. Don’t reject a solution because it costs something, because choosing to act always costs something and choosing not to will cost something else.

The world is messy and complicated because you and I are messy and complicated. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if we could all admit that and be guided by it? In a world where human beings now wield so much power over everything we touch I think it’s time we all admitted how little we know about what we’re doing. The question is, will we ever begin to value humility in a truly practical sense? In ourselves? Our relationships? In the way we do business? And, don’t laugh, in our politics? I don’t know much, but from what little I do know I think humility may be the only path forward for us. This one answer—that we don’t have the answer—may be the answer to how we finally grow up, get past ourselves, talk a little less, listen a lot more, and in this messy, complicated world, come together to build ourselves a beautiful life