Wisdom, Leadership & Success

Welcome back to our second session talking about the Modern Paradigm.

Let’s start with a review of what we learned in our first session on the Modern Paradigm.

For thousands of years, the Wisdom Paradigm was the dominant way of understanding life across all the world’s great societies, cultures and religions.

That was until about 450 years ago when Europe was torn apart by more than 100 years of religious wars that killed millions of people and devastated nations.

With Europe broken politically, spiritually and financially, European thinkers tried to come up with a new understanding of life that would allow people of different religions to live together without killing each other.

Modern, European philosophers began to replace the Wisdom Paradigm of understanding life based on purpose and reason with a Modern Paradigm of understanding life based on reason alone.

Reason is good at handling measurable, quantitative things and not very good at handling things that are tough to measure.

So modern thinkers split life into a public side of life for subjects that reason can tackle easily, and the private-personal side of life for subjects that reason has trouble with like religion, feelings and happiness.

Subjects like business, science, economics and ethics went into the public side of life. The idea was that society could use reason to discuss these issues publicly and get to the Truth about them.

In contrast, issues like Happiness, purpose, meaning, love and feelings went into the private-personal side of life. Putting them in the private side of life meant that they didn’t have to be talked about publicly. You could believe and talk about whatever you wanted in your private life.

The Wisdom Paradigm has covenant relationships—where the good of the individual and team are the same. Modern philosophers replaced those with Modern contract relationships where what’s good for the individual and team are opposite.

The Modern split of life into public and private sides made some important issues, like human nature, fulfillment and the meaning of life, much more complicated.

Modern thinkers invented disciplines, like psychology and psychiatry, to try to understand human nature using reason alone, but these disciplines can’t answer important questions about meaning or purpose in life.

When it comes to motivating people, Modern philosophers had to drop Wisdom concepts of Happiness and fulfillment—they were now on the private side of life. Instead, Modern thinkers tried to explain motivation in terms of quantifiable things like money.

Finally, when Modern philosophers dropped purpose, they lost the primary explanation for moral objectivity—for the existence of moral facts—like it’s a fact that slavery is wrong.

They tried to replace the justification for moral facts using pure reason alone, but that eventually failed. Morality and ethics went from being facts in the public side of life to being personal opinions on the private side of life.

That’s where we are so far in the Modern Paradigm. In this session we’re going to tackle how the Modern Paradigm looks at life, and the nature of Truth and knowledge, history, success and rules.

Truth and Knowledge

In the Wisdom Paradigm, the emphasis is on the development of, wait for it, wisdom.

Remember that wisdom is knowledge plus character. Wisdom is when you have knowledge of the Truth and the character to live the Truth. As you increase your knowledge and develop character more and more, you gain wisdom.

Wisdom is the knowledge and character you need to become a good person who develops good relationships and achieves Happiness in life.

The Book of Wisdom is Scripture because scripture contains the Truth and knowledge you need to live a good life and become a good person.

People gain wisdom through formation, a process that develops both intellectual knowledge and good character for Happiness.

The new, Modern Paradigm has a different take on all this.

The Modern Paradigm believes that there is objective Truth, but focuses on pure reason and information to get there. In fact, a big reason that Modern philosophers reject purpose is that they think a focus on purpose leads away from objective Truth.

The Modern Paradigm goes from a focus on wisdom—knowledge plus character—to a focus on knowledge alone. Character and the emphasis on life get replaced by a focus on academic knowledge and information.

The point isn’t to learn about life. In the Modern Paradigm, the point is to use reason to learn all there is to know in the universe.

The Modern approach to knowledge is straightforward. If we understand knowledge as information, then we can divide all knowledge into a spectrum of subjects like history, sociology, literature, chemistry and physics. Then we can break these subject areas down into thinner and thinner slices and study each of them.

For instance, we can divide chemistry into analytic, organic, physical, bio, inorganic and polymer chemistries.

Then we can assign scientists and PhD students to research each thin slice.

Sound familiar?

The wisdom PhD focuses on how all areas of life fit together to gain wisdom about life, so you can live a good and happy life.

In contrast, the modern PhD focuses on a small slice of knowledge and produces a highly technical dissertation like the Stereochemistry of the Vicinal Hydride Shift (McRowe 1966).

The idea is that given enough time and scientists, we can know everything there is to know.

Then we’ll collect all that information and publish it in the Modern Paradigm’s book of all knowledge—the encyclopedia.

Scripture, the book of wisdom, is replaced by the modern encyclopedia, the book of all knowledge.

Underneath all of this is a modern temptation to believe that by knowing everything, we can solve all our problems ourselves. By using reason, science and technology, we can create our own utopia.

The Wisdom Paradigm uses formation to develop both knowledge and character in young people so they can develop wisdom for Happiness in life. Performing arts and athletics are as important as the classroom in developing the character, teamwork and leadership that leads to wisdom, great relationships and Happiness.

The Modern Paradigm uses a different method—education—to develop the knowledge needed to get a good job and be a productive member of society.

We see this in our education system today. Our modern education system is all about academic grades and test results in the classroom. When school budgets are tight, programs like performing arts and athletics get cut.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, research is naturally focused on things that will help us gain knowledge to become good people in a good society. In the Wisdom Paradigm, it doesn’t make sense to pursue science or technology that would make our society bad.

In the Modern Paradigm, however, research is done for its own sake—whether it helps humanity become good or not.

Over time, the overwhelming modern focus on knowledge and information overrides moral or ethical considerations—which largely move from the public side of life into the private side anyway.

So, as a public ethics and morality evaporate over time, the only restrictions to the pursuit of science and technology are the personal morality of the scientist and the ever-changing social conventions of the time.

In the Modern Paradigm, knowledge, science and technology do not exist to help us become good. They exist for their own sake.

Measure of Success

In the Wisdom Paradigm, the measure of success is honor. Are you a good person with character worthy of honor? Do you have love, honesty, justice, wisdom, courage and integrity?

In the Wisdom Paradigm, the successful person is one who is honorable, develops good relationships and achieves his purpose in life—Happiness.

The Modern Paradigm looks at success in a very different way.

In the Modern Paradigm anything having to do with Happiness or purpose belongs in the private side of life. It’s personal. That means the measure of success is really a private or personal issue.

The way you measure success in your life may be very different from the way I measure of success in my life.

That makes it impossible to have a common, public understanding of success in public life.

So, the Modern Paradigm has an unending, unsolvable argument about what success means in life. Some will say success is about money. Some might argue for fulfillment.

There will be dozens of other opinions as well, with no ability for a modern community to agree on a definition of success.

Its personal.

That said, with the Modern Paradigm’s emphasis on reason and what can be measured and quantified, people will be biased to measure success in life in terms of money.

Here’s perhaps the biggest danger.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, it is very clear what life is about—good relationships and Happiness. Everyone knows their purpose in life and how to get there. Society is bound together by a shared understanding of purpose and the virtues.

In the Modern Paradigm, however, all that gets tossed out the window. Or rather tossed out of the public side and into the private side of life.

There is no shared understanding of meaning or purpose in life. No shared understanding of how to measure success in life.

The fundamental, shared things that bound us together as community begin to break down.

One more thing that pushes us further off course.

Work

In the Wisdom Paradigm, work is fully integrated with the rest of your life. There is no work-life and private life. There is just one life and work is a key part of it. Work is a great place to practice virtues, become a good person, develop good relationships and achieve Happiness.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, you should find fulfillment in your work and your relationships at work.

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Welcome back to our ongoing series about the history of the ongoing conflict in America—and how we fix it.

In our last three blogs, we discussed the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm—the dominant way of understanding life for thousands of years—for almost all cultures, religions and philosophies.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that human nature has been the same through history, and that we all have the same destination in life, the same purpose, which is Happiness, fulfillment.

Happiness comes from having good relationships—with ourselves and with others.

If Happiness is our destination and purpose, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there.

Reason tells us that it’s a fact that if we practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, we will become good people prepared for good relationships and Happiness.

Finally, the Wisdom Paradigm sees human relationships as fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.

Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible. In the deepest covenant relationships, people are willing to die for each other out of love.

The Wisdom Paradigm was the right track for the ongoing development of humanity—until we took a wrong turn and got off track several hundred years ago.

What happened? What got us off-track?

Religious Wars in Europe

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was overcome by a series of religious wars that raged for hundreds of years.

These religious wars devastated large parts of France and Germany, and led to the deaths of millions of people. The wars took a terrible toll on Europe, impoverishing millions more and driving governments to bankruptcy.

In many areas, there was anarchy as rival armies marched back and forth, plundering everything. Civil wars broke out as people took advantage of religious differences and bankrupt rulers to take power themselves.

The suffering throughout Europe was enormous and long-lasting in a way that is hard for us to understand today. Think of the devastation of the civil war in Syria, but across Europe and for a hundred years.

People and nations became exhausted and impatient by the suffering that seemed to be unending and systemic.

Thinkers began to search for a new way to understand life—a new paradigm—that could get them out of the terrible religious and political conflicts.

They needed to find a way for people of different religions to live together without killing each other. This led to the is the rise of political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau that you may remember from your political sci class in college.

The Modern Paradigm--Reason Alone

The Wisdom Paradigm is based on a foundation of purpose and reason. As we said in earlier blogs, our purpose, Happiness, is our destination in life and reason tells us how to get there.

Ever since Europe had become Christian, faith had taken the role of purpose. So, for European Christian civilizations, the equation was essentially faith/purpose and reason. Faith provided the purpose, the destination (salvation), and reason helped people understand what was needed to achieve salvation.

The horrific wars in Europe were over religion, over faith, over what people understood to be their purpose or destination in life.

So, for many European philosophers, the answer to ending the vast suffering was obvious. Let’s drop that thing, faith, over which we’re killing each other, and reconstruct our entire understanding of life in terms of reason by itself.

They do that by splitting life into public and private.

Instead of the Wisdom Paradigm’s understanding of life as a unified whole focused on Happiness, the Modern Paradigm splits life into your public life and your private, or personal life.

Public life is what reason can more easily discuss. Public life is the quantifiable side of life.

Private life contains the things that reason has difficulty discussing, like faith, love, purpose and meaning, because they are either hard to quantify or they are personal.

The modern philosophers believed that to get to objective Truth, it was very important to eliminate the superstitious influence of faith and religion. So, modern thinkers put faith, religion, purpose and feelings all into the private side of life. These subjects are not matters of reason. They are subjective. Matters of personal opinion.

The public side of life is where reason can be applied to pursue the Truth. Objective Truth. The public side of life includes business, politics, science and other subjects that can be analyzed using reason.

At first, morality was on the public side of life. But over time, as morality became more difficult to justify with reason alone, it appeared to become more subjective. Morality became more a matter of opinion than fact and moved from the public side of life to the private side.

Today, most young people consider morality to be a subjective, personal issue.

When this division of life into public and private happened in Europe, pretty much everyone at the time in Europe was Christian. So, while faith and purpose are put in our personal-private side of life, everyone pretty much shared a common understanding of our purpose in life—Happiness and salvation.

We just don’t talk about it publicly as a community.

Keep that in mind—that we stopped talking publicly about purpose, Happiness and salvation in life—because that will come back to haunt us after a few hundred years.

So, for public life, no more purpose plus knowledge. The Modern Paradigm bases everything on reason alone.

Basing this new, Modern Paradigm, on reason alone seemed to make sense. Reason is a powerful tool that seems to point us reliably at the Truth. Reason is something all rational people share, that we can use together outside of religion to get to the Truth.

In other words, we’ll stop basing our understanding of life on something about which we violently disagree (religion) and base it on something on which we all agree (reason).

And so many of the philosophers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries introduced us to the Age of Reason and the Age of the Enlightenment. Collectively, they helped reconstruct our understanding of life, moving us from a Wisdom Paradigm based on faith/purpose and reason to a Modern Paradigm largely focused on reason.

What’s really important to remember here is that purpose—becoming good and achieving Happiness—no longer serves as the central, unifying element that ties our understanding of life together. The Modern Paradigm has switched it to r

Human Nature

In the Wisdom Paradigm, we have to understand human nature to understand life, our purpose in life and fulfillment. Human nature is the starting point for everything that follows including morality, relationships, Happiness, work and the meaning of life.

In the Modern Paradigm, with purpose and Happiness moved from public life to private life, understanding human nature is not as important.

Imagine a person suffering deeply from a question about the meaning of life. In the Wisdom Paradigm, when you ask, “What is the meaning of life?” the answer is obvious: to achieve Happiness.

The Modern Paradigm has a problem here.

On the public side of life, the Modern Paradigm can study human nature from a scientific perspective. We call that psychology and psychiatry. A scientific understanding of how the mind works in individuals and how minds work in groups is valuable in a wide variety of areas including educational, industrial and social psychologies.

But when it comes to purpose or meaning, the Modern Paradigm hits a roadblock.

Remember that science, on the public side of life, can tell us the how and the what about things, but—because the Modern Paradigm rejects purpose—science cannot tell us about the why of things.

So, science cannot tell us about our purpose or meaning in life. In the Modern Paradigm, questions about purpose or meaning or why are relegated to the private side of life.

When a person who is really suffering from a question about the meaning of life, modern psychology is going to be unable to answer that question. With the modern separation of life into public and private, questions about human nature and purpose are usually tackled in terms of one’s religion or spirituality.

And so, with the Modern Paradigm’s separation of life into the public and private, deep questions about the meaning of life get two hard-to-reconcile answers.

You get one answer from the Modern psychologist in public life and—almost inevitably—a very different answer from a minister in your private life who is coming from the Wisdom Paradigm.

Over time, this inability for the Modern Paradigm to talk about the deep, most important questions about life is going to cause huge problems for our society.

When people think that there’s no meaning or purpose in life, bad things happen.

From Wisdom Covenant to Modern Contract Relationships

The breakdown of society in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries made Modern philosophers take a new look at human relationships.

Modern thinkers started with the idea that humans are radically free individuals in a state of nature without basic, pre-existing relationships with others.

These individuals have lots of freedom to do whatever they want, but don’t have much security, because other people are free to do bad things to them.

So, the Modern Paradigm says that people come together in a social contract where they give up some of their freedom to the community and get more security in return.

The Modern Paradigm tends to treat all relationships—from family to business—as essentially contract relationships.

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Wisdom Paradigm Part 3

Welcome back to our third and last session talking about the Wisdom Paradigm. The better you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the more successful you can be in all aspects of your life—at work, at home and with your family.

For thousands of years, the Wisdom Paradigm had us on the right track developing towards goodness and Happiness—until we took a wrong turn a few centuries ago into the Modern Paradigm. We’ll talk about that wrong turn, what happened and the Modern Paradigm in our next podcast.

Here’s a little review of the Wisdom Paradigm so far.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that times and cultures and technology change, but human nature doesn’t change. Human nature has been the same throughout history and will remain the same in the future. Our DNA is what makes us a homo sapiens. Our human nature is what makes us human.

We all have the same purpose, the same destination in life—Happiness. Happiness comes from good relationships.

If you want to be happy in life, become a good person who develops good relationships.

There is an objective morality with moral facts—like it’s a fact that the Holocaust and slavery are wrong. It’s also a fact that if you practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, you’ll become a good person with good relationships who achieves Happiness.

All human beings are social beings who thrive in relationships. We are at our best in Wisdom covenant relationships where the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. The more you put into the team, the more you grow your skills, character, teamwork and leadership. The more the team invests in its people, the better the team gets.

Covenant relationships are the highest trust, highest stability and highest performance relationships.

Wisdom is knowledge plus character. The more you know about the Truth and the better you live that Truth—your character—the more wisdom you will develop in life. Wisdom is really knowledge about life itself.

So, life itself is pretty straightforward. Become a good person who has good relationships and you’ll be happy in life. It’s that simple.

Why are we so burned out in our society today? Why are we unhappy and anxious? Why have the depression and suicide rates skyrocketed—especially for young people?

Because we lost our focus on good relationships and Happiness, and got distracted chasing things like money, fame, social media, status, technology, immortality and technology.

Anything that distracts us from the fundamental Truth of good relationships is going to eventually lead to unhappiness, anxiety, depression and other bad outcomes.

With these lessons in mind, let’s jump into our last blog learning the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm.

WORK

Fisher, smith, shoemaker, miller, weaver, mason, carpenter…  What are these?

In the Wisdom Paradigm, and in earlier times, if your name was Smith, you were probably the blacksmith in town. If your name was Weaver, it was probably because your family wove fabric. Miller was the man who milled the grain into flour. You can probably figure out Fisher, Shoemaker, Mason and Carpenter on your own.

Smith was not a job, not something that you did just for money. It was more of a vocation, a calling, a fundamental part of who you were. Smith was a fundamental part of your identity. As the smith, your work represented you personally. Your work was your reputation, your identity, who you were.

As the weaver, the quality and finish of your fabric reflected you directly. Your work contained, expressed and embodied you. Your work was you and you were your work.

In contrast, today, work is a job. A job is about earning money, making a living, so you can eventually retire and do the things you find fulfilling. We don’t think of work and fulfillment as going hand in hand. We’re often told that we’re not supposed to find our work fulfilling.

Today we divide everything into our professional-work life and our personal-private life, but in the Wisdom Paradigm, there is no such separation.

The Wisdom Paradigm understands that everything in life is focused on becoming good and achieving Happiness. Work is one of the best places to practice the virtues, become good and develop relationships.

Any work, no matter how grimy, nasty or subordinate, is honorable, good and dignified if it gives you the chance to practice the virtues and become good.

Remember, you become what you do. You become what you practice. Better to be the lowliest worker in the nastiest job who practices honesty, justice and love and develops good relationships than to be a billionaire CEO who practices greed and exploitation.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, work is a fantastic opportunity to practice the virtues, become a good person and develop the strong relationships you need for Happiness.

WHAT ARE RULES FOR?

Rules provide us guidance that helps us get better faster than if we had to figure out things on our own.

Let’s say you want to learn how to play cricket. You could walk out on the field with a willow and a bail, and try to figure out on your own what is going on with the creases, wickets, bowling and the googly. While this is an option, it is probably going to be a long time before you have a clue what is going on in a match, and even longer before you can play cricket yourself.

A much better option is to find a cricket expert, a coach, and ask him to teach you the game.

The coach will teach you the Laws of Cricket and show you how to be a striker, how to play as a fielder and how to bowl. He will teach you how to hold the bail, make your run up and use your wrist in your bowling delivery. He will have you practice the techniques you need to become the best cricket player you can be in the shortest amount of time.

The same is true of just about any activity you want to learn.

If you want to play piano, you find a good piano instructor who will teach you the rules of playing good piano. You will learn and practice the scales, then play works ranging from simple to complex.

In basketball, the coach will teach you how to dribble and shoot the ball, and how to play defense. He will also teach you other rules of thumb of the game—like not making long, cross-court passes.

Knowing and practicing the rules will make you a better pianist or basketball player than if you tried to figure it out on your own.

We all know that the best way to learn anything is to find an expert, a master of that activity, who can teach us the rules we need to be good at that activity. If we listen and practice those rules, we might become masters of that activity ourselves.

A master of an activity is one who intuitively understands all aspects of the activity and how they fit together. A master can feel the flow of the activity and can see where things are going, how things are unfolding, long before others.

Take Michael Jordan on the basketball court or Wayne Gretzky on the ice.

Jordan and Gretzky were accomplished masters of their sports. They knew where all the other players were, how they were playing together (or not), and therefore intuitively felt the flow and direction of the game. They knew when opportunities were opening or closing. They could feel to a split second when the ball or puck had to be passed or shot. They had great vision. They knew what was going to happen in the game before anyone else did.

When you are really good at your sport or music or art or writing—when you have learned and demonstrated everything about that activity—you become a master. As a master, you get artistic license to experiment with the rules. You can experiment by playing the musical piece in different ways. You can experiment with color in new ways on the canvas.

As a master, you are in the best position to teach—to coach—others on that activity.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, rules are really the wisdom of the masters expressed in a simplified way to help us become good at something as quickly as possible.

Good at raising a family. Good at work. Good at cricket.

And, with enough commitment, practice and perseverance, good at life.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, rules exist to help you become good.

FREEDOM

Freedom has several important meanings in the Wisdom Paradigm.

First, we must have freedom to pursue Truth and goodness. Wisdom requires being free to make and learn from mistakes.

Second, freedom in the Wisdom Paradigm means freedom from the vices and addictions that can so easily own us. The more you practice the virtues, the less likely you are to be caught up in life-destroying addictions like drug use, alcoholism, gambling or sex addiction. Freedom means freedom from the chains of addiction.

Finally, we all possess different qualities, talents and interests. Some people have talents and interests that make them good physicians. Others possess talents and interests to be business people, serve their nation in the military or public safety, or be artists, parents, coaches, ministers or practice a trade.

In earlier times, people were often limited by class structure, race, ethnicity or education in the work they could pursue, and the talents they could develop.

A big part of achieving fulfillment in life is the opportunity—the freedom—to pursue your talents and interests. The freedom to pursue your life in terms of your talents is where fulfillment and Happiness are maximized. It is the place where the greatest discoveries and insights about life occur.

It is important that people have the freedom to develop their talents and pursue their interests.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, freedom means the freedom to make mistakes, freedom from addiction and freedom to pursue your path to Happiness.

Most important, Happiness is only possible and meaningful if it is the result of our own free choice to become good. That means you must be free to choose goodness and Happiness.

WRAP UP

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Wisdom and Relationships

In our last blog, we talked about the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm. The better you understand the Wisdom Paradigm, the happier and more successful you’re going to be in life.

Let’s review some of the anchor points from our last session.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, culture and times may change, but human nature has remained the same throughout history.

Life is about pursuing Happiness—the fulfillment of our human nature. What brings us Happiness in life? The answer: Good relationships.

If our destination or purpose in life is Happiness, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there. Reason tells us that it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice, courage and love, will make us good people ready for good relationships and Happiness.

This combination of purpose and reason—purpose tells us our destination, Happiness, and reason tells us how to get there—is the critical foundation for everything in the Wisdom Paradigm.

Finally, your life is your story of how you use your gifts and talents to pursue Happiness.

In this session, we’ll talk about more anchor points in the Wisdom Paradigm—especially relationships, truth and morality. Here’s a summary.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that all people are basically social beings. That’s why we find Happiness and fulfillment in relationships.

The purpose of every community—of every organized group of people—is to become good. Communities pursuing goodness help the people in the community become good. That puts everyone on the path for good relationships and Happiness.

We’re going to use the word “team” for all types of communities or groups of people ranging from families and neighborhood groups to businesses and political communities.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. We call this a covenant relationship. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.

Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-stability and high-performance relationships.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice and love make us good people, ready for good relationships and Happiness. That means there is an objective morality with moral facts. Morality is not just a matter of personal opinion.

The Wisdom Paradigm also teaches that there is objective Truth. The pursuit and discovery of the Truth about life is a fundamental part of our pursuit of Happiness.

In the Wisdom Paradigm we don’t just pursue knowledge, we pursue wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the Truth combined with the character to live that Truth.

When you know and practice the Truth over and over in life, you develop wisdom. This process of developing wisdom is called formation.

What is the proper motivation in life? Not money or social status, but the pursuit of Happiness.

That means that we don’t measure success in life by our bank account or social media followers. Success in life is measured by the goodness, honor and Happiness we achieve through the good relationships we have.

Let’s dive in.

Humans are Social Beings

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that human beings are fundamentally social beings.

Being human means relationship is a fundamental part of our human experience.

From the very beginning, we are born into a family relationship. Children who have good, healthy relationships with their parents have the best chance of turning out well in life.

Relationship is a critical part of our lives. Think about the importance of relationships in grammar school and high school.

We want to share our good times with friends. We need the support of friends when times are difficult.

Sharing experiences with friends is deeply fulfilling. Being bullied is devastating.

You become who you hang around.

Our deepest joys include friendship, marriage and family.

One of our deepest fears is being left alone. Solitary confinement in prison is considered to be cruel punishment, even torture, because it deprives us of something we so deeply need: relationship.

Our desire to love and be loved is at the very core of our human nature.

We cannot fully understand a person unless we also understand their social relationships. What is their family life like? What is their ethnicity, culture and religion? What are their interests, activities and sports? Who are their friends?

We can’t understand a person until we answer these questions because we are so deeply impacted, shaped and formed by the communities in which we grow.

The Purpose of All Teams is to Become Good

The purpose of all communities is to become good and help each of us us—as individuals—to become good.

Community means any group of people organized for just about any reason including teams, families, companies, organizations, churches, neighborhoods, community service groups, schools, etc.

To keep things easy, we’ll use the word team to refer to all these different types of communities.

A good team is just like a good person. A good team has virtues like honesty, justice, courage, wisdom and love.

Goodness brings teams the same benefits it brings any person. When your team is honest, just, wise and loving, you will have better, more fulfilling relationships. Good relationships mean your team will perform much better—whether your team is your family, company, athletic team, non-profit, church, or whatever.

We’ve all seen teams outperform expectations because they were deeply committed to each other. We’ve all seen teams fail because they are torn apart by vices like selfishness, unfairness or dishonesty.

A team becomes good the same way a person does: practicing the virtues as it pursues its mission.

That means a sports team becomes good by practicing honesty, justice and courage by trying to win games.

Your family becomes good by practicing the virtues as you try to raise good children.

A company, a non-profit, the military and a church all become good while practicing the virtues as they provide products and services, defend the nation or help people understand God.

Good teams have better, higher-trust and higher-performance relationships than teams who lack virtues. That’s why good teams outperform poor teams.

Remember that the purpose of all teams is the same—to become good—though they pursue goodness through different missions.

Covenant Relationships

In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. This is called a covenant relationship.

A team is only as good as the people who make up that team. The better the teammates are, the better the team will be.

To get the best team possible, the team must invest in its people. The more the team invests in each of the teammates—in their skills, teamwork, character and leadership, the more successful the team will be.

On the flip side, if you want to become a good person, joining a good team is the best way to practice developing the virtues that will make you good.

You become what you do. The more effort you put into the team, the more you will grow in your skills, teamwork, character and leadership. And the more successful you’ll become in all aspects of your life—family, work and community.

It is almost always better to practice the virtues as part of a team than it is to practice them on your own because your teammates will push you harder than you will push yourself. Some virtues—like love and justice—require relationship and can only be developed as part of a team.

So, the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more the team invests in each member, the better the team gets. The more the individual invests in the team, the better the individual gets. The more you put a covenant team under pressure, the tighter the team gets.

This isn’t a relationship based on power or transaction. This is a relationship grounded in a promise—a covenant—between the team and each teammate. That’s why it’s called a covenant relationship. The deepest covenant relationships are grounded in love.

If you’ve been part of a championship sports or work team, or been in the US military, you have probably experienced this type of relationship. A relationship where everyone is close, trust is high and the commitment to each other is very deep. No one is in it for the money. Everyone is in it because they care about it each other. You put your life on the line for a teammate.

Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, all relationships—including friends, family and work—should be practiced as covenant relationships.

For example, when you do a business deal, you should make it a covenant relationship with the other party.

In a covenant relationship, what’s good for you and client are the same. Use the deal, the relationship, as an opportunity to become good by practicing the virtues. This will create a high-trust, stable relationship with your client. That high-trust, covenant relationship itself is valuable because it increases performance and efficiency, and reduces risk.

Objective Morality

Today, people—especially younger people—tend to believe that morality is a matter of opinion, not fact.

In contrast, the Wisdom Paradigm teaches that there is an objective morality with moral facts. Like it’s a fact that the Holocaust and slavery are wrong.

That means there is a right and wrong that are not dependent on personal opinion or a particular culture, but are facts that are true for all people throughout history.

For example, the Wisdom Paradigm teaches that it is not just a matter of opinion, but a fact that honesty, justice, courage and love are right and true.

How can we know there are moral facts and not just opinions?

...

With all the wealth and education and technology that we have today, why does life feel disorienting and confusing?

Why are supposedly smart people saying and doing things that are absurd and contradictory?

Why do we feel like basic morality has collapsed and we’re headed the wrong direction?

Welcome back for the third blog in a series that tells the story of how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it.

As we discussed in earlier blogs, the confusion and disorientation we are feeling are big-time indicators that we are in the wrong place headed the wrong direction.

The collapse of morality? Important people saying absurd things? A dramatic increase in depression and suicide? More obvious signs that we’re in the wrong place headed the wrong way.

We drifted off-course somewhere, and life and society have slowly broken down ever since.

We’re looking at life the wrong way. We’re disoriented. We need to find our anchor points and get back on course.

Let’s find the best way to understand life—let’s find the Truth about life—so we can pursue Happiness and thrive.

So, what was our original course? What was the original paradigm—the original way of understanding life—that we drifted from?

The Wisdom Paradigm.

The more you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the better you will understand life, and the happier and more successful you will be.

The Wisdom Paradigm is the basic way that people have understood life for thousands of years. It is common to all the world’s great philosophies and religions.

Here are the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm:

We all have the same human nature. Times change, technology changes, but human nature has stayed the same through cultures and history

We all have the same purpose in life: Happiness. Happiness is the fulfillment of our human nature, it’s our purpose, our destination in life.

Happiness comes from having good relationships.

Our lives are our unique stories of pursuing Happiness. Happiness is our destination in life. Reason tells us how to get there.

Our relationships can only be as good as we are, so become a good person with good character. Practice virtues like love, courage and wisdom until they become who you are.

The Wisdom Paradigm

The Wisdom Paradigm has been around for thousands of years. At its core, the Wisdom Paradigm is based on the idea that we all have the same human nature and therefore the same purpose in life—Happiness.

Happiness simply is the fulfillment of our human nature.

Looking back in history, no matter what culture or time period, we can see that human nature doesn’t change.

That’s why we all understand things like love, fear, courage, and joy largely the same way no matter our culture, ethnicity or time. The fact that we have the same human nature, the same concerns about life and death, and family, is what unites us as one humanity across cultures and time.

While our DNA is what makes us homo sapiens, it is our shared human nature that makes us all human.

We can read Shakespeare today because, 400 years after his death, what he said about love, betrayal, humor and ambition remains wise and relevant to us.

King David wrote the Psalms 3,000 years ago as a reflection on the challenges, achievements and joys of his life. We read them today because we find their wisdom and guidance valuable even though we live in a completely different culture and time.

Confucius wrote The Analects 2,500 years ago in a distant culture and time. We read them because they contain valuable insights into human nature and life that apply today.

Even when we go back 4,000 years to the most ancient written story we have—the Epic of Gilgamesh—we can relate to Gilgamesh’s experience of brotherhood, love, meaning in life, and mortality. Why can we do that? Because Gilgamesh shares the same human nature with us. Because human nature is timeless.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, times change and cultures change, but human nature remains the same.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, since all people have the same human nature, all people seek the same kind of fulfillment in life.

Christians call that fulfillment salvation. Others refer to that fulfillment as nirvana or moksha. Some refer to human nature being fulfilled as flourishing. Aristotle taught that humans seek fulfillment that he called Happiness.

While there are important differences between each of these understandings of fulfillment or Happiness, they all share fundamental qualities:

Meaning and purpose in life

Joy

Freedom

Total contentment

No more pain or suffering

The sacred

Participation in something deeply profound and transcendent.

For our purposes, we’ll bring all these concepts of fulfillment, like salvation and nirvana, together under the term Happiness. For us, fulfillment and Happiness are the same.

The anchor point to remember here? It’s this: Because we all have the same human nature, we all have the same destination, the same purpose in life. Fulfillment. Happiness.

So, how do we get Happiness?

Happiness is All About Relationships

Happiness is all about having good relationships in life.

For more than 80 years, Harvard has been conducting the Study on Adult Development. They’ve followed thousands of people through life, measuring them in more than 100 different ways.

One of the clearest conclusions of the study is that Happiness in life is all about having high-quality relationships. When you have good relationships, you are not only happier and more fulfilled, but you are healthier and live longer.

The link between Happiness and relationships shouldn’t be a surprise.

We are happiest when we are in love or in relationship with a good people. When we have a big achievement in life, we want to share that with someone.

On the other hand, when people don’t have good relationships, they get unhappy and depressed.

Want to drive a prisoner crazy? Put him in solitary confinement.

The worst kind of bullying isn’t when someone is yelling or intimidating you. The worst kind of bullying is when you are shunned. Cut off from relationship.

One of the most important relationships for Happiness is the relationship you have with yourself. Have you developed virtues like love and self-discipline so that you are in control of yourself? Or do things like addiction, lust or food control you?

Here's the anchor point: Happiness in life is all about good relationships with family, friends, God and yourself.

Purpose and Reason

We know our destination, our purpose, in life. That’s Happiness. Now we need to use reason to figure out how to get there.

This combination of purpose and reason is very important. It has everything to do with the wrong turn we made that took us off-course and got us in the mess we’re in. So, let’s go deeper into this critical combination of purpose and reason.

Imagine that we’re a community of people living in New York City and our purpose is to travel to San Diego, California.

When we know what our destination is, San Diego, we can use reason to figure out how to get there. Reason tells us that if we want to travel from New York to San Diego, we must travel southwest.

It is a fact that if we travel southwest from New York, we are headed the right direction to get to our destination. It is also a fact that if we travel any other direction, east for instance, we will be headed the wrong direction.

That seems obvious enough, but there’s something really important here. After we travel southwest for a while, its tempting to think that “traveling southwest” is the right direction on its own.

In reality, though, traveling southwest is only the right direction because that’s the way to go to get to San Diego.

If the destination changes to London, then it’s a fact that southwest is the wrong direction.

And if you lose the destination, then any direction becomes ok.

We’re going to find that honesty, justice and courage are moral facts because it’s a fact that they help us become good people traveling towards our destination—Happiness.

And it’s a fact that dishonesty, cowardice and addiction are wrong because they take us away from our destination—Happiness.

When we lose our destination of Happiness, then we lose the justification for saying that it’s a fact that honesty, justice and love are right. Over time, they will change from moral facts to just personal opinions.

When our society no longer has a destination, then it becomes impossible to say that it’s a fact that one direction is right and another wrong. Anything goes.

So, this combination of purpose, destination, and reason is the very thing that unites our society. It is absolutely essential.

No surprise here. Leaders know that teams are united by having the same goal.

Society is built on the reality that we all have the same human nature and therefore the same purpose in life: Happiness. Reason tells us that to get there: we have to be good people who can engage in good relationships.

Without a shared purpose and reason, our society will fall apart as everyone heads off in their own direction for their own reasons.

Sound familiar?

The anchor points here? Our purpose, our destination in life, is Happiness. Reason tells us how to get there. Drop the destination, drop our purpose, and everything inevitably falls apart.

The Virtues

So, what does reason tell us about how to achieve good relationships and Happiness?

Good relationships are grounded in mutual trust. The more trust, the stronger and better the relationship.

To have high-trust relationships with good people, we need to be a good people ourselves.

We become good by practicing the virtues like honesty, justice, courage and love. The more often and intensely you practice these virtues, the more they become your character. They become who you are.

Flip it. You become what you do....

Basket-Foot-Golf: How Paradigms Work

In our last session, I teased you with some imagery.

Imagine walking on an athletic field and seeing a group of people trying to dribble footballs through a sand trap. Take second to really visualize that.

To our left, there is a coach talking about the proper golf club selections for the free throw line and goal line.

To our right, we see a person wearing shoulder pads put a big orange ball on top of a small white tee, and try to hit it with a 5 iron.

Behind us a person practices kicking a small dimpled white ball from behind the three-point line painted on a strip of grass.

One coach is teaching a seminar on how to score the most strokes. Another is teaching a seminar on how to score the fewest baskets. Which one is right?

As the participants go through this, they seem confused. Disoriented. Their activity doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose. It is just what they are doing.

What the heck is going on?

When we came upon this scene, most of us quickly recognized the orange ball as a basketball, the white ball as a golf ball, and the brown oblong ball with stitching as a football. The clubs people are using are golf clubs. The tees are golf tees and football kicking tees.

Of course the participants are confused and disoriented. They’re trying to play three unrelated sports simultaneously. They are confusing football, basketball and golf. Watching this, we know quickly that whatever they are trying to do, it will never work.

These three sports are all ways to understand and play a game, but they are very different.

Each sport is a self-contained system independent of the other sports.

Each sport uses the same words like rules, ball, team, playing surface, scoring and win, but the way each sport understands these words is very different. Sometimes the way each sport understands these terms is opposite.

Essentially, each sport is a different paradigm for athletic competition.

What’s a paradigm? A paradigm is defined as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.”

That’s the technical definition of paradigm. A much easier way of thinking about paradigms is the example we’re talking about. Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms—different ways of understanding—how to play a game.

In football, you use a large oval ball, run plays and hit people hard. There are 22 positions with 11 on offense and 11 on defense. You move the ball forward by running with it or passing it. You can make one downfield pass per play. You score by running or passing the ball beyond the goal line, or by kicking the ball through goal posts at the end of the field. You win by scoring more points than your opponent.

In basketball, you use a large round ball and get kicked out of the game for hitting people. You move the ball forward by dribbling it or passing it. You are not allowed to run with it. You pass the ball repeatedly during play. The same five people play on offense as defense. Like football, basketball games have time limits. Unlike football, play is continuous through offense and defense. You score by tossing a ball through a hoop at the end of the court. Like football, you win by scoring more points than the other team.

In golf, you use a small, dimpled ball and move that ball forward by hitting it with a club. You never touch other players and time is not generally kept. While passing the ball is fundamental to the game of football and basketball, throwing a golf ball down the fairway will get you disqualified. You can play as part of a team, but you usually play as an individual. While football and basketball go back and forth on the same playing area, golf is played on 18 different areas. You don’t win by scoring the most points, but by scoring the fewest strokes.

Three very different paradigms for playing a game.

Clearly, this basket-foot-golf activity that we’re watching is a mess that frustrates everyone because they are taught conflicting, even contradictory, things and don’t make any progress.

Everyone is using the same words such as win, ball, team, score, rules and equipment, but are using those words in different and confusing ways.

In this basket-foot-golf activity, players are being taught that you win by scoring the most points and other times the opposite: that you win by scoring the fewest points.

It is crazy. Absurd.

Why Paradigms are Irreconcilable

So, what happened? What’s going on?

In this imagined scenario, several generations ago, only one of the sports was being played. Over time, the other sports gradually started happening in the same space at the same time. The sports became entangled and eventually merged into this chaotic basket-foot-golf mess embodied in dribbling footballs through sand trap and using 5 irons at the free throw line.

The participants don’t know that history. All they have ever known is this one merged basket-foot-golf activity.

There are some important lessons in this.

First, while these sports often use the same words, they mean very different things by those words. This makes everything very confusing.

Each sport uses a ball, but the ball in each sport couldn’t be more different.

Basketball and football use the same term—field goal percentage—but mean and measure very different things by it.

Take the concept of moving the ball forward.

Each sport has a different way of moving the ball forward.

In football you pass the ball or run with it. You never put it on the ground.

In basketball you pass the ball or dribble it. You never run with it

In golf, if you move the ball with anything but a club, you’re disqualified.

Now imagine the basket-foot-golf people having a discussion about moving the ball forward. Because each sport has differing—even opposite ways—of moving the ball forward, there is no common ground for discussion.

Some are going to argue for dribbling. Others are going to argue that putting the ball on the ground is the worst thing ever. Others are going to insist that it’s all about stroke.

If you try to have that discussion, you won’t get anywhere productive. You’ll simply have an argument that turns into an irreconcilable shouting match.

And that’s the first lesson. When paradigms are confused, the same words mean very different things, and that eventually leads to confusion, disorientation and anger.

Failure of the Paradigm Buffet

Second, in our society we tend to approach things with a “buffet mentality.” We like to look at different things, and then pick and choose what we like best to create something new.

So why not treat the sports paradigms like a buffet where we pick and choose what we like most from each sport and then combine them into something new and better?

Unfortunately, that buffet approach with these sports will inevitably end in failure. The sports are self-contained. You can’t mix and match.

You can’t try to maximize your score (basketball and football) while at the same time trying to minimize your score (golf). The concepts contradict each other. It won’t work.

Think of it another way. Imagine an electric motor, a gasoline engine and a jet engine.

The electric motor uses the interaction between the motor’s magnetic field and electric current in a wire winding to rotate a shaft providing power.

The gas engine sparks a fuel-air mixture in a piston that moves the piston up and down to crank a driveshaft providing power.

The jet engine ignites a fuel-air mixture creating tremendous pressure that is directed out a nozzle to provide power.

All of these are engines. All of them provide power. All of them are designed using fundamentally different approaches.

If you try a buffet approach to building engines, mixing and matching parts from the different engines, you don’t get a more powerful engine, you get something that doesn’t work at all.

The same is true about the sports paradigms and life. Any attempt to mix and match pieces between the paradigms—any attempt to play basket-foot-golf—will inevitably end in failure. People trying to do that will become disoriented, confused, frustrated and unhappy.

A buffet mentality won’t work with this.

So, what do we do?

Finding Anchor Points and Untangling the Paradigms

When you understand what’s really going on underneath this basket-foot-golf activity, you can untangle the sports. You can untangle the paradigms.

When the coaches and players see the anchor points of each sport—how that sport defines key things like ball, team, playing surface, scoring, winning, etc.—then they can use those anchor points to recognize and untangle the sports. They can use those anchor points to understand the sport and get really good at it.

When you realize what’s happening, and use the anchor points to untangle the mess and find yourself, the disorientation, confusion and anxiety gets transformed into clarity, excellence and fulfillment.

Why does life seem like an endless chase of pointless things? Why do we feel disoriented? Why are people getting anxious, burned out and depressed?

Because we are being taught conflicting messages from three fundamentally different paradigms of life.

We’re caught in a real-life version of the basket-foot-golf mess. We just don’t recognize it.

Our society has the same problem. We’re yelling at each other—we’re even getting violent with each other—because we have different life paradigms telling us opposite things at the same time.

One life paradigm says there is objective Truth versus another paradigm that says there is no objective Truth, only personal truth.

One life paradigm says there are moral facts, like it’s a fact that killing a person for fun is wrong, versus another paradigm that says there are no moral facts, just moral opinions....

Lost on a Low Level Flight

Back in the last century, when I was in flight school in the Marine Corps, I was stationed for a time in the vacation destination of Kingsville, Texas. At one point, Mother Nature decided to send a massive hurricane our way.

With the hurricane inbound, a young instructor and I—he was 25 years old and I was 23—were told to take one of the jets and go away and get some training done. The instructor decided we were going to practice low-level flights to Houston and Meridian, Mississippi, on our way to Atlanta where his girlfriend lived.

And so, with the hurricane imminent, we took off from Naval Air Station Kingsville as my newlywed wife drove north, by herself, to Dallas to escape.

The low-level flight to Houston was good. We got gas and launched out of Houston.

Now remember, this was last century, way back in the days before GPS and digital cockpit displays.  Low-level navigation flights were designed to teach you how to navigate using a paper map, a compass, and a stopwatch. You flew high-altitude to the start point, dropped down to 500’, accelerated to 420 knots, hit the stopwatch and used the compass to fly the heading to the next checkpoint.

You navigated by flying the correct direction for a certain amount of time where you would, hopefully, find your checkpoint. When you got to the checkpoint you turned the airplane to a new heading and flew that direction for a certain amount of time.

How did you know where you were? By flying the right direction for the right amount of time and looking out the window for terrain features—maybe a road or powerline or river or bridge—that matched your paper map.

Louisiana is flat, so there’s not many hills or mountains to help you stay on route. There are a lot of towns and roads and they all look the same.

We were about 10 seconds late hitting our first checkpoint—a river.

Crossing our second checkpoint—a highway—we were about 25 seconds late. The terrain wasn’t matching what was on the map very well. At one point, I saw a long line of numbered, colored boards go under the airplane. They looked somewhat familiar, but they passed so fast that I couldn’t tell what they were.

Flying the rest of the route was much the same. We were pretty sure we were lost. We got to the end-time for the route and were getting low on gas, so we started our climb to 15,000 feet and called air traffic control to get vectors to Meridian. It took air traffic control some time to find us. We were not where they expected we would be. We had been way off course.

After we landed at Meridian, the tower called us while we taxied and told us to give the Army base, Fort Polk in Louisiana, a phone call.

Fort Polk was quite unhappy because we had flown our orange and white airplane, 500’ high, right through the middle of their tank gunnery range.

While they had tanks lined up and firing.

Those colored, numbered boards? That was the tank range. Fortunately, tank rounds have a flat trajectory and went under us.

We figured out that the compass in our airplane was about 8 degrees off. That caused us to fly a bit north of our intended route. The deviation was small at the beginning but got bigger and bigger the further and longer we flew—until we were way off course.

It almost got us killed. We didn’t know where we were until we climbed to altitude. Air traffic control found us and gave us the reference points we needed to get to Meridian.

There are about 100 good lessons from that flight. Let’s talk about a few.

Lessons From Being Lost

Small Deviations Can Kill You

First, a minor course deviation is insidious over time. It can kill you.

If you start off headed completely the wrong direction, you can realize it quickly. The deviations are big and noticeable. If our compass had been 90 degrees off, we would have figured it out quickly.

When you’re only a little off course though, things are only a little bit off. Especially at the beginning. So, you keep going on your way. You think that things will figure themselves out as you go further.

Over time, however, the deviations get bigger and bigger. You get further off course. The terrain looks less and less familiar. You feel a growing uneasiness that you’re lost.

Bad things—like flying through a tank range while they’re firing—can happen. You can easily run out of gas while looking for a place to land.

Minor deviations in your direction are insidious. They slowly get worse over time. It can kill you.

Keep Your Reference Points

That brings us to lesson number two: Always keep an eye on your reference points. They will tell you whether you are on or off course. If you’re off course, they’ll tell you how far you’re off and how to get back on course.

We got lost flying this low-level route and didn’t read our short-term reference points—the checkpoints and timing—well. In the big picture, however, we knew that if we got lost, we could always climb up to altitude, ask air traffic control to find us, and get vectors to Meridian.

Air traffic control was our most important, strategic, reference point. As long as we didn’t run out of gas, we’d get to Meridian. When we did get lost, that air traffic control reference point got us back on course.

So, keep your reference points—especially the long-term strategic ones. They will save you.

Debrief Your Actions

Third lesson. When the flight is done, debrief what went wrong. After we landed, we sat down, went over the history of our flight, and figured out what went wrong. We realized that our compass had slewed about 8 degrees off over time.

We canceled that low-level into Atlanta and flew at high-altitude instead, cross-checking our compass heading with air traffic control.

Remembering what happened during your journey is critical for understanding where you are, how you got there, and how to stay on course.

Lesson One: Small deviations are insidious and can kill you.

Lesson Two: Keep an eye on your reference points so you can tell if you’re lost and get back on track if needed.

Three: The history of your journey is critical to understanding where you are, how you got there and why you’re there.

If you don’t remember these things, if you don’t keep these reference points, you run the risk of being perpetually lost with tragic—even deadly—consequences.

***

I think these lessons are critical as we think about our lives and our nation.

We’re lost. Disoriented. We don’t know where we are, how we got here, why we’re here or even where we’re supposed to be headed. We’ve lost our reference points.

Lost in Life

If you’re like most of us, life moves so fast that it is difficult to keep up.

Most of us go through life chasing what we think—what we’ve been told—we’re supposed to chase.

Go to the right college. Find a job that is prestigious, changes the world, pays well and is in a hip city.

Make sure your kids are in Honors classes in the best schools while you chase unending travel ball tournaments. Hire private coaches so your kid—who is highly ranked nationally in the U8 group—remains highly ranked when she gets to U11.

Are you saving the whales and dolphins and dogs and elephants and not using plastic straws or single use containers? Are you embracing meatless burgers, kombucha and tiger-nut milk as part of your keto-paleo-south park-adkins-intermittent fasting diet?

Sorry. Kombucha is so 2014 and tiger-milk is so 2018. Swap those for orange wine and milkshake IPA’s. Those are 2019.

Don’t forget to outperform in the workplace while avoiding weekend email and saving time between your wine-tasting micro-vacations, meditation, you-down-time and HIIT to get to those weekend travel ball tournaments.

By the way, a heads-up that cool people in 2019 may start replacing their Pelotons with a return to retro treadmills.

Drink the latest drinks. Dine at the latest restaurants. Take the latest vacations. Drive the latest cars. Electric cars.

Another heads up: If you haven’t planned your conscious travel, curated experiences or tech detox vacations, you’re behind.

That’s the first part of a long list of the things you are supposed to do in life.

Don’t forget to post it all on social media so everyone knows just how successful you are. You’ll know you’ve really made it when you’re able to sell ads on your social media.

How are you doing on that success list? Feeling the stress and anxiety of not measuring up?

No wonder that our stress and anxiety and suicide and unhappiness rates are rising.

All this even though we have more wealth, education and technology than any time in history.

How did we get here in our lives? Where is all of this supposed to take us?

America: Lost as a Nation

Then there is all the conflict going on in America. Our nation is falling apart into warring factions that only seem to yell at each other. Friendships have fallen apart. Families have fragmented.

People are quiet, afraid that they might say the wrong thing in front of the wrong people and get torched by their fellow Americans.

People feel like America is headed the wrong direction. They feel like American morality is collapsing.

What happened to American ideals and justice and common sense and just being nice?

We’re lost as individuals and as a nation. It’s overwhelming, confusing and makes us uncomfortable.

What’s the solution? How do we find ourselves?

The solution is straightforward.

We need to go back to our reference points and get oriented.

From our reference points, we can figure out where we are, where we took a wrong turn, and how we can get back on track.

That’s why this is called a Brief History of the Conflict in America and How We Fix It.

The Conflict is Not Liberal vs Conservative or Democrat vs Republican

As we go through history, we’re going to find that our current battle isn’t liberal versus conservative or Republican versus Democrat....

Airplane Crashes and Reference Points

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn died in an airplane crash off the coast of Massachusetts. The famous son of President John F Kennedy was headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding.

A safety investigation determined that Kennedy flew into hazy weather at night and experienced spatial disorientation, causing him to lose control of the airplane and crash into the ocean.

More simply stated, Kennedy flew into haze at night in which there was no horizon. In those conditions, without any reference points, even the best pilots will lose their sense of what is up and what is down. The airplane will eventually enter an unintended dive or turn that will result in a crash. Looking outside, with no reference points, any moves by the pilot to save the airplane usually end up making the situation worse.

The same thing happened to an experienced helicopter pilot over New York City last month.

The solution is to look inside the airplane and fly using the reference points provided by your instruments. The instruments will tell you how your airplane is pointed in relation to the horizon.

In flight school we used to practice these situations in simulators. After closing your eyes, the instructor puts your simulated airplane in a very awkward position, then tells you to open your eyes and get out of it.

The procedures are simple. Look at your flight instruments and figure out the key reference points: where is the horizon, where is up and where is down. Then roll your wings to parallel the horizon and pull up.

When you have good reference points, you know where you are and how to get where you’re going. When you don’t have good reference points, you get increasingly confused and the situation gets progressively worse.

With good reference points you live. Without reference points you die.

Losing reference points can be scary. Most of us have experienced it.

Ever suddenly realize that you were lost driving or hiking, with no idea of where you are?

Ever wake up after an intense dream and not know where you are?

Most people feel very unsafe and anxious until they regain some reference points and understand where they are.

The same is true of life.

It is easy to get caught up in the vortex of life chasing what everyone else is chasing because, well, everyone is chasing those things. Money. Social status. Elite colleges. High club sport rankings. The right car. The right neighborhood. Eating the right foods at the right restaurants while drinking the right wines on the cool vacations for everyone else to admire all posted on InstaFaceGramBook.

We chase those things under increasing social pressure while suffering increasing burnout until we crash. Check out the previous blog on millennial burnout.

We get caught up in the frenzy—the haze—of chasing life and find ourselves without any reference points. Without those reference points, we lose our sense of direction, and what’s up and what’s down.

We are watching people crash and die every day. There is a suicide in the United States every 12 minutes. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. Suicide has become the second leading cause of death for 10 year-olds.

What is the solution?

We’ve got to get back to our reference points.

We need to get our lives re-oriented in the right direction.

Through practice, we need to turn those reference points into anchor points for our lives. With solid anchor points, we can remain safe in a strong position no matter how crazy life around us gets.

We need to raise our children so that they have the best anchor points possible as early as possible in their lives.

When you have good anchor points in life, you understand where you are, where you are going and how to get there.

When times get tough and life is in chaos, you can stop, go back to your anchor points, get settled, and move forward again.

The trick is to choose the right anchor points in life.

The Right Anchor Points in Life

Here are several important anchor points that can help you move forward. Teach them to your children—better yet, practice them with your children—and you will give them the most powerful way to understand and make their way through life.

These anchor points come in two sets of three.

The first three are Truths about life. Practice thinking them until they become the anchor points of your whole perspective on life. They’ll get you through the storms of life.

The second three are the questions you need to continuously pursue to gain Wisdom about life.

Lead the Story of Your Life Pursuing Happiness.

Remember that your life is your story—your adventure—in the pursuit of Happiness.

If you drift through life, you will get whatever you get—probably misery.

If you lead yourself through life, making conscious decisions to become the best person you can be, you will have the best chance for Happiness and the best life possible.

Don’t allow yourself to become a victim or whiner. Take charge and lead the best life you can with whatever blessings and challenges you are given.

Feeling sorry for yourself? Feel that life is unfair because you had a bad day? We can all learn from how Bunk Wurth and Travis Mills handled things after they had bad days.

They had strong anchor points. They chose to lead their lives to awesomeness rather than be victims of life. They are better and happier for it. They give us the example of attitude and strength that make us better people.

Happiness is All About Relationships

In earlier blogs, we talk about our purpose in life, Happiness. We also talk about the secret to Happiness in life: high-quality relationships.

 Studies show that people in high-quality relationships are not only happier, but are healthier and live longer.

In business, when you have great relationships with your clients, you get more business. When you have great relationships with your team, you get more employee engagement and productivity. These lead to higher business performance.

What are the deepest, most committed and strongest relationships? Those based in agape-love where people are totally committed to each other.

Want Happiness? Spend all of your time and focus all of your energy on developing great relationships with yourself, your family, your friends, your co-workers, your community and your Creator.

Great Relationships are Built on Wisdom, Performance and Love.

The more people trust your knowledge and character (that’s Wisdom), the more they trust your ability to perform under pressure, and the more that they know that you love them, the better your relationships and the more people will follow you.

Learn as much as you can about life. Develop your integrity. Learn how to perform under pressure. Practice loving all those you encounter. Those are the fundamentals.

These anchor points will bear fruit in strong relationships that give you the best chance for Happiness, for success at work and home, and in life.

The Big Three Questions in Life.

Finally, there are three big metaphysical questions in life that humans have been asking for thousands of years. They are the anchor points people have for understanding life.

Who Am I?

Much of the journey in life—especially through the your 30’s—is figuring out who you are. What makes you special and unique? What are your gifts? What are your challenges? Do you love and accept yourself?

It’s about your relationship with yourself. The better you know yourself, the stronger this anchor point in your life. When people attack you, when you are called into question, your faith in yourself will be what carries you through—or not.

Where Do I Fit in My Community?

Where do you fit among your siblings? Where do you fit among your friends? Where did you fit in your 3rd grade and 8th grade and 12th grade classes? Where do you fit at work and in your local community?

It’s about your relationship with your different communities. The more confidence you have in your place in your community, the stronger your anchor point.

People are neurologically, biologically, psychologically and spiritually wired for relationship. When people don’t know where they fit—how they relate—they become anxious, depressed and sometimes worse.

Where Do I Fit in the Cosmos?

What is the meaning of life? What is life all about and why? Where are you headed in life?

It’s about your relationship with the cosmos.

The meaning of life is a special anchor point. The more you know about life, where you are headed and why, the better prepared you will be to weather the storms that come in life.

The more you study these fundamental questions about life, the better your wisdom about them, the stronger your position in life.

Your life is your story of pursuing Happiness

Happiness is all about relationships.

Wisdom, Performance and Love—these are the anchor points for great relationships.

Finally, there are the three anchor points about life: Who am I? Where do I fit in my community? Where do I fit in the cosmos?

The better you understand and live these anchor points, the happier and more successful you will be.

Keep life simple, straightforward and focused.

I’m Pete Bowen.

In our last blog, we talked about three simple things you can do to build a great organizational culture.

The three steps were to:

Identify your core values

Develop an ethos to practice your core values to create your culture

Continually improve your core values, ethos and culture

The point is that if you take each of your core values and transform them into 2-3 specific behaviors that practice that core value, you can intentionally create your organizational culture. You can align and synergize your culture so you get the best performance from your team.

It’s simple. You become what you do, what you practice. If you practice 2-3 behaviors for each core value, your core values will become your culture.

That sounds good, but what core values should you choose? What are the right core values?

One organization I work with has nine core values and 30 corresponding statements.

Another I know has six core values, but very few employees know them, much less intentionally use them.

Are core values supposed to guide team behavior or function as little more than a public relations statement? Few companies transform the values into specific practices. Even fewer measure whether their values are being practiced or not.

So, what are the answers?

Let’s start by understanding the broader context around core values.

We know from earlier blogs that the key to success at work is having high-trust relationships with your team and with your clients. High-trust relationships with your team increases employee engagement and productivity. High-trust relationships with your customers brings more business.

That means that you want to choose core values that build the highest-trust relationships with your team and customers.

It gets better. Remember, you achieve Happiness in your personal life and success in your work life the same way: by developing high-quality, high-trust relationships with others. The same values that will bring you success in your personal life will bring you success in your work life.

If you do it right, you’ll choose a single set of core values that cover success in all aspects of your life.

If you choose a lot of core values, you get the advantage of a long, inclusive list of values. No values get left out.

On the other hand, if you have too many core values, then the values lose strength because there are too many to learn and practice.

Your average person is max’ed out at three core values. Three is the most people can understand and actively apply. To be most effective, limit yourself to three core values.

How do you balance a desire for a long list of values with a limit of three?

The answer is this: Choose three core values that can be easily unpacked into all the other values in your company and in life.

Putting all of this together, you want three core values that build high-trust relationships in your work and personal lives, and can be unpacked into all the other important values.

That brings us to the three core values that are critical for developing great relationships: Wisdom, Performance and Love.

The Best 3 Core Values

Wisdom: Knowledge + Character

So, what is Wisdom? Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and character. That means that wisdom unpacks into knowledge and character.

More specifically, wisdom is your knowledge of the Truth combined with your ability to live the Truth. It can be as simple as having the knowledge that cigarette smoking is bad for your health combined with the strength of character to avoid smoking.

The more knowledge you develop about the Truth and the more you develop your character practicing that knowledge, the more wisdom you gain. It’s a continuously improving cycle. That’s why wisdom comes through experience.

The more people trust your knowledge about something, the more they will follow you and the better your relationships. The more people trust your character—especially in difficult situations—the more they will follow you and the better your relationships.

The knowledge you need depends on the role you play. If you’re a technician, then you need to have technical knowledge. If you’re a supervisor, you’re going to need to maximize your management knowledge. Management knowledge unpacks into knowledge about how to plan, communicate, handle HR issues, and more.

On the character side, let’s talk a bit about integrity.

Integrity is a very popular virtue, but most people can’t define it or confuse integrity and honesty.

Integrity is different than honesty. Imagine the whole list of virtues as the hull of a boat. Integrity means that there are no leaks in that hull.

When someone has integrity, it means they consistently live all the virtues with no leaks.

If you want to describe great character in one word, that word would be integrity.

Wisdom is a great core value because it naturally unpacks into knowledge and character—two things required to build high-trust relationships and achieve success.

Performance

The value of Performance is straightforward. You’ve got to perform.

A basketball player must make the shot. The salesperson must close the deal. The CFO must produce the financials. Managers must make their numbers. The tech must be able to fix the problem.

A parent must be able to raise children. A friend must be there for you when you need them.

The more people trust your ability to perform—especially under pressure—the better your relationships, performance and success.

Love as a Core Value

Finally, there is Love.

Think back to your younger days. Was there a teacher or coach or mentor who made a big difference in your life?

What did that person do that made that big difference? Was it teaching you a better way to solve an algebra equation? Was it teaching you to throw a ball better?

Probably not. That special person most likely made a difference in your life because they took the time to show you that they care about you.

Love is, in many ways, the most important value to build high-trust relationships because love itself is a relationship.

Some relationships are grounded in exercising Power over people.

Other relationships are transactional. You pay them. They give you labor in return. You get what you pay for, nothing more.

The best, highest-trust relationships are based in love.

The ancient Greeks had several ways to think about love.

Storge is the affectionate love you have for your family because they are family

Philia is the brotherly-sisterly love you have for close friends. Think Phila-delphia—the City of Brotherly Love.

Eros is love that is the very passionate, almost irrational love you have for another.

Agape love is the deepest kind of love. Agape is when you are willing to fully sacrifice yourself for another. Think soldiers willing to die for each other on the battlefield or a parent willing to die for their child. Agape is the self-sacrificing love that our Creator has for each of us.

If people know that you not only care about them but love them, you’ll get the deepest commitment and develop the highest-trust relationships possible.

Why use the word Love instead of Care?

Care is good, but its not as powerful as love. I think it’s is too easy to take care for granted. Care is convenient. We’re so familiar with care that we don’t need to talk about it. So, we won’t talk about it.

The biggest push-back on using love is that it makes us feel uncomfortable. We’ve been raised to think that love is something that is supposed to be restricted to our private lives—not let into our work life. That’s why love makes us uncomfortable.

Being uncomfortable with the word love means that we have to stop and talk about it. That discussion will make our teams and our people think about love and their relationships with each other.

Love is a deeper relationship. Love is the foundation for the highest-trust relationships. Why settle for care when you can get higher-trust relationships and better performance with love?

Finally, there’s a huge bonus to engaging Wisdom, Performance and Love as your core values.

Core Values and Leadership

Not only will these values give you the highest-trust relationships and the highest-performance teams, they will simultaneously build great leaders.

How is that?

Great leaders build high-performance teams by developing the highest-trust relationships with their people. The more people trust your Wisdom (Knowledge and Character), your ability to Perform under pressure, and that you Love them, they more they will follow you.

Whether you want them to follow you or not.

That puts you in the great position of being a high-performance leader in charge of a high-performance team.

Let me know what you think.

I'm Pete Bowen

It doesn’t matter what kind of team you are leading, your organizational or team culture is really important for success. If you have a strong team culture, you will get more employee engagement and productivity, and higher performance.

Studies show that companies with strong cultures have improved performance including:

65% increase in share price

4x increase in revenue growth

15% increase in productivity

30% greater client satisfaction

100% increase in unsolicited employee applications

Only 14% of companies have strong cultures. 48% of companies have weak cultures. Building a strong culture can give you a strong competitive advantage.

If talking about team culture makes you feel a little uncomfortable because culture is too “touchy-feely”, you’re not alone. Many leaders are more comfortable discussing financials or strategy. Culture can seem undefined and difficult. Many leaders avoid it for those reasons.

That said, your team culture is critical to your success. When your team culture is strong, you thrive. When your culture is bad or toxic, it can destroy your team.

Is your team culture strong, mediocre or weak? How do you know?

Do you have a step-by-step plan that optimizes your culture and success, or are you just driving blind, settling for whatever culture happens?

If you don’t have a specific plan to maximize your team culture, you’re missing an opportunity to increase your performance and gain a competitive advantage.

Let’s use a three-step approach to help you develop a plan that systematically builds a strong team culture.

The approach we’re going to discuss works with any team—your work team, family team, sports team, church team—any team. This works if you are the owner or CEO of a company or a new manager with three direct reports.

Practicing this approach won’t just help you lead a better team; it will help you become a better leader in every area of your life.

Let’s start with the goal in mind: a high-performance team that drives success.

We know from earlier blogs that the key to success in leadership and life is developing high-trust relationships.

In business, success comes from high-trust relationships with your customers and your team.

If you have high-trust relationships with your customers, they will bring you more business.

If you have high-trust relationships with your team, you will get higher employee engagement, more productivity and higher performance.

The combination of great relationships with your customers and your team gives you a big competitive advantage.

With that in mind, our approach develops a team culture that builds high-trust relationships with your team and customers.

We’ll start by getting a better idea of what team culture is, then go into the Three Steps for building a Great Team Culture:

Core Values

Ethos

Continuous Improvement

Team Culture

Your team culture is how your people work together to get things done. It’s your team’s personality. Your team’s character.

Teams with good cultures have people in high-trust relationships who work well together. They are aligned to the same team goals. They take advantage of their diverse talents to achieve high-performance results. Continuous improvement is built into how they work. They challenge each other to excellence as a team and as individual people. They care about each other.

You need a step-by-step plan to systematically form and maintain a strong team culture.

For most companies, there’s no plan. Team culture is just whatever happens—for better or worse.

Step One: Core Values

Most of us think that there’s only one kind of core value: the set of values posted on the company walls. These are the explicit core values. Explicit, because they are the official, published core values.

Most companies have four or more official core values. Probably less than 10% of the employees can recite them. Even fewer employees can give you examples of how they live those values daily.

Underneath, however, every team has implicit core values. The implicit core values are the values and priorities that leadership communicates implicitly through interactions with the team. They are the core values that everyone follows because they know that they are the most important things to those in leadership.

The official core values on the wall might be Integrity, Respect and Accountability, but if you talk with the employees, they might tell you that leadership wants you to cut corners, that leadership allows some managers to demean employees, and that leadership keeps some underperforming employees around because of favoritism.

You can uncover the implicit core values by having a trusted-third party ask employees what employees think is most important to leadership.

In the best teams, the explicit core values match up with the implicit core values. That means leadership is doing what they are telling employees to do.

In the worst cases, the implicit core values communicated by leadership are the opposite of the official core values. The hypocrisy of leadership will destroy trust with the team.

In one case, the five official core values on the wall were good, but few employees knew them. What was different is that the three implicit core values communicated by leadership were even better than the official core values. Everyone knew the implicit values and the implicit values built a strong, high-performing  culture.

That’s a better situation than having conflicting implicit and explicit values, but it’s also a lost opportunity. If that company simply makes the implicit core values the official values, they make the values more powerful and useful. They can take the values and their performance to a whole new level.

Your core values are the foundation for your culture. They are the very heart of your team. Your core values are your promise to customers and your team. They should be posted on the wall, reinforced through action by leadership and intentionally practiced by everyone.

There are three core values that are critical for developing these high trust relationships: Wisdom, Performance and Love.

Wisdom is the combination of your knowledge and skills, plus your character. The more your customers and team trust your knowledge, skills and character, the better your relationships.

Performance is straightforward. You’ve got to be able to perform your role. A basketball player has to make the shot. The salesperson has to close the deal. The CFO has to produce the financials. Managers have to make their numbers. The tech has to be able to fix the problem. The more your customers and team trust your ability to perform, the better your relationship, performance and success.

Finally, the more your customers and team know that you Love them, the better your relationship.

In a future blog, we’ll discuss each of these values in depth and talk about why they are really the only values you need.

Ethos

How do you build the highest trust with customers and team? By practicing what you preach. By walking the talk.

Your ethos is how you practice and live your core values every day.

We all know that you become what you do—what you practice. When you practice something repeatedly, it becomes a habit and eventually a fundamental part of your character. That applies to you as a person and to your team.

Your ethos is simply the set of behaviors you practice to live your core values. It is practicing what you preach. Your ethos is how, every day, you walk the talk.

What’s the best way to develop your team’s ethos?

Have your team organize themselves by role. Get all the receptionists together. All the operations managers. All the sales people. All the techs. The executive team.

Have each group meet and decide what 2-3 specific behaviors they will all do to practice each of the values.

For example, the receptionists at a hospital might decide, together, to live the value of Love by practicing the following behaviors:

Make eye contact while greeting people

Check in with patients every 8 minutes

Don’t point where patients need to go but walk them there.

As the receptionists practice these behaviors, they show the patients that they really do love them. Over time, practicing Love will become a habit ingrained in the receptionists. They will become what they practice and Love will become a fundamental part of their culture.

When each group in your team decides how they will live the core values, they take ownership of those behaviors and values. Their ethos becomes their signature, their brand.

It’s simple. Your culture is what you do. If your team lives your core values by practicing your ethos in everything that is done, your values and ethos will become your culture.

Continuous Improvement

With your values and ethos firmly in place, you can develop training and KPI’s/metrics that ensure your culture plan is working and on track.

Culture isn’t a box you check off and then you’re done. Culture is ongoing, constantly being recreated and refined.

The core values of Wisdom and Performance demand that you strive for continuous improvement in your culture. This three-step approach to intentionally creating your culture gives you the ability to develop KPI’s/metrics to measure your culture and the tools to fine tune it.

Those are the basics.

A strong culture drives results by developing high-trust, high-performance relationships with your customers and team.

Your culture is what you do.

Change your culture by changing what you do.

Make the commitment to Wisdom, Performance and Love, and the ethos by which you will practice them.

Live the ethos, measure the effectiveness and seek continuous improvement.

Your people will become stronger. Your team will become more capable. You will become a better person and leader.

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