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