Transcript
Hello, Welcome to another DailyJim It is friday june 10th 2022. It's the afternoon. So if you can't tell I have a little more pep in my step as they would say, It's about 2:45. Um today I wanted to talk about the ends and the means. Um if you're not familiar with that ends are kind of like the outcome and the means are kind of the process of how to do something. And I was thinking about this as I read about new philosophy called effective altruism. Which people were talking about some of the detriments maybe to it and how sometimes we can get obsessed with trying to maximize or optimize good in the world, You know, try to basically the idea is to take, a certain amount of resource and try to optimize the good in the world. Um in terms of donations, especially philanthropy and as I was reading through some of the discussion on this, someone mentioned a passage from john Stuart mill, a famous philosopher, From the 1800s in his autobiography where he was talking about that he was so, so focused on the ends that, at one point he realized when the end that he had focused on lost its charm, he was, almost utterly miserable. It just, it seemed like life had lost its seal. And it got me thinking a lot about personally how I have, I'd say over the last many years. I almost tried to focus my work and my business on what is the end meaning, what am I trying to achieve? What am I trying to help other people achieve? Trying to help them be better leaders? Am I trying to help them be better parents or spouses? Am I trying to help them get, you know, be able to respond to any situation with love. Am I trying to help them, etcetera, etcetera? What is the outcome that I'm aiming for? And often I'll get back into the situation where I'll go wait a second. There's too many possible outcomes. I don't know which outcome to choose and I can struggle in choosing a brand name, I can like, for example, a podcast name, what outcome am I trying to achieve with the podcast? How do I want people to feel, what do I want people to do, etcetera, etcetera? And when I pull back from focusing on the outcome or the ends and I focus much more on the means, I can feel so much more relaxed and focused and just kind of open to the outcome. Maybe more closed on the means more focused on the means, putting constraint on how something is done, but much more open and fewer constraints on what the possible outcomes are personally. I feel stronger that way. I feel more comfortable and focused. For example, on with, I feel leo I wasn't telling people the whole purpose of Ophelia is to blank. It was, hey, here's an app you can open up and you can write how you're feeling to yourself and it stays on your phone very focused on the how with emotional self defense very similar. The idea is like, hey, you're gonna come to class and we're going to practice uh, emotionally punching each other and learning how to deal with punches and jokes, etcetera, etcetera. So this has helped me pull back a little bit and reflect on my work, and hopefully I hope to focus more on what it is that I'm doing and what it is, the tool or service does instead of what outcomes it creates.
But then I pull back and I look at this in the context of what I've talked about the last couple of days in terms of politics and it seems especially in the US, a lot of our political discussion has been about the ends. One strong example is listening to the january 6th committee yesterday in reading some of the comments afterwards and one person saying, yeah yeah okay. Whatever january 6th that happened, you know, a year and a half ago. What I care about are high high gas prices. And so what that says to me is they don't care necessarily about the process of how government has done. They just care about the result. The result is I need lower gas prices, which makes me ask, okay, well what if the government said we're going to put limits on profits of the corporations? Well, no no no you can't. What if they said they were going to nationalize the gas companies so that get lower price. No no no you can't nationalize. And so I think sometimes we do care about the means and the process a lot more than we think we do. But sometimes we don't. And I think I worry a lot when we focus too much on the ends, when politics becomes just about winning or losing and not about how we play the game. You know, and on reflecting on it was john wooden, a famous basketball coach from the University of California Los Angeles, U. C. L. A. Nobody says it a full name. U. C. L. A. And I believe he said his definition of success was that when people went out there, the team went out there and they did the best that they could, didn't matter what the score was. So in other words, his definition of success was about doing, about focusing on the means, focusing on the process and doing the best you possibly can in the process, not caring so much about the results and the outcomes. So I hope we can get back to that more in politics and I hope that maybe I can demonstrate that be the example instead of trying to tell other people to live one way and try to demonstrate that as well. So this podcast right now is called the Jim Kleiber show, this is DailyJim and I don't know if those names work but it really DailyJim really does describe it. It's five minutes of me just talking for okay, we're at six minutes, on that note, it's friday, I spoke really quickly, try to jam a lot of stuff in today so I hope you have a delicious weekend or half weekend depending where you are in the world, and well I will chat with you on monday alright, take care of you.
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