In this episode, we discuss the importance of eliminating good intentions from your life.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about how good intentions create monsters. Sometimes doing the nice thing is not the right thing to do. I just finished reading the book “Trillion Dollar Coach” which is a story about Bill Campbell and how he coached different tech companies like Google and Apple to grow into huge companies. One of the chapters covered disagreeable givers. As people, if we see somebody going through a struggle or some type of setback, we want to give them support and tell them that everything is going to be okay.
Everything is situational, but that might not be the best thing the person needs to hear. They might need to hear that they need to get over their bullshit and get themselves back up. There are good intentions, but that might cause someone or an organization more harm down the road.
There are tons of good intentions in the good that cause monsters. People want to give people bottle waters but that just causes a lot of plastic waste. We want to give our family a nice dinner with burgers and fries, but that can cause obesity or environment problems if done excessively by one person or by a lot of other people at once. These are good intentions because we want to make someone else feel good in the moment but the chain reaction from that good intention can have consequences down the road.
I think about this and sometimes I have to play the bad guy at the moment because I’m not trying to make someone feel. After reading the book, I feel that I need to do a better job of getting over good intentions. You have to nudge people in a direction that is going to help become better people. If they just stay in the same spot, they’re just going to become stagnant and if you’re stagnant for too long, you’ll just rot away.
I feel the same thing for public policies, it’s nice to help people out but if it doesn’t help people become overcome their stagnant state, then what is going to happen is we are going to have a bloated system that requires more resources than the value it is producing. We want to help people but we don’t want to enable people to become dependent. They should be independent and you have to train yourself to be that way.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t help people at all and have a sink or swim mentality. We all need help to become better people. If it wasn’t for the help of Bill Campbell, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt of Google, would not have had the skills to take Apple and Google to the next level, but Bill doesn’t coddle them, he told them what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear through asking questions, telling stories, and being direct with them, along with other high performers.
I don’t have kids yet but when I do, I know exactly how I want to raise my kids and I know it’s going to be hard because you love your kids and want to do the best for them, but I don’t want to always carry them so they don’t learn to stand on their own. I know I’m going to get told ugly things by my kids in the future, but I know for the long term it will be in the best interests to show them the lessons that I’m going to show them in the future. I could have good intentions in terms of doing everything for them as kids because I don’t want to see them struggle but it will just create a monster down the road.
I also read this other great book by Angela Duckworth called, “Grit” and I want to raise a kid with Grit. A kid that will push through the hard times and stick with something over the long haul and not give up when they get bored. One thing that I plan to do that I learned from the book is to make my kids stick with an activity for a minimum of two years. At the two year mark, my kid can decide if they want to stick with the activity or switch to something else. I don’t want to let a kid give up after the first setback because that is just a prescription to becoming miserable.
When it comes to good intentions, you have to look at the chain reaction that is going to happen from that good intention. It’s like that analogy of the butterfly that flaps it’s wings create a tsunami in another part of the world. That is literally what can happen with good intentions. Not all good intentions can create this type of damage but it can happen.
So as your doing a good intention or receiving one, ask yourself, what does this mean to my environment or how is this shaping me or the person receiving the good intention. Are you going to create a monster or create a better member of society? One is definitely going to be better than the other and we just have to be aware of our actions and our environment. It’s easy to let things slip by without really thinking about how it will affect us or our surroundings. I feel like reading different things like the Trillion Dollar Coach, writing in a journal about my thoughts, and meditating really help with building up self-awareness so that I minimize the monsters that I create.
The world doesn’t need more monsters in it. We need more productive members of society that will solve the problems of today and tomorrow. Monsters don’t care about the future, the just care with how much they can take today.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, good intentions create monsters. The can weaken a person so that they are either takers or can’t take care of themselves, both can create the same amount of damage. So be careful about how you treat people and the goal is to help people grow as people and good intentions don’t help people or society grow. They help them become stagnant and then rot away.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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