Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets, Part 4 - "The Maturity Question"
Your Move with Andy Stanley Podcast
Andy Stanley
4.7 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our natural inclination is to live as close to the line as possible, often attempting to get away with as much as we can without facing the consequences. This is a slippery slope, so what can we ask ourselves to step away from the edge?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, welcome to your move where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. I'm Andy Stanley and I'll be your guide. Did you know that something can be not wrong and unwise at the same time? |
| 0:14.0 | Why is that important? Because your greatest regret, hate to bring it up, but your greatest regret was preceded by a series of not wrong decisions but unwise decisions. |
| 0:24.0 | Let's not do that anymore and today I will tell you how right here on your move. |
| 0:31.0 | So when our kids were old enough to drive, I decided not to give them a curfew. You know, a curfew is specific time to be home. |
| 0:43.0 | And the reason is this, my personal experience with curfew as a teenage driver convinced me that the traditional approach to curfew is a terrible idea. |
| 0:52.0 | At 16 years old, curfew transformed me into an overly aggressive weekend driver. Now on weekdays, I was fine, but on Friday and Saturday nights, not so much. |
| 1:03.0 | I found myself suffering from five-minute syndrome. The five-minute syndrome, you know what this is? I can stay just five more minutes. |
| 1:13.0 | And then five minutes later, I can just stay five minutes. I've got five more minutes. And before long, I had to be home in, you guessed it, actually maybe you remember it, I had to be home in five minutes. |
| 1:24.0 | Regardless of how many minutes it would actually take me to get home, which explains my overly aggressive weekend driving. So when my kids started driving, I didn't tell them what time to be home. |
| 1:36.0 | I told them what time to leave for home. And thanks to cell technology, I knew what they left on time. Now, you have experienced some version of this curfew dynamic as an adult, where your margin for error got gobbled up with just five more minutes thinking. |
| 1:53.0 | Whether it was one more drink, one more business trip, one more sleeve of cookies, one more pair of shoes, one more swipe of the credit card, whatever it is, the outcome is usually the same. And here's where the math begins to fall apart. |
| 2:06.0 | One more, one more rarely adds anything. When it comes to five-minute thinking, five more-minute thinking, one more rarely adds. |
| 2:16.0 | Anything, in fact, worse, it usually subtracts one more actually results, unless oftentimes of what we value the most, right? And while it's been a while since curfew dictated your driving habits, your current driving habits, in fact, are influenced by a similar dynamic, unless you were a very unusual driver, you drive either at or slightly above the posted speed limit, right? |
| 2:40.0 | And while most of us feel little to no guilt driving faster than the posted speed limit, none of us want to get pulled over. So what do we do? Well, we choose the speed that we're convinced allows us to break the law while avoiding and encounter with the law. |
| 2:55.0 | And my point, whether it's curfew, diet, driving, spending, our natural inclination, you know this, our natural inclination is to live as close to the line as possible, which line? Well, the line between legal and illegal, the line between responsible and irresponsible, the line between moral and immoral, the line between ethical and unethical. |
| 3:21.0 | The line between I'm still in control, and I need help and it's just human nature. It's human nature to snuggle up to the edge of irresponsibility, disaster, embarrassment, and to stay there as long as possible. |
| 3:34.0 | It's human nature to get by with as much as we can get by with without becoming our own worst enemy without being grounded, embarrassed or expelled, fired or kicked out of the house. And here's the thing. |
| 3:47.0 | Fuelling, fuelling this, this incessant flirtation with disaster is a flawed assumption that informs so many of our decisions, an assumption that, well, it basically impedes our ability to make good decisions. |
| 4:01.0 | And this assumption is why I think we're so comfortable living, dating, spending, eating, drinking, and driving on the edge of embarrassment or worse. And so for the sake of clarity, I'll illustrate this assumption with four contrasting ideas. |
| 4:15.0 | Here's the assumption I'm talking about. If it's not wrong, well, then it's all right. If it's not illegal, then clearly it's permissible. If it's not immoral, it's acceptable. And if it's not over the line, it's fine. |
| 4:30.0 | Now, if the problem with this way of thinking is not immediately apparent, just put on your older or brother sister hat for a moment. If you're a parent, just put on your parent hat for a moment. I bet, and we've never met probably, but I bet you don't set the bar that low for your children. |
| 4:46.0 | You don't set the bar that low for anybody that you care about to embrace these assumptions is to organize your life or to organize somebody else's life around the lowest common denominator, right? Essentially we're asking how low can I go? |
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