语言、品格与社会规则

语言在人类心灵发展中意义非凡。作为逻辑思维的基础，语言是人们产生概念、了解不同价值观的区别的必要工具。概念产生必将涉及全体人类社会，绝非个人私事，即人们的思想感情必须是普遍适用的，才能为人理解。例如在对美的认识、理解、感受等方面，人们已经有了一种共同的认知或已经确立了一项基本审美原则，所以才会在看见美的东西时心生快乐。由此可知，跟理智、智慧、逻辑、伦理、美学类似，思维与概念也以人类社会生活为源头，并在不希望人类文明分崩离析的社会成员之间，建立了紧密的关联。

法律、图腾与禁忌、信仰、教育等所有能保障人类生存的规则，都一定要被社会生活约束，跟社会生活规则相符。究其本质，人们一般谈到的公正、正直和人们眼中价值最高的人类性格，都属于人类社会需要的品性。社会生活的各种要求，相当于人类心灵的塑造者和所有心灵活动的指导者。责任感、忠诚、坦诚、喜爱真理之类的美德，只因都跟普遍适用于社会生活的原则相符，才得以产生并延续至今。

这说明必须要站在社会立场上，才能对一种性格的优劣做出判断，因为个人性格要被人留意到，一定要先证明其具备普遍意义，在这一点上，其跟一切科学、政治、艺术成就没有区别。这就相当于以个人的社会价值大小作为标准评价此人。我们往往会用理想化形象作为标准，为具体的个人做出评价。这种理想化形象要能借助对整个社会都有帮助的方法，解决个人的种种难题，还要能将个人社会感提升到某种高度。福特·缪勒以“根据社会规则掌控人生的人”来形容这种人。要让自己符合标准，必须要在自己跟其他人之间努力建立合作关系，且必须努力掌握人类社会成员应掌握的技巧。

- 阿德勒，《洞察人性》

比努力更重要的三件事

在“努力”之外，还有太多重要因素被我们有意无意地忽略了。而在这些重要因素中，“方法论”“选择和判断”以及“积累性”是最主要的三个。
  
（a）方法论——指的是我们必须透过现象看本质，花时间研究各种不同现象背后隐藏的共同规律，并据此提炼出一套解决问题的、具有一定普适性的方法体系。
 
 方法论的核心不是思考“这样才能把一件事情完成”，而是探索“为什么通过某种方式可以把一件事情完成”。学会这样的思维习惯，能够培养我们研究世间万物运作规律的能力，带来的好处是：当同样的事情的某些因素发生变化的时候知道该如何迅速应对，以及在面对全新的问题时能思考出解决办法。
  
工作和创业都不是考试，不要说标准答案，连标准问题都没有。我们每一天都要面临新情况，需要解决新问题，同样的问题在极短时间内又会发生新的变化。这种情况，不是你单纯通过努力就能解决的。
 
（b）选择和判断——代表的是我们的预判能力，也就是在一定时间范围内，预测事态走向的一种能力。不管从事何种工作，或者只是求职，我们每天都要面临大量的“决策时期”，要做出选择。人生的所有选择汇总起来，将在很大程度上决定我们的成功概率和所能达到的高度。
 
 选择和判断能力，背后隐藏的是一个人掌握信息的广度，以及思考信息的深度。后者可以通过长时间的训练得到提高，而前者可以通过大量的阅读以及信息搜集得到改善。生活中，很多人的努力都只聚焦在一个点上，只专注于自己要做的事情，忽略了关联信息的搜集和深度思考。
  
（c）积累性，是说在一件事情上不断积累，到达足够的时间长度。

- 阿何，《别再用勤奋掩饰你的懒惰》，2016.

Blindness That Kills

It is December 29, 1972, and Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 has just taken off from the bitter cold of New York City and is heading out to Miami. One hundred and sixty-three passengers are on board, most of them hoping to enjoy a New Year’s vacation in the sun.
 
The flight is smooth and without incident as, a little before midnight, the plane makes its final approach into Miami International Airport. The wheels are lowered in preparation for landing, the captain informs the guests of the local temperature, and the passengers fasten their seat belts.

But then the captain notices that something is wrong. On most aircraft, there are three sets of wheels: one set beneath each of the two wings, and another just below the nose. When the wheels are lowered into place and lock into position for landing, indicators in the cockpit light up. But the green light linked to the wheels beneath the nose has failed to illuminate.

This could mean one of two things: either the light itself is faulty or the wheels have failed to lock into place. Either way, the captain has no choice but to abort his landing to figure out what has gone wrong. He informs air traffic control at just after half past eleven.
 
What happens next will ultimately cause one of the biggest civil aviation disasters in history. The crew members fixate on the faulty light. They pull it from its fitting, they turn it around in their hands, they blow on it to remove dust, they get it jammed when trying to put it back in its fitting. They devote so much attention to the light, they fail to notice the gorilla in their midst.
 
The gorilla, in this case, is the fact that the autopilot has been inadvertently disengaged, and the airplane is losing altitude. As the crew continue to focus their attention on the light, the plane is now taking the crew and passengers on a downward path toward disaster in the Everglades.
 
As the plane drops through 1,750 feet, an altitude warning alarm rings through the cockpit. The alarm is part of a sophisticated warning system, informing the pilots of their mortal danger. But although the alarm is clearly audible on the black box recording, neither the pilot nor the copilot hears it. Their attention is so wrapped up with the light, they have no spare bandwidth with which to consciously register the noise. They are now less than one hundred seconds from death.
 
Altitude is declining every second. The pilots can’t feel it because their senses are deceived by the plane’s motion. They can’t see it through the windows because it’s a moonless night, and there is no visible horizon. But right in front of the pilot’s noses, the altitude meter is spinning downward. It is within their line of sight. It is possible that both pilot and copilot actually look at the meter and see it moving. But they can’t perceive what it is saying. Why? Because it never hits conscious awareness. 

Only when the plane is seven seconds from impact with the ground does the copilot finally realize that something is seriously wrong. The pilot takes evasive action, pulling hard on the lever, but it’s too late. A moment later the plane crashes, killing 101 people.
 
 
attentional resources vs. insufficient bandwidth 
 
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 is that the plane’s detailed warning systems worked. The altitude meter told the pilots that the plane was descending, and the alarm system provided the same information in acoustic form. But neither made the slightest bit of difference. The pilots had insufficient bandwidth. They were inattentionally blind. For the pilots, focused on the faulty light, it was as if the warnings never happened. They vanished into the realms of the unconscious.
 
Crash investigators would later establish that the nose wheels had, in fact, locked into place: the plane could have landed. The only piece of faulty equipment was the lightbulb in the nose gear assembly fixture, which had burned out. One journalist said, “The crash occurred due to the failure of a $12 piece of kit.” In a way, he was right, but the deeper truth is that a warning system, however sophisticated, is often only as good as the attentional resources at the disposal of the crew.
 
Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 has become a seminal event in aviation safety history, changing the way crashes are investigated and the way pilots are trained. A key innovation in crew training systems is a clear procedure of delegation between the pilot and the copilots in order to free up attentional resources.
 
The problem with the faulty lightbulb was not just that the captain fixated on it, but that the rest of the crew did, too: the pool of attention was exclusively focused on a single problem. Had just one of the crew focused on the light fitting, there would have been plenty of available attention for the others to have picked up on the visual and acoustic cues indicating the plane’s descent. 

- Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, Chapter 8

Rest Ethic and Noble Leisure

Even if we could work at full capacity, day in and day out, we shouldn’t. A lot of the wonderful parts of the human experience center on rest, reflection, and recovery. Our minds and bodies need a reprieve from the constant pressure and demands on our time and brainpower. If we want to accomplish the big things we’ve set out to do – to create, lead, contribute, and make an impact – we need a rest ethic as strong as our work ethic.
 
A great rest ethic is not just about working less. It’s about becoming conscious of how you spend your time, recognizing that busyness is often the opposite of productivity, admitting and respecting your need for downtime and detachment, establishing clear boundaries and saying “no” more often, giving your ideas time and space to incubate, evaluating what success means to you, and ultimately finding and unlocking your deepest creative and human potential.
 
As Nassim Taleb noted, “only in recent history has ‘working hard’ signaled pride rather than shame.” With this false pride, our culture has descended into a crisis of mental health issues, burnout, and widespread unhappiness. Even the one thing we so desperately seem to be seeking – productivity – is suffering as a result.
 

Work is a necessity. But leisure was noble.
 
The key distinction Aristotle saw between mere work and noble leisure was essentially the question of why we do it. Work is done for a purpose, a utilitarian goal. Leisure, on the other hand, is done purely for its own sake, in search of meaning rather than purpose.
 
So while today we might think of Aristotle’s pursuits as “work,” to him they were largely leisure. Most of his thoughts were pure contemplation, which he considered as an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake…. Nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.” He was “pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.” Something “useless” can be “beyond usefulness” and a true good in itself. Unfortunately, even among the most “pure” knowledge workers today, such as academics, this form of thinking removed from purpose rarely exists anymore. We no longer understand the concept of noble leisure.
 

- John Fitch & Max Frenzel, Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic 

and Finding Success Without the Stress.

Directed, Undirected, and Misdirected

The expression “pay attention” makes sense as we dive deeper into where and how our minds concentrate.

There are different types of attention:

• Our choice to concentrate is directed attention.
• Our intentional move to let our minds wander is undirected attention.
• Our less productive, more troublesome use of the brain is wasted energy, or misdirected attention.

- Joseph McCormack, Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus (2020)

When Authentic Forgiveness is Achieved

True forgiveness is a painful journey, a prolonged wrestling with a wound, and a process aimed at achieving genuine repentance by the offender, graceful acceptance by the victim, and restoration of the broken relationship. This is true forgiveness in the biblical sense.
 
Forgiving is not an instant solution or a quick fix. It is a long, deep, difficult, and painful process of wrestling with the injury, and risking a return to conversation and a resumption of relationship. The Christ of the cross, who shows how costly it is for God to forgive, is our great example (1 Pet 2:21). Augsburger states, “God used the Cross to make forgiveness possible and to model forgiving to an unforgiving world.
 
Some ask when authentic forgiveness is achieved. Augsburger states, “Grace and truth, acceptance and confrontation, sacrifice and prophetic rebuke are needed in resolving alienation, injustice, or interpersonal injuries.” Authentic forgiveness requires one party to repent and the other party to have the grace to accept that repentance with trust and respect. Authentic forgiveness occurs when there is mutual recognition that both repentance and acceptance are genuine, and when the severed relationship is mended. The final stage in authentic forgiveness is when the victim reconnects with the offender and discovers that the strange chemistry of reconciliation can heal the wound until nothing remains but the remembered scar with a transformed meaning. Such forgiveness results in a deeper and stronger union than before.

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.

Forgiveness is Not Unconditional

Conflicts are not resolved when misdeeds are overlooked—the hurts continue to ache and the relationships continue to decay. As forgiveness enthrones justice, to make harmony genuine, both parties should discuss the issues in depth with one another so that they can confess, repent, and reconcile with substance.
 
As Western culture has become increasingly individualized, the importance of a moral context has been trivialized and forgiveness has often been reduced to passive forbearance. It is only when moral values and virtues are central to the meaning of personhood that the importance of forgiveness is appreciated. Augsburger writes: “Authentic forgiveness is that cluster of motivations which seeks to regain the brother and the sister in reconciliation.… The courage to forgive is an excellency of character, a virtue that enables one to act in restoration of personal relationships, to risk in reconstruction of social networks, to commit oneself to live in moral integrity.” Forgiveness demands the moral virtues of justice, fairness, love, mercy, repentance, and reconciliation.
 
In Christian tradition, repentance and reconstruction of right relationship are central to the process of forgiveness. According to Augsburger, repentance should consist of three dimensions: remorse, restitution, and renewal. Remorse, when accompanied by a full detailed discussion of the issues, is a genuine sorrow. Restitution is an attempt by the offender to restore what was destroyed, again, when accompanied by full discussion. Renewal is a change in life direction, with the offender not only repudiating past behavior but affirming a new principle of moral action is needed. 

Forgiveness is the mutual recognition that repentance is intended, embraced, and pursued. Forgiveness is not unconditional. Augsburger writes: “Love may be unconditional, forgiveness is not.… The familiar teaching of unconditional, unilateral forgiveness is not forgiving but a return to loving.… Forgiveness … recognizes the complexity of reopening the future in risk, restoring relationship in trust, and recreating the nature of that alliance in justice.” Thus, forgiveness without repentance and reconciliation is incomplete; it is simply love for one’s enemy and a willing heart to forgive.

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.