Junk Drawer Spirtuality

Outliers, The 10,0000 Hour Rule (Ch. 2)

Practice makes perfect.  At least that's the rule of success I always heard growing up.  if you practice hard enough, you can do practically anything.  Of course, as we grow older, we realize that this rule of thumb is only partially true.  Practice makes perfect, but perfect also relies heavily on a person's inherent talent and ability.  Those who truly rise through the ranks of excellence, those who excel in their fields, they are the most gifted, the brightest, the strongest, the fastest, the most skilled . . . Or are they?

Outliers, Chapter 1

This is the first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  So to begin with . . . Pop quiz.  If you were a little boy growing up in Canada, and you dreamed of being a professional NHL hockey player, in which MONTH of the year should you have been born?

Give up?

The answer is either January, February, or March.  Don't believe me?  Just check out the birthdates for all of the hockey players in the NHL.  Not the year.  The month.  In fact, check out the rosters for any elite group of hockey players in North America.  It's astonishing!  "In any elite group of hockey players - the very best of the best - 40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December."  It's an iron-clad law of Canadian Hockey, as predictable as the sunrise.

So the natural question is 'Why?' 

Outliers, An Introduction

A few months ago, I read a book that I've been anxious to blog about.  It's Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers: The Story of Success.  I first became acquainted with Gladwell about five years ago when I read The Tipping Point, another excellent book.  So after I saw Gladwell talking about Outliers on the Colbert Report a few months ago (here's the vdeo), I knew I had to get it.  I read it . . . loved it.  And soon I started hearing about others talking about the book.  Here's a quote from an LA Times article I read:

"[Outliers] seems to have become the topic of conversation around [Holywood], during holiday parties and Oscar soirees. "Revolutionary Road" director Sam Mendes recently mentioned it during an interview. Will Smith, currently starring in "Seven Pounds," didn't mention "Outliers" by name during a recent chat with the Los Angeles Times, but he described a small movie he'd seen as featuring thespians who "I could tell . . . weren't world-class actors with 10,000 hours of experience." 

If you haven't read the book yet, you'll understand the "10,000 hours" reference soon enough.  

Book Review: The Blue Parakeet

I read this book a few months ago, but I'm just now getting around to writing a review.  Scot McKnight authored The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible.  It's a book that deals in heavy and complicated subjects but McKnight does a wonderful job of making his thoughts accessible to those without a theological education.  Compared to other hermeneutics books I've read, Blue Parakeet is a book one could possibly navigate in a few days.

Blue parakeets, according to McKnight, are those squirrely Bible passages that seem ever-so difficult to understand.  They're the Bible passages that seem odd compared to the rest.  We're afriad of them, or we ignore them, or shoo them away, or cage them, but in any case, we never seem to know what to do with those pesky blue parakeets that fly into our roost.  What do we do about those Bible passages that just don't seem to make sense or rub us the wrong way?  McKnight insists that instead of trying to tame the parakeets, we should listen to them, let them be and "Let the Bible be the Bible."  He provides 3 ways to begin reading the Bible, blue parakeets and all.

Book Review: Stuff White People Like

Based on his popular blog site, Christian Lander wrote Stuff White People Like, a book featuring one man's quest to educate the world on the unique taste of white people.  I bought the book just prior to boarding a red-eye flight to Kansas City a few weeks ago, and I'd say this book is absolutely perfect for that very context.  It is a light, fast read, highly entertaining (including some moments when you will laugh out loud), and it requires very little brain energy to process it.  Like I said . . . perfect for a 7 AM flight.

Here's the simple premise.  Lander has made 150 observations about the unique and quirky "stuff" that white people tend to enjoy, things that people of another race or ethnicity would find utterly bizzare.  It's all couched in sarcastic language and written as if he's a filmographer for National Geoographics observing the mating habits of wild Gorillas.  Now, it's important to understand that, contrary to his book's premise, Lander is ONLY talking about a certain type of white person. 

Book Review: Rapture Ready

On the plane ride to Texas over Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to finish reading the wildly entertaining, sometimes offensive, but usually enlghtening book, Rapture Ready: Adventures In the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.  It is a book by a guy named Daniel Radosh who describes himself as a "liberal New York Jew," who took it upon himself to spend a few months trying to better understand the subculture of evangelical Christianity.  He talked to popular Christian authors, visited a Christian theme park, went to Christian concerts, music festivals, raves, visited Christian bookstores, entered "Hell Houses" on halloween and attended Christian WWE style wrestling matches in the south.  Radosh wrote about his experiences, the things he saw, the conversations he had, and the impressions that were left on him. 

As an evangelical, I appreciated the book. . . 

Predictably Irrational, Recap

My last post on the book Predictably Irrational was on the final chapter, and I got a really cool comment the next day.  It was from Dan Ariely, the author of the book!  I guess he randomly stumbled across my blog about his book, and has been following along with my summaries on his chapters. I thought that was pretty cool, and I'm glad he felt I did his book justice.

So I thought, since I've been covering this book for the past month or so, and since I've enjoyed it so much, I'd recap some of the big observations and principles Ariely makes in this book about human nature that he considers "predictably irrational."  You can click on the first word in each category for my full post on each subject.  Enjoy:

Predictably Irrational, Chp. 12

Chapter 12 of Predictably Irrational is entitled "The Context of Our Character Part II."  We covered the first part in Chapter 11, which talked about the importance of having ethical benchmarks like the Ten Commandments (the author is Jewish :)).  Chapter 12 hones in on people's tendencies to steal, even though everyone knows and would say that it's unconscionable.

Consider this: imagine you had the choice to leave one of two pieces of your property in a public place for 72 hours in hopes that no one would take it.  You can either leave an envelope containing $50 in cash, or $50 worth of pop (that means "cokes" if you're one of my Texan friends).  Which would you be more comfortable leaving in a public place (e.g., your company's break-room, a bathroom, a train).  Well, according to research, a person is way, way more likely to lose his Dr. Pepper than his $50.  Does that seem counter-intuitive?

Here's why: according to Ariely "when we look at the world around us, much of the dishonesty we see involves cheating that is one step removed from cash."  There's something about actually taking a person's dollar bills or coins that registers in our brain "THAT"S STEALING!  THAT"S WRONG!"  But when it comes to taking a pop, or a pen, or something else that isn't strict currency, it seems alittle bit easier for most people.  Consider the CEOs of Enron.  Do you think they ever would've walked up to little old ladies and snatched dollar bills out of their purses?  Of course not!  But they felt more than comfortable stealing millions of dollars from the pension funds of little old ladies.  Why?  Our consciences make it easier to take things that are a few steps removed from cold hard cash than stealing the actual cash itself.

I'll give you a personal example.  After I graduated College, I lived in Amarillo for a time, and one afternoon I was having a conversation with a co-worker about movie prices.  I told her that I still get my student discount to go to movies because I kept my ID card from college and (at the time) I still looked young enough to pass for a college student.  I hadn't really thought about the ethical ramifications or the fact that ti might be wrong.  Honestly, I figured I was just being clever.  But this girl quickly pointed out to me, "but that's lying!  You're not a College Student."  And she was right.  The truth was, i saved myself a few bucks at the time by lying about being a student, and it seemed easy. . . alot easier than simply reaching into the teller's cash register without him looking and stealing the money.  I never could have done that!  But that's the point. . . there really is no difference.  Stealing is stealing.  It's worthwhile to think about all that you may be stealing through fudging on insurance claims, tax returns, shared software, etc. that we may have raionalized as OK simply because it wasn't cash.  Whether we want to admit it or not, all of that stuff adds up and impacts our nation's economy and society.

Predictably Irrational, Chapter 11

This chapter in Predictably Irrational considers why people choose to be dishonest.  Ariely did experiments with college students by giving them exams in which they might be tempted to cheat.  What Ariely discovered was that while everyone basically values honesty over dishonesty, people still behave dishonestly at least occasionally.  Why?  Ariely says it's because our "internal honesty monitor" is only active when we contemplate "big transgressions."  If I were to consider stealing a whole box of pens from my work place, I would probably experience enough consciencious guilt over the action to prevent me from going through with it.  But, when it comes to taking one pen, or maybe even two, most people would never even consider how those actions reflect on their overall character.  It's because we tend to think of issues of honesty, goodness, righteousness, character, integrity on a macro-level (the big sins), but the small incidents of dishonesty like stealing one pen don't even make it on to our moral radar screen (even though the combined employee theft in America costs the national business force $600 Billion).

But here's what was interesting.  He did those same experiments with college students where they would be tempted to cheat on a test, but with one group of students, he first asked them to write down as many of the "10 Commandments" as they could remember. hardly any of the students could write more than a few of the commandments.  But here was the result.  When the students were forced to grapple with moral benchmarks and major ethical truths, none of those students cheated on their exams. . . none of them!  Just by getting a person to think about the concept of solid ethical standards, people are more likely to be honest.  

So here are a couple of things I've been thinking about with regard to this chapter.  First, it's cool to have Ariely put to words what Evangelicals have had such a difficult time understanding about the secular world: people simply do not think of themselves as dishonest people.  Unless they stole a car, or killed someone, people will more than likely sweep the small stuff under the rug without a second thought.  How do we convince them that that stuff is important?  Should we convince them that that stuff is important?  Here's a second interesting point (and/or question) . . . I for one have never been the kind of guy who's tried to get the 10 commandments posted in every public school and court house, but this experiment does make you stop and wonder if we have done students a moral disservice by removing ethical benchmarks on which they can contemplate in their daily scholastic lives-- maybe at least an oath of some sort.  You can also see why memorization of Scripture is important, and should be exercised more by Christians.  I know I don't do that enough.

Predictably Irrational, Chapter 10

This chapter in Dan Ariely's book is called "The Power of Price."  Remember that the thesis for Predictably Irrational is that people make irrational choices (even though we'd like to think there's a good reason behind all of the decisions we make), they're alittle bit messy, and we can even predict the kinds of bad choices people will make because we do them over and over again. 

This chapter is very simple, and it touches on a fact that we all intuitively know about ourselves: We tend  to think that the more expensive something is, the better it is.  In fact, according to Ariely, we can trick our brains into believing that a higher priced good is actually better feeling, more productive, better tasting, more effective, whatever, than it's lower priced counter-parts even when the two are absolutely identical.  If you buy two different boxes of aspirin, one name-brand and one over-the-counter, you are actually more likely to get headache relief from the high-priced, name-brand product than the over-the-counter one.  Why?  Is the name-brand one better?  Not necessarily.  It's just more expensive, and we trick ourselves into believing that something that costs more is actually better.

Ariely interestingly talks about this phenomenon with regard to the health care industry's role in global economics with a great question.  Read this: "America already spends more of it's GDP per person on health care than any other Western nation.  How do we deal with the fact that expensive medicine may make people feel better than cheaper medicine.  Do we indulge people's irrationality, therebye raising the costs of health care?  Or do we insist that pople get the cheapest generic drugs on the market regardless of the increased efficacy of the more expensive drugs?"  That is a great question. . .  It's amazing how we can literally trick ourselves into depending on high priced things we don't need and then back ourselves into a corner when we find out we don't really need it. 

Twilight In The Desert and Crazy Gas Prices!

Today, the price for crude oil hit $134 per barrel and on the way home tonight I noticed that gas had reached $4.15 per gallon.  Why the high prices?  Well, I just read a really interesting book by a guy named Matthew Simmons called Twilight In The Desert that brought alittle clarity to that question for me.  Simmons is a very well respected guy in the oil industry and in economics.  He works for an investment bank in Houston that specializes in energy and he offers a pretty grim view of what's ahead.  

Simmon's thesis is that the world's dependency on cheap and plentiful oil is going to meet with some tough economic times because the world's top supplier, Saudi Arabia, is not the bottomless pit of crude oil that people keep telling the public they are.  Their national oil company, Saudi Aramco, has kept details of their oil fields behind closed doors for the past 3 decades.  But in this book, Simmons combed through gobs of research demonstrating that Saudi's 5 major oil fields. . . the ones that are basically feeding the world's energy needs. . . are in bad shape and could peak and begin declining any day now.  At the very least, they are simply incapably of keeping up with the growing energy demands coming from China and India.

I was reading this book last week when Bush went to visit Saudi Arabia to beg them to start pumping more oil.  Of course Aramco said they'd start pumping out a few 100,000 more barrells a day (bringing them to about 9.4 million barrels/day), but that hardly made a dent in the oil prices.  Everyone said Bush failed.  But did he?  Why wouldn't they start pumping more?  Don't they have enough oil?  For years, energy analysts have said that Saudi Aramco will need to start pumping somewhere in the order of 20 to 25 million barrells of oil a day over the next decade to keep up with the world's energy demands.  Until recently, most have said that shouldn't be a problem.  Simmons says the reality is that Saudi Arabia is simply incapable of pumping more than around 10.15 million barrells a day for any sustained period of time, and sometime soon that number may begin declining.  All that means, if Simmons is right, very soon demand is going to start exceeding supply on a global scale.  And that's when things are going to get REALLY painful!  Here's a link to a NY Times article from 2004 that explains in a few pages what Simmons did in 350 if you don't have the time or the patience to read the full deal.

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 8

This chapter in Predictably Irrational is called "Keeping Doors Open."  It's a chapter about the fact that people tend to avoid closing the doors on our alternate choices for as long as we can. Areily's economics experiments showed that when people have many, many options to choose from, it is actually less economically beneficial for them because they end up running back and forth between options rather than commiting and going with one.  It happens in purchasing decisions, decisions concerning a mate, and many other areas of life.  We waste time running back and forth between our range of choices rather than simply commiting, and reaping the benefits of the choice we've made!  And that's irrational.  "We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open," Ariely says.

He suggests that when we get into that trap of running back and forth between open doors, we need to start consciously closing some of those doors of the time, economic, spiritual, and emotional suckers in our lives.  He says keeping those options open is hurting us rather than helping us.  They draw us away from the stuff that's really important.

I think this idea is pretty important when it comes to church ministry.  There will always be great ideas that people offer, and many of those are important, passionate, and spirit-filled ideas that could help people.  But in deciding who we want to be as a church, we have to make tough choices by closing certain doors and commiting to other doors that we find to be more beneficial. 

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 7

In chapter 7 of Predictably Irrational Ariely talks about the high price of ownership by conducting another experiment on unsuspecting College Students-- this time from Duke University.  After a homegame sell-out for an important Duke basketball game, Ariely made a few calls to students to gage how much they believed a ticket to the game might be worth.  First, he called students who were on the waiting list for tickets but didn't get them.  The average price the students who didn't get tickets were willing to pay to buy tickets from another student was $170.  Then Ariely called students who were on the same waiting list and did recieve tickets to the game.  He asked them a similar question: what is the minimum price at which they would sell their tickets?  On average, students said they wouldn't sell their game ticket for less than $2,400!  Between owner and non-owner, that is difference in percieved value for the same item by a factor of 14!

Why?  The main reason, as Ariely explains it,  comes down to the way owners of an items value the stuff they own.  A Duke student considering whether or not to sell a basketball ticket will focus on the fact that he may lose the experience of the game, the excitement, the thrill, the memories.  How much is that worth?!  Apperently around $2400, but only if you own the ticket.  See, a buyer always focuses on what the will gain from the purchase.  An owner and seller always focuses on what he'll lose.  The simple fact that you own a thing makes you think the value of that thing is way  more than it's actually worth!  And that is irrational!  That's true for all kinds of ownership: cars, clothes, homes, anything you own.  As soon as you buy it, you fall in love with it, and you form an unnatural attachment with that item that forces you to think it's worth more than it is.  Ownership does that to people.

Here's the way I've seen that happen with me, personally.  It's not so much about a "thing" I own as much as ideas I have.  I find that I have to be careful of how much the fact that I had an idea, pitched an idea and, in a sense, "own" that idea, affects my perceived value of it.  In a collaborative environment, like ministry can be, I find myself getting disappointed or discouraged sometimes when an idea that I gave isn't used or valued by someone else.  I think to myself, "My idea was way better than this other one.  Why didn't they use my idea?"  And since I read this chapter, I've been stopping myself alot more and asking myself, "Was my idea really all that valuable, or do I just think it's valuable because I own it?"  That'll get you thinking. . .       

      

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 6

Chapter 6 of Predictably Irrational is all about. . . uh . . . uh . . . procastination.  It's called "The Problem of Procastination and Self-Control."  I'd never thought of it like this, but Ariely says the source for many of our bad financial habits, eating habits, or most other bad habits we harbor is our propensity to procrastinate.  If we eat unhealthy and we know it, we still do it becuse we're putting off eating healthy.  if we're spending way more than we should and not operating in a budget, we do it because we're procrastinating on the whole financial responsibility thing.

Ariely did some more experiments on his College students.  He had them set their own due dates for certain projects and then he had a control group who completed the projects by assigned due dates, and then he observed their behavior throughout the semester.  Here's what he found. !. "Although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weaknesse are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it." 2.  One of the best available tools for precommitment to combat procrastination is to utilize the help of an authoritative external voice.

Think about it.  It's alot easier to shed those pounds when you have an arobics instructor pushing you.  It's alot easier to control your spending if someone is checking up on you.  It reminds me of how important accountability and mentorship is toward people's decision making.  If I'm accountable to someone for the decisions I make I'm more likely to make the right decisions and not procrastinate on them.  If I have someone getting in my grill when I procrastinate on something I know I should be doing, then i'm more likely to not put it off, and just do it.  I think that's the power of mentorship, that I wish we could utilize more in church settings. . . giving people that external voice who can speak into their lives when it comes to financial habits, relational habits, spiritual habits, etc. 

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 5

WARNING: THIS POST IS PG-13!!!  Actually, the chapter of the book is, but I'll try to keep it clean for the sake of this blog.  The chapter is called "The Influence of Arrousal."  Remember, this book is all about the stupid, irrational choices that people make and the predictable reasons why people make those choices.  This one is about sex.

Ever wonder why despite all the sex education classes, books, pamphlets, and after-school specials, STDS are still flying around, kids still don't use condoms, and lots of teenage girls are still gettin preggers?  Dan Ariely says it's because our little brains actually function differently in a state of arousal than they do in calm state.  He did actual (and kinda disgusting) experiments with College students asking them questions about what they would do sexually in a normal state of mind, and then he compared those answers to the way they answered the same questions in  . . .ahem . . . a state of "arousal."

To make a long story short, I think we all had an idea that a state of . . .ahem. . . "arousal" . . . impairs a person's judgent.  But his research showed some scary stuff.  Like the higher propensity to rape, and do all kinds of other stuff that would get you stoned in the Old Testament.  It seems that you  could ask most men and women what they thought about these questionable moral sexual behaviors when watching baseball, and they would answer one way, but as soon as they flip the channel to "SkinaMAX" the answer changed.  Moral relativism at it's finest.

I think the biggest lesson to be learned is that we need to be careful when we make very big decisions.  Like sex, hightened emotional states leads us to rash and poor choices.  You should never go grocery shopping when you're hungry.  You should never make big decisions when you're angry.  The more we understand ourselves and how our brains can mislead us into poor choices under certain circumstances (like. . . ahem. . .nevermind), the more likely we are to be patient with our choices, and wait until we're calmer and alittle more collected.               

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 4

Dan Ariely's 4th chapter in Predictably Irrational is called "The Cost of Social Norms."  In this chapter he talks about two kinds of interations that people have with each other.  There is a "social exchange," and there is a "market exchange."  Of course a "social exchange" is all about relationships.  Grandma bakes you some cookies, not because you pay her, but because of her relationship with you.  That's a social exchange.  A "market exchange" occurs when you pay someone for the thing they do.  These aren't things we decide. . . they're frames of mind.

For instance, let's say Grandma baked you some cookies and you said, "Thanks Granny!  Here's 2 bucks for all your hard work."  I guarantee Grandma wouldn't be making me any more cookies.  Why?  She'd be more than happy to do it for nothing, but as soon as I bring money into consideration, everyone's mind moves to a Market Exchange rather than a social exchange.  And $2 for slaving over a hot oven baking cookies all afternoon doesn't sound too appealing.

That's what Dan Ariely found to be interesting.  First, people tend to work harder when it's a social exchange rather than a market exchange (for relationship rather than money).  Second, a transaction cannot be considered both social and market.  And third, once money enters the conversation, everyone's brains automatically switches to a market interaction, not a social one . . . market beats social every time.

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 3

Chapter three in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational is called "The Cost of Zero Cost."  it's a chapter about a simple phrase: "FREE!"  Ariely says that this simple word has alot of power and it can lead many of us if not all of us into irrational choices.

Here's a funny experiment from the book: "Suppose I offer you a choice between a FREE! $10 Amazon gift certificate and $20 gift certificate for seven dollars.  Think quickly.  Which would you take?"  Most people who were tested jumped for the free gift certifiacte, even though it's obviously the wrong choice.  The $20 gift certificate for seven dollars gives you a $13 profit. . . $3 more than the $10 gift certificate.  But that's the power of this word, FREE!.  It drives people, draws people, and makes people make irrational choices even if it provides no financial benefit to the consumer.

Obviously, marketers will always use whatever psychological games they can to profit their companies, and all the consumer can do is remember "buyer beware."  But what about Christian marketing?  Should those who sell "Christian" products (books, CDs, gifts), be held to a higher standard?  I gotta be honest , I cringe alittle when I see people buy "real annointing oil" from the holy land in a little vile for $5 when you can by a whole bottle of extra-virgin for $10 at Safeway!  Really, just about all junk from the holy land is shamelessly marketed to gullible Christians.  I've seen "Real Holy Land Dirt" sold in a jar!  Christian bookstores can be some of the worst at this.  Between Jesus candy, action figures, pens, pictures, and way, way over-priced Bibles, we have somehow convinced religious people that in order to be religious, they need to buy this "Christian" rubbish.  It's the same thing as using the word "Free" to lure people into buying stuff they don't need.  And sure, all consumers bear the burden for their own purchases and gullibility, but let's be real.  Anyone who sells Christian goods should take on at least some responsibility in not only the honest pricing of goods, but what we decide to sell, and how we market those goods to our brothers and sisters in the Lord.  Amen?      

Predictably Irrational: Chp. 2

The second chapter of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is called "The Fallacy of Supply and Demand."  This chapter challenges the pure, free-market notion that all prices for goods and services are determined by the two independent variables of the supply of that good and the demand for the good.

Instead, Ariely says, the price a consumer is willing to pay for a good (for instance,a a cup of coffee), is based on a principle he calls arbitrary coherence.  This principle says that the initial prices for most goods are basically arbitrary (in other words, who knows what's a good price for a cup of coffee?), but once a price is set and established in the consumers' mind, then that price shapes present prices and future prices.  For instance, Starbucks tells us that the price for a "Cafe Venti Mocha Maciatta-Frappucino-Latte" is $5.  Why is it $5?  Who knows.  It's an arbitrary price.  But once the $5 "Cafe Venti Mocha Maciatta-Frappucino-Latte" was established in our minds, we didn't really question it.  Now everyone sells really expensive "gourmet" coffee drinks based on this arbitrary price-- not set by supply/demand necessarily, but something largely irrational.  As a consumer, I had to anchor some kind of basic price in my mind ($5 for coffee), and since then, I cannot think of paying for coffee independently from that anchor.  It becmae my natural reference for price.  Thus we pay for lots of stuff based on arbitrary prices that were set and suggested to us by marketers and manufacturers, not by independent free market variables of supply and demand.  And those prcies got concreted in our brains as the real value for those things.  All that means that we pay alot more than we should for junk we don't need!

So as we're starting a church, and as I'm about to be purchasing alot of equipment and stuff for all the things I "need" in a church plant, here's what I gotta do.  First, as I plan on purchasing something (anything?) for Waterfront, I need to ask, "How much missional value will I get out of this good or service, and could I get the same missional value out of something that costs less?"  If we purchase cell phones for staff, do we need $400 Blackberrys or can we get by on $50 peice of crap phones?  Can we get cheap, donated, used equipment to meet a similar missional value as a brand new peice of equipment for twice the price?  Will we ever need to buy a building, or can we create the same (or similar) missional value by renting a facility and not having a specific office.  Churches waste alot of $$$$ on alot of crap, and we have to be sure that we are constantly trimming the fat. 

This chapter reminds me of the fact that American consumerism is ingrained in all of our brains, and we all have anchored arbitrary prices for stuff set in our brains that aren't based on anything real rational.  And we gotta somehow erase all of that (or at least combat it) if we're going to be the best stewards of God's blessings that we can be.     

Predictable Irrational: Chp 1 Part II

In my last post on chapter one of Predictably Irrational I talked about Ariely's principle of how we tend to make choices (sometimes irrational choices) based on the fact that we have compared something to something else or someone to someone else.  We always make comparisons in order to help us make the choices that we make or decide what it is that we deserve or desire.

Ariely talks about a meeting he had with a company CEO.  This CEO recently had a conversation with an employee who was dissatisfied with his pay.   The boss asked, "How much did you expect when you got here?"  The employee answered, "About 100,000."  The boss said, "And now you're making 300,000, so why are you coplaining?"  The employee said, "Cause the guys at the desk next to me aren't any better than me and they make 310!"  What's interesting to me is that if the employee had removed all the other employees around him from the equation, he probably would have been perfectly happy wiht his wage.  In fact he would have considered it gracious because it was more than he expected.  But once, he had the opportunity to compare, his view of fairness changed.  Sounds alot like the parable of the 11th hour workers (Matt. 20)

So I'm wondering-- if, as Ariely says, people decide what they consider to be a fair wage for work based on comparison with others, do we also tend to do the same thing with God's grace?  Would I be content with God's grace if my eternal reward were the same as someone whom I considered less righteous?  Would I be disappointed in God's fairness if someone occupied hell who was nicer than someone I knew in heaven?  What I'd never really considered before is that the only way i could ever be disappointed with God's justice or grace is if I'm drawing comparisons instead of taking God's grace as an act of pure generosity.  Remove the comparison game from the equation, and the fact that God loves me at all is mind-blowing!  I'm no longer thinking about what I deserve in terms of what others around me are getting.  I'm only thinking about what I have recieved because of God's grace.  And maybe that's the spiritual lesson-- YOU CANNOT COMODIFY GOD'S GRACE!  AS soon as you start to attach a value or a pricetag to it by comparing it to what someone else got or didn't get, grace loses what makes it so special-- it's a pure, incomparable, gift of God.         

Predictably Irrational: Chp 1 Part 1.

This chapter is entitled "The Truth About Relativity."  Ariely talks about coming across an add for The Economist magazine.  The add gave 3 options for a subscription: 1. One year's online access to articles for $59.99.  2. One year's print subscription for $125.  Or, 3. One years print subscription and online access for $125. 

Which one would you choose?  Ariely did an experiment with his students to find out which one they'd choose, and 16% chose the first option (online access), 0% chose the print only option, and 84% chose the print and online option.  But what if you changed the choices and removed the middle option.  Would the results change?  You wouldn't think so because no one chose the middle option anyway.  But it did!  When the only 2 options were 1. One years's online access for $59.99 or 2.  One year's subscription and online access for $125, 68% chose the first option (up from 16%), and only 32% chose the second option (down from 84%).  So what happened?

Ariely calls it the principle of relativity.  He says in the original add, the middle option was a decoy that forced your brain to desire the third option rather than the first, even though the first option was clearly the better choice.  The reason is, first, we always think of things in terms of a thing's value relative to another thing's value.  We don't have an internal value meter that telss us how much stuff is worth-- we have to guestimate based on the value of other things.  Second, we tend to compare things that are easily comparable.

So if you're choosing between three cars, one's an SUV at $10,000, one's a truck at $15,000, and one's a truck at $15,000 that has 15,000 fewer miles than the other truck, most likely you will choose the truck with the fewer miles and not the SUV.  The reason is, you make your choices based on comparisons not absolute values, and it's much easier to compare things that are similar than different.

Ariely says that this is a primary reason for out of control spending and crazy consumerism and materialism.  We are constantly comparing ourselves!  And if we run in circles with people with fancy stuff, most likely, we will start making purchases based on our comparison with other people's fancy stuff and not on what we need.  It's interesting to think about the stuff I own that I might have purchased more out of comparison than need.  How much have I tried to one-up someone.  How much have I determined values of things based on what someone else has?                  

Predictably Irrational: Intro

I picked up a book in the airport on my way back to Chicago last week, and I am loving it.  Its a book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.  He's a Behavioral Economics professor at MIT.  I'm 2 chapters away from finishing it, and I have been thinking through all of the implications and applications of his theories and explanations, and it's making me think pretty hard (even about church stuff).  So I thought I'd start blogging about it chapter by chapter.

The introduction tells us alittle about the author.  Ariely is Israeli, and while in Israel at the age of 18, he was in a very serious accident that gave him 3rd degree burns over 70% of his body.  While in the hospital he suffered through horrendous burn treatments at the hands of the hospital staff.  He started to ask himself, "Why did the nurses choose to treat burn patients the way they did?"  He wondered why ripping the bandages from his still healing skin and causing quick bursts of pain (like quickly removing a bandade) was universally recognized among nurses as more humane than a slower method of bandage removal.  So. . . after exiting the hospital Ariely decided to devise scientific experiements to determine which method of bandage removal was better, only to discover that a slower and lower intensity method of medical treatment for burns causes less pain in burn patients.

But what got Ariely interested was the question, "How did the nurses decide that ripping the bandages off quickly was better?"  Just about everyone assumes that it's true, but as it turns out, it's not.  Ariely's thesis for the book is that contrary to popular opinion, people don't have the power to make rational decision for themselves all of the time.  On the contrary, people make irrational choices all the time, but beyond that, people make predictably irrational choices too.  We buy things we don't need.  People have intentions of losing weight but still chosse to eat unhealthily.  We have difficulty limiting available options to make choices easier. In other words, we tend to make the same irrational choices again and again in very predictable patterns, and by understanding those patterns, we can attempt to break the cycle of bad choices.

This is mainly an economics book, but it has a lot of insight into sociology, psychology, ethics, and I think for church work too.      

Velvet Elvis: A Review

Someone told me about a month ago that this book was a "must read for every Christian."  I'd say it's close.  Velvet Elvis, by Rob Bell, has actually been out for about 3 years, so it's not new, but it is a challenging book to the way that Christians usually conceptualize faith.  His writing style is more like a Rob Bell sermon than well-crafted prose.  He creates pauses and changes the tempo with line breaks so as to let the reader feel as though he is hearing it rather than reading it.  The wrting is smooth.

The content should strike a cord with many Christians, and some parts downright made me want to weep.  He writes a chapter about how he has to kill his "superpastor" or a nagging feeling inside that told him he wasn't good enough.  That one hit me where I needed it.  He has great metaphors that challenge fundamental Christian thought.  He compares doctrine to springs instead of bricks, because springs bend, expand and contract as our doctrine should.  He challenges the old Gospel idea that I need to identify myself as a "sinner."  Instead, Bell says, I am a person is God's image who is learning who I am and supposed to be in Christ.  He challenges the old "the Bible is an owner's manual" metaphor of Scripture and Sola Scripture, saying it's never Scripture alone that serves as our authority, but the Spirit led reading and meditating on Scripture.

It's a great book.  Sometimes I felt like Bell was splitting hairs on things that weren't matters of debate.  Sometimes I felt he was reacting against a fundamentalist straw-man who only exists in a small minority of evangelical churches.  But in the end, it was a valuable read for me.  I think it is a great read for a person who grew up in the church, especially a person who grew up in an overly strict church-envoronment, who got burned.  I don't know that I would recommend it to a new believer. . . I think he sort of assumes these past church experiences in his writings.  But it should challenge us teachiers of Scripture and doctrine in the assumptions and terminology we use.                     

40 Days Living the Jesus Creed: a Review

Scot Mcknight's 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed is an expansion of his earlier work, the Jesus Creed, into a devotional book.  It follows the Purpose Driven Life format (except it's alittle shorter) into bite-size chapters to be read in succession for 40 days as a devotional.  McKnight takes the Jesus Creed (Jesus' greatest commandment to love God and love our neighbors) and expands the creed into 40 daily reflections, all concerning that theme and examining different points of scripture that extrapolate on the theme.

McKnight is a great writer and a great scholar.  He has a great way of expositing Scripture and theology in a way that's not too "heady" for the lay Christian and not too fluffy for the pastor or seminary-trained.  As I would expect, there are at least a few chapters that seemed fairly repetitive.  But I was impressed with how little that problem presented itself (to me).

One way that I was alittle disappointed was that the book seemed to spend alot of time and alot of chapters on "loving your neighbor" but only about a 1/4 of the chapters were about "loving God."  I hoped it would be alittle more balanced, especially since loving God is the greatest command, and as Jesus says, loving your neighbor is "second."  Regardless, it's worth the time to take 40 days and focus on loving God and others and see how this focus for 40 days can change your outlook and approach to life.  Well worth the $15 it took to buy the book!                  

The Problem With Evangelical Theology: a Review

I just finished Ben Witherington's The Problem with Evengelical Theology.  It's a pretty good book.  It's not exactly what I was  expecting.  I was hoping for a book that dealt more broadly with problems existent in the larger swath of evangelical approaches  to Scripture.  Instead, Witherington hones in on a select few traditions (reformed, dispensational, and Wesleyan), and criticizes their specific approaches to theology.  He should be commended for including his own theological tradition (Wesleyanism) among the chapters, but I'd say the brunt of the criticism was not evenly distributed.  I think Withington let the wesleyans off with a light slap on the wrist, while unleashing his full exegetical and theological wrath on his reformed and dispensational counterparts.

I think he raises some great points, and has some wonderful insights such as the idea that we should take a more "storied" approach to theologizing.  He has wonderful insights into Romans 7, where he argues that the "I" in that section isn't post-conversion Paul or pre-conversion Paul but rather Paul is impersonating the Biblical character, Adam.  There's also a great chapter where Witherington deals with the theology of the rapture, and what those proof-texted passages really mean.  My biggest criticism is that he spends much time reinterpreting traditional "reformed" passages in a "corporate election" spin to support his own Wesleyan position.  Inf act that becomes the default theological explanation for all election passages. . . whch is fine. . . but I wish he'd spend more time talking about corporate election other than simply saying "this passage should be interpreted corporately rather than individually."  I think a short treatment on the subject of corporate election, it's merits and demerits in comparison with the individual election view in Calvinism would have been wise.  So i you're looking for an objective critical book on the broader tradition of Evangelical theology, this is not it.  If you're looking for a pretty good book on the exegetical foundations of Wesleyan Arminianism, and where this tradition is headed, it makes for a pretty good and informative read.