Drash for Yom Kippur Morning

 Yom Kippur Morning

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Jews

Step Two:  From Independence to Interdependence

(Part Two)

On Rosh Hashanah I began my High Holy Day drash series on the principles that I learned from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  This book has been life-changing for Clara and me.  In trying to decide how to theme my drash series for these all-important days this year, I decided use these Seven Habits.  The truth is that I’ve been thinking about this for several years.  I have found over time that doing the drashot for these holy days is a very effective way to present ideas far too complex for one drash.  If you have been unable to attend every service of this season and would like to benefit from the entire series of drashot, you can find them posted to my blog.  After the service this morning, I’ll be happy to tell you where to find it.

          On Rosh Hashanah I talked about the first three Habits, those which can and will enable you to make the transition from dependence to independence.  They are:  Be Proactive.  Begin with the End in Mind.  Put First Things First.  If you master these Habits, you will have mastered yourself.  You will have achieve Private Victory.  You will be able to live by your Core Values.

          Last night I talked about the need to go beyond independence.  Whilst independence is a worthy goal and absolutely essential, it is not the end of the road.  Interdependence is.  The Road to Happiness, necessarily, passes through a place called interdependence.  Because we are not self-contained, solitary creatures, we find happiness when we learn to master ourselves and learn to live effectively with others.  In Covey’s phrase, we strive for Public Victory.    

The next group of three Habits are calculated to take you from independence to interdependence.  They are:  Think win-win.  Seek first to understand, then to be understood.  Synergise.

Win-win is a mindset that refuses to recognise life as a zero-sum game.  Zero-sum means that there is only a finite amount of resources, and there can never be more.  So in zero-sum, in every situation where there are two competing visions, one will win, one will lose, or there will be a compromise.

About the only thing in life that is really zero-sum is time.  As you may have heard me say before, time is a limited commodity.  Every hour we spend doing ‘X’ is an hour we’ll never have available to do ‘Y.’ If we spent an hour watching television, we didn’t spend that hour reading.  If we spent it playing the ukulele, we didn’t spend it fishing.  With the passage of each hour, the remainder of our life is thus one hour shorter.  This is absolute.

Okay, so it’s not completely absolute.  We can lengthen our lives – maybe – by healthy living.  You know:  control your weight, eat healthily, exercise regularly, give up bad habits, keep a positive outlook.  Do all or most of these things, and maybe, just maybe, you can squeeze some extra years out of your life.  But maybe not.  Genetics are the biggest influence on longevity, and you can’t change that.  So for the purposes of my thesis, we can call time zero-sum.

But there’s a mindset that infects many people, a mindset that is absolutely fallacious.  And that is, that everything, or at least almost everything, in life is zero-sum.

For example, wealth.  Many people – I would venture to say, most people – erroneously think that wealth is zero-sum.  That is, there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.  And when somebody other than me succeeds in amassing wealth, he has done so at my expense…and the expense of everybody else.  But there’s no truth at all to that notion.  When somebody else succeeds, the chances are that he is increasing the chances of others, to succeed.  That’s because, in his wealth creation, he has probably created one or more new businesses, which in turn employ other people or at least generate sales across other businesses.

But most of us think that someone else’s amassing wealth, just takes part of a fixed amount of wealth available out of circulation.  That’s why people who have not amassed wealth, often want to punish those who have.  Why they want to Soak the Rich.  Soak the Rich, usually with crippling taxes, is an attitude that is widespread.  Not enough money in the public coffers to fund all the schools?  Soak the Rich.  Keep hospitals open?  Soak the rich.  Built new highways, and keep the existing ones in good repair.  Soak the Rich.  Soak the Rich often makes those of us who aren’t rich, feel good.  It makes us feel righteous.  It takes some of the sting out of the reality that we’re not rich.  But it doesn’t free up wealth to make anybody else better off.  Because wealth is, at the end of the day, a commodity without limit as to its potential growth.

The zero-sum mindset infects thinking on all kinds of things, not just economics.  If I want ‘X’ and you want ‘Y,’ the zero-sum mindset says that there is only the possibility of one of us getting what he wants.  So it’s win-lose.  Or the alternative is ‘compromise,’ which means that I get half of X and you get half of Y, or some other proportion, and neither one of us is happy.  In that case, it’s likely to be, Lose-lose.  Zero-sum is the mindset of limitations.

Win-win, in contrast is the mindset of possibilities.  Win-win says:  I want X.  You want Y.  Let’s figure out how each can get what he wants.  Now it may be that both X and Y are not obtainable simultaneously.  But it may be possible to achieve X and Y serially.  For example:  I want to go to Hawaii on holiday, and Clara wants to go to Europe.  I only have enough days of annual leave to go to one of the two places.  So we do one this year, and plan for the other next year.  That’s an example of Win-win thinking.

Sometimes, even with a Win-win mindset, both the desired alternatives are not possible.  An example.  I want to retire on a sailboat, cruising America’s East Coast and the Bahamas.  Clara wants to retire in Israel.  Unless we opt to split up in retirement, it may not be possible to do both.  That’s where a Compromise may be necessary.  In this view, Compromise is a tool, employed so that everybody can get at least some of what they want.  But Compromise, when it is a mindset as a product of zero-sum, makes nobody happy.

So Think Win-win does not mean that everybody gets everything they want, when they want it.  It does mean that, when there is an apparent conflict between two desires, the default attitude is to explore ways that both can be achieved.  Instead of automatically defaulting to Win-lose, or Compromise.

Try to Understand before Trying to be Understood is largely self-evident.  And it is a Habit that, once adopted, you will use many times every single day.  The reason is, of course, that we seldom understand one another automatically.

Many of you have read another of my favourite books, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, by Dr John Gray.  Gray’s thesis is that men and women communicate so differently, it’s as if we’re from two different planets.  His premise is that, once we accept this, we will be able to communicate more successfully with the opposite sex.  And if we are able to communicate more successfully, we can live with one another far more successfully.

The difficulty of understanding and being understood transcends the male-female divide.  Some of us grew up speaking different languages.  Even for those who grew up speaking English, we have different cultural references that hamper us in communicating.  And even when we have no such barriers with a given person, our differing agenda can easily cause mis-communication.  So even when we’re talking to someone of our own sex, and even if it is a fellow Jew, we can and often do experience difficulty in putting ideas across.

So difficulty understanding others, and making them understand you, is almost a constant in life.  We spend a lot of time and energy trying to be understood.  And therein lies the crux of the matter.  We’re all intent on being understood.  So with two people struggling to be understood, a meeting of the minds is often difficult at best.  In any transaction, each parties is likely to be so intent on getting their idea across that the two end up talking past one another.

We break the cycle when we focus on the other party.  When we put aside our own imperative to be understood, and focus on trying to understand.  Then, having had a meeting of the minds on The Other’s concern, we will be free to work on getting our own across.  By putting The Other first, we solve half the problem.  This, instead of continually talking past The Other.  When we practice this, we break through communications barriers that hamper working together productively.  We clear the decks to work together toward common goals.

Synergise means using the power of the many.  Synergy means that the total is more than the sum of its parts.  Most of us are familiar with this concept.  If you’ve got a group of people with a common goal, that goal will more likely be met if the group’s members pool their talents and divide their labours.  This tends to bring success to the entire group.  Independent action is far less efficient.  A group of people working together in cooperation accomplishes far more than the same group of people, working just as hard, independently.  We practise this habit whenever we divide tasks on a large project, so that we’re not duplicating one another’s efforts.  Many of us utilised this habit in school, especially if we went to professional school, when we formed a study group and each of us studied a separate chapter of the assigned reading, made notes, and shared the notes of even made oral presentations on our chapter to one another.

We find it easy to imagine using all these habits in the context of, say a work group.  When we work closely with others, it is often not by our own choice.  The group has been, in effect, imposed upon us.  We probably have no choice but to make it work.  We therefore grasp at these, and perhaps other habits to get the best result out of the work.

But most of us have a hard time applying the same principles to other areas in life.  To family.  To friends.  To one’s congregation.  For some reason, we have a hard time seeing the similarities between these settings, and our professional work.  But they really aren’t very different.

More than that, we often prefer to work independently because we think it is easier.  And in a sense, it is.  Working independently, we don’t have to trust others to do their part.  We don’t have to learn others’ weaknesses and strengths.  We don’t need to rely on others, and thus risk disappointment.

But in most of life, we are not independent.  We therefore must internalise the lessons of how to work and live cooperatively.  Because interdependence is ultimately the key to effectiveness.  Interdependence means learning to trust and depend upon others, and letting them trust and depend upon you.  Only when we become interdependent, do we become truly effective.

As you remember, we began with twin premises.  First, that there is great virtue in living a value-driven life.  Why would we not want our deepest-held values to guide us as we go through life?  I can’t imagine one person in this room telling me, honestly, that they would not prefer to live that way.  So what prevents us from living according to our values?  Two things.

First, most of us have never clarified and articulated what our values are.  We might have some vague idea of what they are.  If asked, you could probably rattle off a list that would sound good to your own ears, and others’.  But they would not have been formulated carefully, and contemplated, to the point that you would be able to intentionally live by them.

Second, you probably don’t have a series of life habits that are calculated to enable you to live according to your values.  Even if you can easily tell me what your Core Values are, can you tell me how you go about living according to them?  For most of us, the answer would be no.  And the reason would be that we have never thought too deeply about what it takes, to live according to one’s values.

 Stephen Covey, before death took him from this earth, did think vdeeply about what it takes to live according to one’s values.  And he has left us with the gift of the Seven Habits.  The Seven Habits are likely not the only possible methodology for living out one’s values.  But they have worked for many, many people.  Including your rabbi.  I therefore recommend to you, as you consider your lives in the coming year, to consider this formula for effectiveness.  Gut Yontef.