Ethics Experiments 5-6

Ethics Experiment 5—Kindness (Write-up due 10/7 by 5:00 PM)
This week, I want you to focus on an ideal rather than practice a particular set of behaviors. Kindness means essentially that you treat every person as an opportunity to give. As with any virtue, kindness is more than simply not being mean. The beginning of this task is for you to refrain from saying hurtful things to people, whether they are there in front of you or absent. (Gossip is inherently unkind.) Learning to keep your mouth shut when you might feel like saying something, even making a rude joke, about someone is perhaps going to be a challenge for some of you. But kindness is more than just such restraint. Kindness means actually going out of your way to give people something valuable: encouragement, thanks, a smile, a compliment, holding a door open, letting someone go first, etc. Kindness, therefore, is active. “Appreciate” as a word means “to cause to have increased value.”

One time I saw one of those “Instruction Book” type lists and it said, “Leave every situation a little better than you found it.” For this exercise, I have modified this to say, “Leave every person you meet a little better than you found him or her.” Every person on the planet is built to need other people. Go ahead and give them something that will satisfy that need a little bit. Who can you do this for? Any human qualifies: parents, siblings, strangers, cafeteria workers, waiters, grocery checkers, teachers, janitors, police, etc. In fact, part of the fun of this experiment is to go out of your way to not let anyone pass by you without giving them some kindness. We in this society have a habit of ignoring each other. For one week, simply strive to notice other people more and bless them somehow in little ways. Here is a good goal to have: give at least three people a day a compliment. At least one of them has to be to a stranger. This is the easy part of the exercise.

The harder part of this exercise involves something completely intangible: your thoughts. It is a very good thing to speak kindly and to act kindly towards other people. But the real trick to loving people is to learn to think kindly toward them. Remember, every behavior ultimately starts as a thought. It is far easier to treat people well when you think well of them. In our society, coarseness is the rule of the day. We routinely mock people in our heads and even out loud. I am encouraging you to learn to be judgmental in a favorable way on purpose as an exercise in controlling your own thoughts. Try to do more than simply not think bad (remember, the mind does not perform negation well), instead actively steer your mind in the direction of thinking good of people. Find something about them that you can admire or value.

Every person has value. Think of this exercise as attempting to see that value in each of them. If it helps, try to think of what their parents love about them, or their children, or spouse, etc. I try to consider what God made them for and what He sees of value in them, since He always sees not only who you are but who you can be as well. So I try to see and treat people according to best person I think they can be, in part by imparting this vision to them and in part by expecting and encouraging them to live up to it. As you do this, pay attention to yourself, your thoughts, how others respond to you, and how easy or difficult it is to be kind to people in your mind and then out loud in behavior and speech.

Another aspect of kindness is sensitivity or becoming aware and considerate of how others are doing emotionally. If you don’t normally do so, try asking people around you how they feel, and don’t take “okay” for an answer. Kindness often means learning to listen intently to people. Simply caring enough to pay attention to their emotional needs will be very meaningful to many people, especially women. Although some people will try to not reveal how they are feeling, it is also worth noting that some people are simply doing all right, and some are so out of touch with their own emotions that they can’t describe them. Remember, the idea is to be aware, not to invade or offend.

Ethics Experiment 6—Productivity (Write-up due 10/14 by 5:00)
In the 1950s, there once was a businessman who had a time management expert in to help him in his efforts. I forget the man’s name and the company, but it’s a true story as far as I know. The advisor gave him one simple formula to implement and told the man to send him a check for however much money he thought the suggestion was worth after he tried it for a few weeks. After about a month, the businessman sent the expert a check for $25,000. I want you to try doing the suggestion for one week, but with a slight twist.

Each night, make a list of the six most important things you must do the next day. Then number them in their order of importance. The next day, start on task one, and work on it until you finish it. Cross it off. Then start task 2, and work on it until you finish it. Cross it off. Continue until you either run out of day or run out of tasks. Then that night, repeat the exercise. Don’t worry too much if you don’t finish all the items every day. You will do more than you would have otherwise, and if you couldn’t do them all by this method, you couldn’t have done them all by any other method either.

My addition to the procedure is to make a prediction of how much time each task will take you. One of the great downfalls of many people in their planning is they underestimate how much time things will take and then they get frustrated and behind when a more realistic estimation would have prevented this problem. It’s called trying to be a “time hero.” So I want you to be as accurate as you can in predicting the time each task will take, and then I want you to be as accurate as you can in actually measuring how much time each does take. Try to become so accurate that by the end of the week you can guess within 15 minutes each task’s duration to complete.