The Inevitability of Your Interactions
How does a person get to the point of committing a massive crime or a public moral failure?
The late Tim Keller noted that if you were to go back in time twenty years and show the person a crystal ball of what they’d eventually do, in most cases, they would be horrified. They would tell you, “I would never do that. I am not that kind of person.”
So, how did they get there? Keller explains it in this sequence:
- The Small Act: It starts with a tiny, easily rationalized step like a minor lie, a small amount of deceit, or just a bit of unchecked anger.
- The Confirmation: To make sense of their small act, the person justifies it to themselves as being completely fine, or simply a necessary byproduct of their circumstances.
- The Next Step: Because the person’s mind is now more accepting of acts like this, a slightly larger transgression or poor decision no longer feels as shocking or impossible.
- The Momentum: Each successive choice accelerates the trajectory, further morphing the person’s character until they freely choose an act they once would never have thought imaginable.
This sequence applies much more broadly than crime, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t only apply to a negative trajectory.
I’ve run three marathons in my life. My 16-year-old self, who hated running, would have thought that was crazy. But I made a small decision to join the track team to help with football conditioning. One small run led to a slightly longer run, which led to buying running shoes, which built momentum.
Similarly, I am close to publishing my third book. My 25-year-old self, who saw himself as a mediocre writer at best, would have never believed it. I decided to write just one article for work. That prompted me to start writing a blog post every week, which nudged me to block weekly time on my calendar for writing.
The roots of many of your biggest realities today can be traced back to small choices you made days, months, and years ago.
The Compound Effect on Relationships
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on our daily, small choices, doesn’t it?
In my previous article, I wrote about the art of discerning what to say “yes” and “no” to on your calendar, because each “yes” and “no” accumulates into the life you’ve designed for yourself. The exact same rule applies to your interactions.
How satisfied are you with the Relationship Capital you have built? What professional or personal relationships frustrate or disappoint you?
Some of that frustration is simply because of what’s happened to us. There is no question that life circumstances and our environment shape our reality. However, I am guessing that the vast majority of the friction you experience can be traced back to small choices.
A small, defensive remark that you justified in the moment led to another, which built a culture of mistrust. A small decision to “download” your opinion rather than asking a curious question built momentum until your team stopped offering their ideas entirely.
There is an inevitability to your choices. It is exactly how the Joker in The Dark Knight is able to build his entire master plan around the deterministic moral framework of the heroes. He accurately predicts what Batman will do based entirely on Batman’s past choices.
What is the implication of this for you and me as leaders?
First, our small acts today will bear great consequences on our choices in five, ten, and twenty years. Choose wisely and bravely. Don’t follow the path of least resistance. Your small choices are votes cast for the kind of person you want to be.
Second, interrogate what you’re rationalizing. Once you start justifying small acts that are inconsistent with who you want to be (“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” or “I only snapped at them because I was tired”), your subsequent actions will start sliding in that exact same direction.
Who do you want to be five, ten, and twenty years from now? What small actions today will build the inevitability that you’ll actually get there?
