Teaching of Value Premises

We have a lot of teachers and teaching life experiences during our life. When we are young we spend a lot of time working with teachers. First there are your parents, but very quickly there are professional teachers and structured school. What I have found is there are a few bad teachers that do not offer much, most teachers try their best offering you an average learning experience and there are a few teachers that are truly great and offer a huge learning experience. 

The truly great teachers do not fill a bucket but build a fire and the learning you get from them lasts a lifetime. These exceptional teachers teach you how to teach yourself.  

You will probably not identify which teachers changed your life until years pass by and you reflect back on what you have learned, accomplished and why.

I was lucky to have my mother’s sister, my aunt Jean, who was a PHD Microbiology Professor at Rutgers University, took a struggling second grade math student and turned me into a straight A math student. I struggled with English class, making mostly C’s until a first year teacher, 4 years my senior when I was a Senior in High School, inspired me to make my first A. Later at Sam Houston State University an English professor, Jewel Gibson who is also an author, inspired me to write. An atomic scientist university professor decided to teach Physics at my high school. He taught me to use math as a scientific method to measure and understand how things and events in our world and universe work.

At Sam Houston State University I had 2 goals, to become a doctor and play football. As it turned out I could not do both. The time it took to study and attend long lab sessions ate into my training time to be a football player. Since I was on full scholarship my coach  called me to his office and said that I had to choose between studying to be a doctor and playing football. I decided to switch to Business Administration and play football. This lasted one year and other than being on a national championship team it did not make me happy. Lucky for me I met Donna, fell in love and decided to give up football and get married, enroll at the University of Houston majoring in Math and minoring in Management.

I love math, but the engineering math courses became boring and uninteresting. I switched to theoretical math and started taking courses from a professor writing the first text book for the point set theory course. This learning experience taught me how to start with next to nothing and build something complex and beautiful using the scientific method.

My minor, management of people, led me to an amazing learning experience under a very capable teacher. He spent his first career as a Catholic Priest and left the priesthood when his values came into conflict with the Catholic Church. He developed and pioneered a new course offered by The University of Houston. The course was Value Premises. The purpose of the course in the management curriculum was to teach you to understand how different cultures and religions structured values that lead people to think and behave the way they do. Then as a manager of people I would become better able to understand and motivate people to be as productive as possible while still meeting the values they desired to live by. As a manager I always wanted a win win relationship with everyone I came into contact with. This included not only employees but customers, partners, stockholders and everyone I had to deal with.

The Value Premises course had us study the Catholic and Protestant Bible as well as the Jewish Torah, Muslim Koran, the Hindu Vedas and the Taoism Tao Te Ching (Laozi). Then we discussed the values that the various cultures practicing these various religions followed.

Every human being has a set of values that guides everything they do in their everyday life. Studying Value Premises gave me a basic understanding for values used by most of the world peoples working to support their lives.

The fire that this one teacher built in me caused me to explore many different Christian faiths. After several years I landed in the Unitarian Church. I came to the conclusion that while there are differences between all Christian religions the values by which I live day to day could be essentially met by any/all of them. I also found a lot of commonality between Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Taoism. However, day to day I found Christianity the only way I could live a happy value driven life. I think that even if you don’t study value premises you should commit your day to day life based on one of the available faiths.

I think one of the problems the world has today is too many people live their day to day life based on a set of values they have decided are best for them. These people have not studied the various value premises that have developed over thousands of years of human evolution. They have not committed themselves to the values held by one or more of the faiths. They have defined their values on their own or in collaboration with their friends on Twitter, Facebook or some other social media. Value systems developed this way always develop according to nihilism and narcissism, in other words the world revolves around what you and your friends want. 

If you are not living a life based on values developed over thousands of years by the people that came before us, you may well be living an invaluable life.

Value Yourself and Pass on What You Believe to be Fact, not Propaganda.

I have missed writing a blog entry. I did it every day while at sea on Bella Donna crossing the South Pacific. It was easy to stay focused on thoughts and then setting aside the few hours required to write something each day. Bella Donna is a very small island in a very large sea. While standing watch or watching a fishing line you have time to think. I have not been on any recent long passages and I do find it very challenging to think and write at the same time dealing with daily life. 

So, I want to commit some time to reflect on my thoughts that are stimulated by what is in the news each morning. I want to do this every day. We will see how this works for me.

I find that things happen in the world that touch me and remind me of lessons that life has taught me. I want to write some of this down so it may be used by others.  I especially want my grandchildren, when they enter early adulthood to know what their grandfather thought in hopes it helps them to make good life decisions.

Life has been very good to me. People have asked me to write about how to live successful life. There is this huge pile of experiences, lessons, thoughts, values and facts; it could take forever to write it all down. So we will try to do a little every day as the morning news stimulates my memory.

What struck me this week is how people make decisions. As a young boy I totally got 2 things, faith (values) and scientific method. My mother would take me every Sunday to the Methodist Church at the end of the block we lived on where she sang in the choir and I got instructed on how to live a Christian Life; i.e. values and using a moral compass. My father would stay home to mow the lawn, drink a beer and start the traditional Sunday Texas Family BarBQ. I thought my dad did not share the church values. It wasn't until years later that I learned the strength and level of commitment my dad had to values. You see he was a thirty-second degree Mason, a man of great spiritual values which he practiced by giving time to handling the finances for the Shrine Circus every year to raise money for the Shriner's Children's Hospital. He also ran the finances for the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo to raise money for charity. It wasn't until I grew up, got married and moved to California that I learned how hurt my father was that I did not ask about how to become a Mason. You see a Mason can not talk about his Masonry until a son or daughter asks.  

As a young boy I was introduced to the Scientific Method of making decisions.  This means that I would not accept any fact that would be important to my life decisions until I was convinced by proof over an acceptable time period. To this day I do a ridiculous amount of research before purchasing almost anything. For example, I spent 6 months analyzing the Apple Watch before buying one. I did not buy an Apple Watch for a show of style; I bought it for its functionality. Have I made mistakes and resented purchasing something I researched ? Yes, but it happens rarely and when it does I learn from my mistake.

We live is a world flooded with marketing messages, social media, political correctness, propaganda and lots of exercise of freedom of speech. The vast majority of this flood of information does not pass through the Scientific Process. this information would all be interesting, if true. The truth is today, more so than when I grew up, people start with a fact they want to be true and go about collecting only the information that supports their “fact”. Then they flood the news and electronic social media making a marketing/propaganda case to convince as many people as possible. 

My experience is if you allow yourself to make important life decisions based on this marketing/propaganda which definitely forms opinions held by many, you will be unhappy and certainly NOT SUCCESSFUL.  

You are an individual, be a leader of one making your life decisions based on facts you know scientifically to be true. This is why we have our Freedom. Do not become a human robot in the forwarding of marketing/propaganda to others. Take your time to research and verify before giving into social pressure. Feel that what you pass on has value.

A little short for today, i will do better as I get into this.