Perception and Averages

On Monday, Dave Ramsey had Andy Andrews, author of "The Traveler's Gift" and "Master the Seven Decisions" on the show. Near the end of the segment, Andy was talking about averages. He described how, after a recent hurricane, he said he was devastated, and so to him, everyone was devastated. But, there were some people that weren't devastated and even prospered because of the hurricane: carpenters, plumbers, landscape people made more money in their lives because of that hurricane. As an average, his town, Orange Beach was devastated.

There is one segment of society that will not participate in an economic downturn: its doctors. They won't participate in it because our perception of them is different. You know, I've asked people, thousands of people, how many of you have bad doctors, and nobody ever raises their hand. You know that's impossible, right? It's impossible because if we take all of the doctors that represent us, half of them are going to be above average, and half of them are going to be below average. There are thousands of people in America are being cared for by bad doctors evidently. Below average doctors. But, our perception of them is that they're smarter, that they're better educated, and that they're worth the money, that they're worth us sittin' waiting three hours for them to give us five minutes of their time. And our perception of somebody is so strong that it will keep them financially sound through an economic downturn. Now, all I am asking is, if our perception of somebody is so strong that we can affect their financial ability, why can't we turn some of that on ourselves? And you understand that your perception of yourself affects your choices. And when your perception of yourself affects your choices, it changes the choices that you make. You know, an average, we can choose to be above the line, we can choose which the part of the line that we want to be on. It's huge to have a perception of yourself that is at least as effective as somebody else.

Now, this may sound like motivational speaking, and it might be. But it ties back into my post about Little Man Syndrome, and how we may get beaten up by events in our lives, but we do have an amazing ability to change our perception of ourselves and the choices that we make.