On Improving Others – Sunday, January 13, 1946
Perhaps most of us, if not all, are perfectionists at heart. We are ever attempting to improve ourselves, to improve others, to improve the conditions under which we live. At times we feel a wholesome dissatisfaction with ourselves, but perhaps more often we feel dissatisfaction and impatience with the weaknesses and failures and faults of others. When we arrange with someone else to do something for us, it often annoys us if it isn’t done as well as we think it should be done.
We are perturbed when others make what seem to us to be wrong decisions. We are annoyed when we see someone else miscarry an opportunity, or fail in some undertaking, or miss the mark in any activity. Most of us are inclined to do our share of sideline —coaching and to be critical of those who are doing the playing. It isn’t easy to sit by and watch someone else fumble, when we are convinced that we could do what they are doing in less time, with greater skill.
At times it is difficult for us even to let our children do things, because our fingers are itching to do for them what we know we can do better than they can. But every man and every child must have his opportunity to think, to decide, and to do. Life has to be learned by all of us. If only the skillful and the able were permitted to perform, there would be no chance for anyone else to become skillful or able. With rare exceptions, almost anyone can learn to make his own way in life, and to be useful in his own generation. But the most successful leaders of men are those who discover early that there is no use trying to put square pegs into round holes.
Men have different gifts and abilities, different ambitious and objectives, and we shall save ourselves much disappointment if we learn to quit expecting racehorse performance where there isn’t racehorse capacity. We have to take men as we find them and help them to be useful according to their capacity—and not according to ours. We shall never find anyone who will do anything exactly as we would do it. Nor would the Lord God do it exactly as we would do it—but He respects our honest efforts. And should we become impatient in our search for perfection in others, perhaps we can bridle our impatience with the reminder of these quoted lines:
“And in self-judgment if you find
Your deeds to others are superior,
To you has Providence been kind,
As you should be to those inferiors
Example sheds a genial ray
Of light, which men are apt to borrow,
So, first, improve yourself today
And then improve your friends tomorrow.”—Anonymous.
“The Spoken Word,” heard over Radio Station K S L and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Jan. 13, 1946. Copyright 1946.
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January 13, 1946
Broadcast Number 0,856