The Mote in my Idea

So many great ideas and companies are born because people wanted the product or service for themselves. We need something, and that thing does not exist yet. Or we interact with a provider of something, and they do it wrong or have such poor service that we decide to go into competition with them. Or we go to buy something and it simply costs more than we know it should, so we go create it, build it, do it - and a new company or idea is born.

Find a need and fill it, the saying goes, and what better need to find and fill than our own?

I think this motivating principal lies at the root of our tendency to be hypocrites - where we are finding the faults in others that are our own weakness and fault as well. Read on.

"And why do you look at the splinter in your brother's eye, and not notice the beam which is in your own eye?" Mat 7:3

But here is why we do that: Whatever our problems are, we are trying to improve and we're fighting our own bad behavior. Say we're trying to eat healthy. We may not be very good at eating healthy yet, in fact we may have just started some new willpower-testing regimen today, and we can hardly stand to see someone breaking the new rules we've just set up for ourselves, maybe downing junk food and soda, and our instinct is to jump all over them for it.

We've "geared up" mentally to wage war against the bad behavior in ourselves and when we see the "enemy behavior" we're going to start shooting, (unless we're self-aware enough to hold our tongue and recognize the source of our zeal).