Remember to Remember - No. 30
Often, what's most important in life is not something new, but the things we have forgotten and must remember. We are all surrounded every day by endless new information in the form of podcasts, articles, videos, books, news, and AI. It is astounding how much information there is out there, and now it is more accessible than ever. Influencers are constantly selling us their opinions on how we should eat, dress, exercise, work, and live. The abundance of knowledge we are surrounded by every day has made us all information addicts. We read a book or listen to a podcast and hear something interesting or wise, and think it will change our lives. Fast forward a month or two, and most of us can’t remember what we heard that was so profound.
I have written before about what Brian Schroller calls the “integrity gap,” but it’s worth mentioning again. The distance between what we know and what we have actually applied to our lives is called the integrity gap. As a culture, we have become really good at consuming new thoughts and ideas but increasingly worse at applying them to our lives. The most important question has become, what do we need to remember to remember?
How many times have you read a book, felt convicted or inspired, and then put it down, only to forget what you learned? What about retreats? We come back rested, inspired, and committed to living differently, and then the grind of life happens, and we forget to remember the decisions we made and the things we learned. Perhaps worst of all, how many times have you heard God speak to you or put something on your heart and then forgotten to remember what He said? All of these have happened to me many times.
Scott Dohner often talks about how we want new ideas and new solutions, but what we really need is to just do the old ones. The truth is that simple wisdom, remembered and applied, outperforms seemingly higher-level wisdom that is forgotten. We are looking for the secret key that will unlock everything, but transformation happens when we take simple foundational truths and let them change how we think and live. We have to become people who remember to remember.
There is something appealing about new ideas and something boring about old ones. Maybe it is shiny object syndrome in our modern attention-deprived culture, but I think it’s more than that. We want shortcuts, the easier path to our destination. The old tried and true paths in life are rarely short and are clearly challenging. Most of the truly important wisdom in life has to do with process and becoming, versus shortcuts to achieving. How many books come out each year with promising shortcuts? It has become painfully clear to me that there are no shortcuts to what truly matters in life. The only way to make the journey shorter is to remember the truly important wisdom so that you don’t have to be reminded of it years later, after all your shortcuts have failed. The fast path to what we want in life always costs us something that we should be unwilling to trade. Usually, it costs us the relationships that were made for with God, ourselves, and others. The sad reality is that we have forgotten what truly matters, and we have traded it for a life filled with pursuing shortcuts, shiny ideas, and avoiding the hard work of becoming who we are created to be. What if instead we committed to a life of remembering what truly matters? What if we remembered and put into practice the wisdom that is truly foundational to the life we were made for?
Wisdom
Most people don’t understand what wisdom truly is anymore. It has become a term synonymous with knowledge or maybe even high-level knowledge, but that’s not what it is. Wisdom is living truth for the journey of life that guides us to God and the life we were created to live. We so easily allow living truth to be blended into the soup of exciting ideas and thoughts we are presented with every day. Before we know it we have merged timeless truth with pop-psychology and shortcuts to the “good life.” If we dilute wisdom with the world's high-level thinking, it loses its potency, but more importantly, we lose our focus on it. We don’t have to fully forget true wisdom in order to lose our way; we just have to forget to remember it and let it guide how we live on a daily basis for it to be completely ineffective in our lives.
If we instead take simple, timeless wisdom and apply it daily in our lives, it will be far more effective than every other manner of shiny and exciting new thoughts and ideas. The fruit of real wisdom applied daily is more valuable than anything else we could attain in life. Over the years, I have sat with mentors who consistently talked to me about seemingly boring wisdom, but the power of their story and the evidence of God’s hand in their lives led me to trust them. As I practiced remembering and applying the simple truth they shared with me, it has changed everything in my life. I have found deep peace, live a beautiful life of adventure, have an incredible relationship with Heather and the kids, and have some great men in my life who care deeply for me. The more of life that goes by, the more I see how rare and beautiful those things are and how cheap the world's definition of success is compared to them. Only by the grace of God and His gift of men to show me the way, have I come to find the path of peace and the way of wisdom. It’s available to all of us no matter what. Finding this narrow path requires us to remember to remember the wisdom that guides our lives.
“Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her; those who hold her fast will be blessed.” — Proverbs 3:13–18
The importance of remembering is not just true in our spiritual lives; it’s true in every area of life. So many business leaders struggle with getting distracted by shortcuts and new ideas. One of the most important business skills is remembering what is most important. I have seen time and again how easy it is for incredibly smart people to get distracted and lose sight of the fundamentals. This practice of helping people remember what is most important has become a foundational part of my work. At the end of the day, what I do is help people identify, focus on, and apply what matters most. It sounds simple, but when challenges come up or things get busy, we all start looking for new solutions. In our fast-paced, overloaded world, we have lost the art of remembering and applying simple wisdom in complex environments. One of the greatest skills in our modern world is the ability to remember and apply what truly matters most in every area of our lives.
Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, marking the start of the High Holy Days and a 10-day period of reflection that culminates in Yom Kippur. Remembrance is a core theme of Rosh Hashanah, remembering God’s creation, covenant, and reflecting on our lives. Today (September 23rd) is the start of Rosh Hashanah. I have been working on this note for a couple of weeks and didn’t realize that it aligned with this holiday of remembering. Let’s all take the next 10 days to reflect on our lives and remember true wisdom, what God has said to us, and the way of life He has created us for.
- John Walt
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