the key reason skill development goes bad
After spending the last two posts talking about the importance of acquiring skills, it would be easy to focus on strategies for gaining skills. But if you ever want to develop skills in a healthy way, you have to understand the unacknowledged problem that plagues our culture when it comes to skills. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, the problem is that we gain the right skills but for the wrong reasons.
What do I mean by this? Many people do the right thing in gaining skills but are motivated by the wrong reason: their personal advancement and success. They pursue skills not to serve others, but rather to help themselves.
I remember my dedication to practicing basketball in high school. I was fixated on becoming a more skilled basketball player, so I shot baskets every evening for hours, dreaming of the personal success that would come to me if I became better than my peers. These selfish motives strike each of us in different ways, causing us to develop skills, whether at school, work, or in life, out of a motivation to advance beyond our peers.
The Bible calls special attention to these motivations, naming it envy, that secret displeasure and ill-will we harbor towards people who have what we want in life. The preacher in Ecclesiastes saw this in his day, writing:
Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This is also vanity and a striving after the wind.
As the preacher looked at his culture, he saw people who worked hard to acquire the skills they needed to succeed. But rather than praising their work or their abilities, he calls our attention to their motives: they are driven to increase their skills because they are envious of their neighbors. They envy the success, wealth, and status of their peers, which motivates them to get the skills they need to surpass the people around them.
Could this same thing not be said about our society? Does not envy, or a desire to be envied, motivate so many people to develop the skills they need to advance in their careers or excel in their lives? We observe the lifestyles and success of our peers, whether in real life or on social media, and envy them, motivating us to double down on developing the skills we need to succeed.
The German sociologist Helmut Schoeck echoes Ecclesiastes in his 1966 classic book entitled Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour:
Envy is a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being, and which occurs as soon as two individuals become capable of mutual comparison. Man is an envious being.
Schoeck believed that envy was a core drive for human behavior, as it motivates people in every culture to compare themselves to others and develop the skills they need to keep up. But despite Schoeck’s belief that envy is a widespread motivator in human behavior, he said that no one wanted to talk about it:
That our fellow man is always potentially envious is one of the most disturbing, often one of the most carefully concealed yet basic facts of human existence at all levels of cultural development.
While no one wants to admit to being envious, everyone struggles with gaining skills not because we want to serve others, but rather because we want what our peers have. Envy drives much of our societal push for skills development. For example:
An athlete sees the praise and recognition of his peers and decides to increase his training so that he will be the fastest next season.
A new mom sees how much attention another mom gets for having the perfect home and starts to spend more and more time online picking up tips to help her create a picturesque home.
A young person sees their friend’s lifestyle and decides to get their MBA so that they can jump up into the next income bracket.
A college student sees the attention a classmate gets for landing a prestigious job and begins to spend even more time focused on getting better grades.
A pastor sees a peer’s church explode in attendance and begins to attend conferences so that his preaching will improve and more people will like his church.
In each of these examples, people are working towards helpful skills that will result in better performances, families, churches, and businesses. But the problem is that they are doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Their desire to improve their skills flows out of envy for their peer’s success, even though they’d never publicly admit that.
So how do you know if you are developing your skills for healthy motives or envious motives? It all comes down to glory. The person who is pursuing skills out of envious motives believes that their goal in life is to glorify themselves and enjoy their own life. If they could just become more skilled then they would get the personal glory to feel happy and important.
But the person who is pursuing skills out of healthy motives is motivated by the desire to, in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, glorify God and enjoy Him forever. When you are motivated to build skills to glorify God and not yourself, you will be able to do the right thing for the right reason. When this happens, it creates a culture where people develop gifts to love God and serve others, not to bring glory to themselves:
The painter paints not to be remembered with the great artists of all time, but rather to show the beauty and order that God has created.
The accountant pursues excellence not to enrich his lifestyle, but rather out of a desire to honor God’s command for honest scales and a truth-based society.
The doctor cares for patients not because it’s the job that pays her the most money, but rather because she wants to use her skills to help sick people become healthy.
The parent stays up talking through an issue with their child not because they see it as an investment in their future success, but rather to show the unconditional love they’ve received from their Heavenly Father.
The chef creates new recipes not to win more Michelin stars than her peers, but rather to display how different ingredients in God’s creation work together in incredible ways.
As these examples show, every skill can be pursued for good or bad reasons. You can develop your skills to serve your neighbors and glorify God or to serve and glorify yourself. This doesn’t mean that money or recognition or even fame are bad, but rather that they should be a byproduct of you trying to use your abilities to honor God, rather than the main motivator themselves.
But when you recognize that God cares not only about what you do but why you do it, you will be able to work towards skills that serve others and contribute to the greater good. A well-lived life doesn’t just involve developing the right skills, but rather developing the right skills for the right reasons.
