Guy Reams (00:03.406)
Okay, today is day 191. Throw the baby out with the bath water. You know, I love idiomatic expressions, especially ones that have lasted hundreds and hundreds of years. This is a German phrase that came back in the early 1500s.
Even some of the most famous writers like Martin Luther and Goethe would use this reference in their own writings. So it was a very popular phrase. So even though this phrase is over 400 years old, or no, more than 500 years old, we still haven't learned our lesson. As a human family, we find ourselves getting way too impatient and too frustrated about feeling a moment of disruption or unhappiness. And as a consequence, we throw everything out.
We overreact.
and we end up getting rid of what's annoying us in our life, and we also, at the same time, get rid of the good too. In my opinion, this is a behavior pattern that we as humans do all the time that causes us significant delays and challenges in our life. People will make entire career decisions this way, and as a consequence, they're not able to ever really build anything of value. So you can't throw, it's like a friendship.
One of the first ways we do this is in relationships. Let's say you have a friend that is a good friend or somebody you'd like to be friends with, and then they do something to annoy you or they do something wrong or something that you don't like. So you could just get impatient and throw that relationship away, right? But there's a lot of good in that relationship too, so you threw both of it out. So that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Guy Reams (01:53.006)
If you were to forgive that person, or just ignore the thing that annoys you, and work on the things that are good, then you would be building a relationship, because that's what a relationship's all about, right? I mean, luckily for me, my wife has decided to tolerate my problems, and as she's done so, we've built a relationship, and I know that there's things that I do that are not great.
But because she's willing to look the other way on those things, our relationship has built and grown over time and it's much stronger as we've gotten older because we're willing to look the other way. Now I'm not saying that my wife has anything that annoys me, just to be on the record, all right? So.
Now, that's with relationships. So how often do we throw away a relationship? Like a relationship with a customer, or with a vendor, or with a salesperson, whatever a case might be. Every relationship, if you want to get value out of it, requires you to build that relationship, which means you need to look past a couple of annoyances now and then. The second is with things. For example,
If your house gets dirty, you don't move out and go to the next house.
If you have a house that's got some repair issues or it's annoying you or there's something inconvenient about it, you can work on fixing that problem. Because I'll tell you this, a paid off house is far more valuable than a house that you owe a lot of money to. So if you've got a house that you've built value in, just because there's one thing annoying doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out. Same thing with vehicles. A lot of times we get rid of our car before we've actually took all the value out of it.
Guy Reams (03:40.814)
Like after you've paid the vehicle off and the vehicle's gotten past any major maintenance issues it has, there's a period of time, maybe four or five years, where that vehicle has the most value to you. And if we're so willing to throw it out, then we don't get the value. So there's probably millions of things in our life that are just that way. One little thing goes awry, and so we throw the whole thing out. The third one is more esoteric, but probably the most important. It's the idea of beliefs or ideas or things we have.
have faith in. We oftentimes choose to have faith or to believe in something and we put energy towards it and then something doesn't work out. Like let's say a new marketing plan. We have faith that if we market towards this type of customer that that will get us results. But it doesn't get us results right away so we throw the whole thing out. So we put whatever energy we put into it, we never get anything back from it because we're too busy moving on to the next thing because we don't have patience. So this concept
to baby out with the bathwater, I think it was very applicable today, even though it's an old statement. We need to learn to be patient. Give people and give things a chance to bring us the most value. Give our ideas a chance. Give the things that we have faith in a chance before we're so hasty to throw everything out.