Forest Fires and Life Decisions



What decision do you think has the most impact on your ability to be a competent person?

Competency means to perform at a high level.  To be a competent chess player, a person must consistently make good moves without many mistakes.

But life is full of mistakes.  We make them any time we act or think selfishly.  How can we ever hope to be truly competent at what matters most when we exhibit that type of behavior so frequently?

I was a Psychology undergraduate at BYU, but one of the discipline's ideas that has stuck with me the most came from a class of the same subject that I took in high school.

When people discover a disparity between their actions and standards, the realization creates cognitive dissonance, a fancy term for internal stress or conflict.  In order to resolve the discrepancy, a person typically responds by either elevating their behavior to meet the standard or dropping their standards to meet the behavior.


That concept sounds simple enough, but it lies at the very core of the conflict between excellence and mediocrity. In fact, misunderstanding or self-deception about the effect of cognitive dissonance is a principle reason why some people don't reach their potential.

When a person reduces their standards to the level of their behavior, they use a reason to justify it.  For example, when they discover that they are going faster than the speed limit they might think, "Everyone else is going faster than I am," "I'm in a hurry and it would be rude to be late," or "Police officers don't care if I'm only going two over."  While a solitary infraction may not seem serious, every decision we make, even the small ones, play a role in building or eroding our character.

The decision to take the moral high road fosters integrity, but the choice to change rather than rationalize our behavior when we make mistakes determines whether or not we will keep it.

In other words, it determines whether or not we reach our potential.

Some people think that the mistakes they have made mean that they have already lost the opportunity to become what they could have been.



When wildfires burn prominent sections of forest, seemingly identical landscapes can exhibit marked differences in the speed of their recovery.  One of the most important factors that determines how soon new growth will begin is the accessibility of new seeds.  The sooner that seeds can penetrate the desolate soil, the faster healing can occur.

Even after an area scathed by fire recovers, it is never exactly the same again.  At the same time, it isn't necessarily inferior to how it was before it was burned.  Overcoming the aftermath of a wildfire is painful and undesirable compared to avoiding the fire in the first place, but the damage doesn't destroy the potential that the landscape has for incredible beauty.

 Why?

Because its potential for excellence is part of its nature.  And no amount of fire can ever take that away.


What a tragedy it would be if the forest, devastated by its loss, put off gathering new seeds and instead chose to wallow in its charred branches, weeping at the open sky?  Or decided that it was ok to be an empty wasteland after all?

The only way it will ever be green and lush and beautiful again is by reversing its life course and starting to plant new seeds.

On that choice hangs its destiny.


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Photo attribution: Nicholas A. Tonelli, "Burns Run Wild area (11), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

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