Don’t Be an Idiot: The Most Inspiring Words I’ve Ever Heard

In an old episode of the office, Dwight Schrute recounts some good advice given to him by his sage boss, Michael Scott.

Michael Scott: What is the most inspiring thing I ever said to you?

Dwight Schrute: ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Changed my life.  Whenever I’m about to do something, I think, ‘Would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.

It’s really good advice for all of us.

Recently, my husband lost about thirty pounds. For years, he’s been saying that he would like to lose some weight, but he wasn’t too serious about it. One of his vices is sweet tea (we’re from Georgia), and try as he might to abstain from the sultry beverage, again and again he would fall off the wagon and head home from Chick-fil-A three refills past his original 32-oz drink.

But last March, he got serious. He actually did lay off the sweet tea. Instead of scheduling meetings at lunchtime, he’d come home and eat tuna with mustard. Plain tuna with mustard. He stopped helping himself to seconds at dinner. Maybe most shocking of all, he voluntarily ordered an entrée salad a couple of times when we went out. He started running. Then, as the pounds began to drop and the grouchiness began to subside, he signed up to do a sprint triathlon. With an event on the calendar, he amped up the exercise, quickly adding cycling and swimming to the mix.

Now, everywhere we go people we know stop and comment on his new physique. What’s your secret? They ask.

“Don’t be an idiot”, he says. “My wife has been saying it for years. Eat less, exercise more. I just stopped being an idiot.”

He’s amazed that people think he used some type of magic formula. He melted the fat the hard way, slow and steady. The technical term might be “self discipline.”

The credit really belongs to Michael Scott, but I’ll take it. Don’t we all want to wake up one morning and find out that there’s something magic about good old fashioned discipline? And yet, becoming a disciplined person really isn’t all that complicated. If you can remember four words, you can master just about anything.

The most inspiring thing I can say to you this week: Don’t be an idiot.

If you don’t want to take it from me, take it from 2 Timothy 1:7: For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline. (NIV)

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