Didn't See It Coming: Overcoming the Seven Greatest Challenges That No One Expects and Everyone Experiences

by Carey Nieuwhof

Cynicism begins not because you don’t care but because you do care.

You start to do what cynics do by instinct: you project past failures onto new situations.

The problem with generalizing—applying one particular situation to all situations—is that the death of trust, hope, and belief is like a virus, infecting everything. You think you’re protecting yourself from the future when, in reality, your new stance infects your present. The people you care about most in the here and now suffer. That’s because as a cynic, you project your newfound suspicion on everyone and everything. Your current relationships stall out or dial back a few notches. The withdrawal isn’t just from the future; you retreat from the present as well.

Perhaps most disturbingly, cynicism begins to infect your relationship with God. When you close your heart to people, you close your heart to God. That shouldn’t surprise us, but it does. It only makes sense that the very act of hardening your heart to people simply hardens your heart.

What I needed to understand is what you need to understand: cynicism is actually a choice. Cynics aren’t born; they’re made. Life doesn’t make you a cynic; you make you a cynic.

Cynics find hope hard because hope is one of cynicism's first casualties.

The thrust of the gospel is that Jesus sees your hate and meets it with love. He sees your despair and counters it with hope. He sees your doubt and lobs belief back at you again and again. Cynicism melts under the relentless hope of the gospel. Your past isn’t your future. Not if you get Jesus involved.

An incredibly effective antidote to cynicism is curiosity.

Increasingly in our culture, certainty is off-putting.

When your life becomes focused on what you know and what you can control, dreams die.

Like it or not, character, not competency, determines capacity.

When you’re no longer breathing, the legacy you’ll leave will center on your character. People will remember if you loved well, if you forgave easily, if you cared enough to be there for them. They’ll remember if you served or preferred to be served. They’ll know whether you thought life revolved around you or whether you really tried to honor God and others. They’ll remember whether you were generous or miserly, arrogant or humble, compassionate or indifferent. They’ll remember your temper or whether you learned the rhythms of grace.

Blaise Pascal was right: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”1

After all, becoming a Christian is not about us being good; it’s about God being good to us in Christ. Our response is to trust in Christ.

Let me tell you what happens when you are relentlessly committed to making sure your talk matches your walk: you change your walk. Every time I line up my public talk to match my private walk, it makes my private walk better.

Of all the lies we tell, the lies we tell ourselves are the deadliest.

Nothing feels quite as strange as people treating you as poorly as you regularly treat them.

My theory is that we’ve grown used to posting status updates, telling the world what’s on our mind. Social media has made us all mini-broadcasters. As “social” as social media is, it’s still largely a monologue. Most people tell rather than ask.

Here’s what I’ve realized in my life: confession and progress are inexorably linked. You won’t address what you don’t confess. If you think about this more deeply, it’s the things that you refuse to confess that grate on the relationships that matter to you. Your unwillingness to address your critical words drives a wedge down the center of your marriage. Your self-absorption builds a wall between you and your kids, not to mention your friends. Jealousy and envy make it impossible to celebrate the accomplishments of anyone else, and your friendships stay shallow or dissolve as a result.

Excuses find their genesis in the reasons things didn’t go the way you hoped. Yes, your parents got a divorce when you were six years old. Sure, your coach never put you in the games when you deserved to play. No, it’s not fair that other kids got their education paid for while you couldn’t attend the college of your choice. But here’s the question you need to answer: When are your past circumstances going to stop defining your present and future? At a certain point, your circumstances have to stop functioning as excuses.

Healthy people treat reasons as explanations, not justifications. Justifications lead to stagnation and, eventually, either to complete

Thousands of people face the same set of circumstances every day. The biggest difference between those who make progress and those who make excuses is how they treat the reasons for the circumstances. You get to pick: you can see a reason as a justification that leads to stagnation or as an explanation that can lead to transformation. Start confessing your role. Start shedding the past. Start owning your shortcomings. Because you can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can’t make both.

When you take an interest in others more than in yourself, it’s a very small form of dying to yourself, something very close to the heart of Christ. When you give your life away, something greater rises.

the leaders I admire most and who have accomplished the most tend to be people who never seem in a rush, who have all the time in the world. There’s something to that.

After a long pause, Dallas replied, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

the fastest path to irrelevance is this: stop changing.

The barrier to change, of course, is that anything that deviates from your default—your normal—will feel unfamiliar, challenging, and sometimes even threatening. And every decade, the gap grows between where culture has gone and what you’re hardwired to view as “normal.”

You’re ready to change because the pain associated with the status quo just became greater than the pain associated with change. That’s the moment most of us change.

If you want to talk to people who understand resistance to change, hang out with church leaders for a while. For some reason, North American Christians tend to cling to the past more than they want to leap into the future. The decline of both faith and church attendance during the previous decades has been significant, and the relevance of the church to the culture has suffered as well. In my view, there’s a direct correlation between the two phenomena. Yet often Christians believe that since God doesn’t change, we don’t need to either. I’ve committed my life to reversing that belief. After all, irrelevance causes us to lose the ability to speak into a culture. There has never been a more important time for the church to have a voice, yet we’re at the point of losing ours.

In many ways, that’s what churches and companies are doing today. We’re using new technology to prop up an old model. What if leaders started thinking of themselves as a digital organization with a physical presence, instead of a physical organization with a digital presence? After all, everyone they want to reach is already online.

But what seems obvious to outsiders is rarely that obvious to insiders, which is why you and I struggle badly with change.

The brain has a bias toward what it already knows.

1. Love the Mission More Than the Methods

To be successful in life, methods need to serve your mission.

one of the best ways to earn the affection and buy-in of a younger team is to listen as much as you speak, to learn as much as you attempt to teach. You can learn so much from younger leaders, and they hold the key to your organization’s renewal and future, in terms of both personnel and ideas.

The best years for leaders who are able to communicate with the culture often seem to happen somewhere between age forty-five and seventy-five. If you don’t navigate these years well, these are also the years where irrelevance accelerates. But if you pay attention to the things we’ve discussed, these can be not only your peak earning years but also your peak contributing years.

Growing older does not necessarily mean growing irrelevant. In fact, staying relevant to the culture around you may be the gateway into your best years yet.

The key to seeing transformation take root is to keep changing, keep experimenting, keep risking. You won’t feel the shift immediately, but at some point you’ll wake up and realize you don’t want things to be the way they used to be. You’ll begin to feel that “the good old days” should be left behind and that your best days are ahead of you. And that ushers in hope, excitement, and joy.

don’t just intend to change. Actually do it. Because unimplemented change will become regret.

When you value the counsel and input of others, especially on the things you’re best at, you embark on a path toward greater wisdom.

After all, self-righteous Christians don’t do drugs. They do food.

Unrestrained, pride will relentlessly drive you to remove whatever challenges it, and one of its most consistent threats is accountability.