Tonight I was talking politics with a friend -- government healthcare, mostly, and the chance that my family could one day benefit from a program I have real doubts about. I said what I've said a hundred times, that most people can't see the forest for the trees. Then I heard myself add, "The way I think, I can't see the trees for the forest."
I stopped. I hadn't been saving that line. It just came out, and it was true.
When someone shows me a program that makes care cheaper, I go straight to the system behind it: who pays, what it rewards, who stops being responsible for what, and where it all is in fifty years. I see those things first, and I see them fast. My friend was pointing at something real -- a bill that gets smaller, a worry that goes away -- and I answered about the forest.
Afterward I talked it through with ChatGPT, and it said something I haven't been able to put down: "Your strength may also be your blind spot."
Am I so busy with what a program does to the country that I miss what it does for the people I love? I don't know yet. I think sometimes I am.
I started Real Prosperity to help people see the structures that shape their lives -- the incentives, the charters, who holds the evidence. I still believe that matters. I didn't expect the work to turn around and show me something about myself.
The Savior taught principles for the whole world, and He still stopped on the road for one blind man. He never let the crowd crowd out the one. I want to hold the whole and the one the way He did, and I'm a long way from it.
So the next time a friend and I talk about something like this, I'll say the tree out loud first -- what it would mean for the people at that table, this year -- and then I'll ask my question about the forest.