Minute With Mallon: The 51% Secret!

Oct 12

Welcome to Minute with Mallon!

Something I Taught:

Many of you know that before I was married to Sandy, I was married to my wife, Leigh. She passed away from cancer in 2005 after we'd been married for 26 years.

We got married on August 25th. The day before our wedding, my mother asked me to get on the phone with a couple she knew.

I was getting ready to go out for my bachelor party, and getting on the phone was about the last thing I wanted to do.

Remember those phones with cords that stretched about 30 feet? Well, never mind. 😊

Anyway, this was a couple my mother had lived with before she married my dad. They had been married for about 60 years.

After introducing themselves, they asked if they could give me a little marriage advice.

I said yes.

The woman told me they had lived by one simple rule for decades.

Give 51% and take 49%.

She explained it something like this:

"Every day, we try to give just a little more than we expect to receive. Sometimes that means doing something around the house without being asked. Sometimes it's listening when we'd rather be doing something else. Sometimes it's letting the other person have their way.

"We don't keep score or worry about who's doing more. We just both try to be the one who gives that extra 1%.

"And here's what we've learned. When both people are trying to give 51%, neither one feels like they're getting the short end of the stick."

Think about that for a minute.

Here was a couple who had been married for 60 years, and they had boiled down one of the secrets of their marriage to four simple words.

Give more. Take less.

I've thought about that conversation many times over the years.

And here's what I love about it. This principle doesn't just apply to marriage.

It applies to our children, friends, coworkers, and just about anyone who matters to us.

What if, instead of focusing on what someone else isn't doing for us, we focused on what we could do for them?

What if we listened a little longer? Showed a little more patience? Encouraged instead of criticized? Did something thoughtful without expecting anything in return?

And what if we did those things even when the other person wasn't giving their 51%?

Of course, healthy relationships need boundaries. I'm not suggesting we allow people to take advantage of us.

But I do believe our most important relationships would improve dramatically if we spent less time keeping score and more time looking for ways to give.

So here's my challenge for you this week.

Think about one of the most important people in your life and ask yourself:

"What would giving 51% look like in this relationship today?"

Then go do it.

You might be surprised what that extra 1% can do.

Something to Ponder:

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

Bruce Lee

Something I Learned:

I recently came across something from Leo Tolstoy that made me think.

He compared people to rivers. Sometimes they're calm, sometimes rushing, sometimes clear, and sometimes muddy. But they're still the same river.

People are the same way. We all have good and bad moments.
As the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once wrote: One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way—said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong.

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Here's what really struck me:

We tend to judge people by their worst moments while wanting others to judge us by our best intentions.

Who have you put a label on that deserves another look?