The Butterfly Effect of Kindness

Two of my favorite movies, It’s a Wonderful Life and Back to the Future, have space time continuum themes. In these movies I love how the viewer gets to see how small things like little acts of kindness can snowball to change the world. In It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, gets to see how his town and family would have been detrimentally impacted if he had never been born. His seemingly small acts of kindness literally changed most everything. It’s not always so easy to see this in our own lives but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.There is a term called the butterfly effect that was discovered by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz in the 1970s that explores this same phenomenon.

Essentially, the butterfly effect is used in chaos theory to describe how tiny variations can affect giant and complex systems.

One day, when Lorenz was plugging numbers into mathematical equations to predict weather, he noted that the outcomes were totally different than what he expected. After looking over the data, he realized the outcome was different because the numbers were rounded to three decimal points instead of the six he had used previously. He thought the tiny change wouldn’t alter the outcome by much, but he was wrong.  Put into practice, this theory explains that it is difficult to predict large, complex systems without knowing all the small factors that affect the whole system. He showed that seemingly miniscule changes can set something in motion that will have much larger consequences. In a 1973 speech, Lorenz said:

"...a perfect example of the butterfly effect would be a case in which “a butterfly flapping his wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas.”

A number of  years ago, I received a call from my high school tennis coach who I had not seen in many years. He told me on the phone that he had taken a drive of over seventy miles to Chillicothe, Missouri, and, when he remembered it was my hometown, he decided to look me up. He had checked into a motel and asked if I could come see him. I was painting my house and had paint all over me, so I told him that it would be great to see him and that I would come as soon as I cleaned up. However, while I was getting ready, he called back and told my wife he didn’t think it would work for us to get together. Sensing something was wrong, I immediately got in my car and drove to the motel, paint splatters and all.At the motel, he told me that he was an alcoholic and had just gone on a drinking binge.

My former coach told me that he was considering suicide.

He had lost his job, lost his wife, and had a strained relationship with his children. He felt that his whole life was in shambles. During our conversation, he told me that he had made no difference in the world and everyone would be better off if he had never been born.In an instant, I was provided with exactly the right thing to say to him. I reminded him of when I was in 8th grade, playing tennis at the local tennis courts and he came by and strongly encouraged me to go out for the high school tennis team, something I most likely would not have done otherwise. As a result of his encouragement, I went out for the tennis team and became a state high school finalist. That determined the college I attended because that college offered me a tennis scholarship. While I was in college, the president of the school brought a job opportunity to me which led to my career in Chillicothe as a bank president. In Chillicothe, I met my future wife which obviously led to our three children. I showed him how his one act of encouragement most likely changed my entire life. How could he possibly think he had never made a positive difference in the world? I believe my words helped him at the time and, thankfully, he did not take his own life that night. Our conversation helped me, too, because it reinforced how little things can make a big difference.

It reminded me that just as a butterfly flapping his wings in one part of the world can contribute to a hurricane in another part, the small things that a person does can make a big difference.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

• Can you think of a time in your when you failed to do something small that would have made a big difference to someone else? If so, what happened? How might things have been different if you had taken action?
• Has there ever been a time when someone did something small for you that made a big impact? If so, what did they do and how did it affect you? How might things have changed if they had not done this?
• Do you make a conscious effort to do small things and/or little acts of kindness for other people to make their lives better? Why or why not?
• How can you start doing little things to help others throughout your day? What will be difficult? What steps should you take to overcome those difficulties? (List plan or ) What might change if you start doing this?