Two Words That Are Killing Your Future!!! (9 Minutes)

0:36But the problem is that sometimes you'll tell people something, trying to teach them or enlighten them with something, and in the middle of the sentence, they're showing their ignorance by saying, "I know, I know, I know. Yeah, I know, I know, I know." Why are they showing ignorance by saying "I know"? Because, number one, they show that they have no manners, so obviously, they don't know. Even if you know, how do you know that everything I'm about to tell you, you know? I haven't completed what I was about to say. Because they have self-confidence issues. The Mishberei HaYam interprets this as a directive to express appreciation when one is taught something new. If one remains silent after learning a thought or idea, their intellectual benefactor may get the impression that they have already heard it.

2:04A truly learned person expresses their appreciation by saying, "I never heard this before. Thank you for introducing me to this new idea." To translate what I just said: Sometimes, somebody is about to tell you a story that you know. You heard the story before; it's a Gemara story, it's Moshe Rabbeinu's story. You've heard the story before. The Mishberei Yam is teaching you both Mussar, about behavior, and also how to really be a Chacham. How? Never ever interrupt the story, even if you know the story. Meaning, you heard the story of Kriyat Yam Suf how many times? X amount of times. You heard the story of Moshe Rabbeinu coming from Mount Sinai how many times? X amount of times. There's a mitzvah that we're obligated to do every single year on Pesach, which is coming up in a few weeks, where you are obligated to study all night everything that happened from Mitzrayim all the way to Mount Sinai. Even if you are Rav Chaim Kanievsky or even if you are the Gadol Hador, you are obligated with the same mitzvah as us, the little people. Why?

3:27Go over the story again, but I heard it last year and the year before, and the year before, and the year before. Go over it again. Number one, you could understand something new from the same story all the time because the Torah, it never ends. That's number one. Number two, if someone is teaching you this specific thing, if someone is about to tell you a story and you interrupt by saying, 'I heard it,' you could be ruining something for them. You could be ruining something for them, number one. Maybe they wanted to try something out by teaching somebody, and you just stole that opportunity from them. Now, this guy that was about to teach you something—all he needed was one student to say, "Wow, what a story!" and he was going to become a teacher. He was going to start teaching people every week, and he was actually going to succeed and get people to do teshuvah every week. And every week, people do teshuvah, people return to Hashem, people do this today. But you ruined it. Why? Because you thought, "Yeah, I heard it already." I heard the story about Moshe Rabbeinu. I heard it already destroyed his confidence. He now wants to go back to be an engineer. He wants to go back and cut hair again. He doesn't want to be a teacher anymore. Why did you say I heard it? The magnitude of you saying I know just destroyed millions of lives, potentially. Two, second reason.

4:47Many times, if you're a speaker, you actually learn while you speak. If you speak out loud, you're learning; you actually end up learning from your own speech, from you saying it yourself. Why? When you read, if you're reading it in a secular way, you read anything in a secular way, all you're doing is reading with your eyes. When you read in a religious way, you read like a ben Torah (a son of the Torah). Like a Jew, you're reading with both your eyes and with your lips, meaning you're saying the words out loud. You don't necessarily need to be like some people who never do a blessing the whole year, but when they finally do, they want to make sure the whole synagogue hears. The guy hasn't done a blessing since 1942. Okay, I get you, it's only an apple, relax, relax. It's only an apple, we got you. It's an apple, you know, the bracha (blessing), boy, play; it's good for you. Not everybody has to hear, but if you do every bracha like that, you should be watching a minyan. But it's all for kavod (honor), for the show-off. So, anyway, sometimes you learn.

6:01Simply by hearing yourself, because now, instead of just your eyes and lips, you are also using your ears. When you speak out loud and repeat something, you're sharpening your own skills. Additionally, you're observing other people's reactions, which triggers many other thoughts. Now, since you've repeated it out loud, all the thoughts you had before get rewound, and you start gaining new insights (chidushim) from your own speech. All the thoughts that you had before get rewound, and now you start getting new thoughts, and you start getting a chiddush from your own speech. I can tell you many times during the shiur itself, I got a chiddush. Many times, literally, I think it's at least once a week, if not every week, every shiur always brings a chiddush during a shiur. That's just the way it works. So now if somebody's about to give you a chiddush or some story that you heard a thousand times already, you say, "Oh, no, I know already," and you cut their story in half. No, no, I know, I know. You could have potentially just killed their chiddush, and now they're not gonna get a chiddush because of you. So the character trait that we all have to develop is to have enough patience to let people finish what they're going to say, even if you heard it, especially if it's Torah.

7:19If it's Torah, especially if it's Torah, take note and learn from it. If it's shtuyot, if it's the guy who's telling you the same story about how he got into an accident in his car, and it was a fender bender, and the guy came from the left, and then from the right, and then the light was red, and blue, and all. Or if he tells you about a poker hand, people that play poker. They love to tell you the story about every single hand. They have a play: "Oh, and he had aces, and he had queens, and then I, I said yes, and I called them." And they tell you that for every single hand they have a play. Or people that go fishing and... People fishing, I'll tell you, all listen: that day, the sky was blue, the clouds were on the right side, and the sun was shining on me. But I think it was really on him and the fish. I'm telling you, those fish were talking to me—they were. I was going to get one that day, and I'll tell you the whole story about the fish and the entire fishing story. It's a famous thing; people that fish, people play poker, people that in general do certain things, they like to repeat their stories. It's like they live vicariously through their own stories, but you don't have to listen to them again.

8:22You have the time and you have the ability; you want to develop really, really good manners. And if it’s somebody who is important, like your father or your mother, you have to. It's something else. But if it’s just some guy that’s wasting your time, you have no obligation to listen to him. Just some random person wasting your time with poker stories or fishing stories—you have no obligation to listen. But if it’s Torah, you have to listen to it. Number one: you can help him. Number two: you can help yourself. Number three: perhaps there's part of the story you’ve never heard. Even though you heard the whole story a million times, maybe there's one fact he's going to mention that you never heard, which will complete the story for you.