“Will it work?”
Along the way, we’ve been pushed to load our decisions with a need for certainty. It’s easier, it seems, to not try than it is to fail.
But the question, “is it worth trying?” unlocks possibility.
A surgeon in the middle of an operation should probably not experiment with an untested technique. But a writer, a leader or a musician can make that question part of their craft.
It’s the only way we learn.
Periods were an extraordinary invention. It took thousands of years of writing before we settled on this simple convention.
The most direct way to improve your writing is to make your sentences shorter.
I was reading a magazine article yesterday and was rapidly losing interest. The topic appealed to me, but I couldn’t keep reading. Then I noticed that halfway through the first column, I was still on the same sentence.
We have trouble keeping that long a string in our heads at once.
You can make sentences too long.
But it’s hard to make them too short.
Pharmacists used to mix chemicals by hand to create prescriptions.
Opticians used to grind lenses from scratch.
Lawyers used to start with an empty page.
Graphic designers needed to know how to draw.
All of these jobs are still important. None of them are the same as they were thirty years ago.
In your work, are you fighting the change or leading it?
It’s hard to see us going back.
I remember some time ago having a conversation with a young married girl who said she was really having trouble living the Christian life. She felt that she was doing things that weren’t pleasing to the Lord, and she just didn’t seem to be able to turn that around, to change that, to make it different. She confessed that she had been “seeking more of God” is the way she put it. She was trying all the spiritual experiences. She had gone into a charismatic environment, and she had tried to speak in tongues. She had even been “slain,” as it were, in the Spirit, as they call it.
She said, “I’m trying to get all I can get from God.” And my response to here was,
Momentum activities like public speaking, board sports and leadership all share an attribute with riding a bicycle: It gets easier when you get good at it.
The first error we often make is believing that someone (even us) will never be good at riding a bike, because riding a bike is so difficult. When we’re not good at it, it’s obvious to everyone.
The second error is coming to the conclusion that people who are good at it are talented, born with the ability to do it. They’re not, they have simply earned a skill that translates into momentum.
There’s a difference between, “This person is a terrible public speaker,” and “this person will never be good at public speaking.”
And there’s a difference between, “They are a great leader,” and “they were born to lead.”
The thing about momentum activities is that we notice them only twice: when people are terrible at them, and when they’re good at it. That includes the person you see in the mirror.That is the error you need to avoid.Its a process which everyone can work on.
There’s nothing wrong with abundance and joy.
But being spoiled causes two real problems:
it makes it difficult to appreciate what you have. If perfect is the standard, it’s rarely met and never exceeded.
it leads to tantrums. Tantrums about sharing, about the lack of ‘more’ and about the endless poverty of comparison.As a community increases in wealth, the number of spoiled citizens increases as well.
It’s often the acid that corrodes the magic that created the wealth in the first place.
Whining is a symptom, it’s rarely a cure for anything.
Kathryn Kuhlman said “I have come to the conclusion that this age knows almost everything about life___except how to live it” . It is not enough to know about life,we must know how to live life.
We have handed over our bodies to the doctors,our mind to psychiatrists,our souls to the ministers/pastors and our spirit to…….. But we are not three separate entities.Man is trinity;body,soul and spirit.Life is a whole.You cannot affect one part without affecting all three.
Man was made to give himself to a higher power than himself.In other words,man is going to be mastered by something.If you are not mastered by God,then you are going to be mastered by things.Or circumstances.
Christian need never go down in defeat.Never.No man,no woman,if his confidence is in God,need ever go down in defeat. You will never be defeated in the hour of sickness,in the hour of mental strain,in the hour of disappointment,in the hour of temptation. You and I ARE NOT ONLY CONQUERORS,WE ARE MORE THAN CONQUERORS THROUGH CHRIST WHO LOVED US and we surrender to.
But when we take our eyes off Jesus,when we refuse to submit to His lordship,His ownership,we gradually,slowly or silently turn our control of our precious lives to things,circumstances,negative habits,and negative spirit.
If you don’t know who to hand your life to and get revelation of what to do with life, (the fresh,the world and the negative spirit) with find something to do with you.
Dreams are fine. And dreams involve contradictions. We want this AND that, but both can’t happen. That’s what keeps them from being plans.
Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.
It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems.
Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why?
There are two useful reasons, I think.
FIRST, because we’re unaware of all the real and imaginary boundaries our friends have set up. If it were easy to solve the problem, they probably would have. But they’re making it hard because they have decided that there are people or systems that aren’t worth challenging. Loosening the constraints always makes a problem easier to solve.
And SECOND, because resistance is real. Solving the problem means moving ahead, confronting new, even scarier problems. It might be easier to simply stay where we are, marinating in our stuck.
When we care enough to solve our own problem, we’ll loosen the unloosen-able constraints and embrace the new challenges to come.
Until recently, most of the decisions we were called on to make were based on hunches, insight and a little bit of data. Occasionally, a field like direct marketing would develop into something quite data-driven (“I don’t care if you like mailer one, mailer #2 did three times, better! Number 2 it is.”) but not often.
It took Ignaz Semmelweis more than twenty years (he died before it happened, actually) to persuade doctors that washing their hands could save the lives of mothers giving birth. He had the data, he had the proof, but that wasn’t enough to change minds.
Data mining and the proximity of the internet to most of what we do is changing the proximity of proof to decision. Now, you don’t need to do a lot of research, the data is just a click away.
What are you going to do when your hunches don’t match the data that’s now pouring in?
The data shows, for example, that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk. It doesn’t feel that way, of course, but will you respect the data and stop, cold turkey?
The data shows that the vast majority of wine drinkers can’t tell the difference between a $20 bottle and a $100 bottle. Will that keep you from buying the fancy wine? How much is the placebo effect worth?
The data shows that famous colleges under perform many cheaper, friendlier, smaller colleges. How much is your neighbor’s envy worth?
These are just a few of the millions of examples of counter-intuitive data-driven findings. It took Galileo decades to persuade people the light objects fell as fast as heavy ones… even though he was busy dropping them off buildings for all to see. I wonder how long it will take us to get our arms around this avalanche of insight. Probably longer than most of us think, and marketers that jump too quickly to data are going to be disappointed (while lifehackers that use the data are going to continue to have a huge advantage).