What are you grateful for? If you spend some time at National Community Church, you’re likely to hear Mark Batterson talk about a gratitude journal. The idea is that each day you write down something that you are grateful for. In Mark’s words:
Keep a gratitude journal this week. Find something everyday to be grateful for. It’s a spiritual discipline. Psalm 103:2 says, “Praise the Lord and forget not all his benefits.”
In the words of the hymn:
Count your blessings. Name them one by one. Count your many blessings. See what God has done.
Your focus will determine your reality!
I’ve decided to start keeping a gratitude journal on Twitter using the hashtag #gratitude. After searching, it looks like some others have already put the hashtag it to good use, and you should join in too!
I’m aiming for three things a day. I feel like that will force me to think about it more than just one thing would. Today I’m grateful for free museums with places to sit and read, for the wonderful night I had last night, and for my day off.
What are you grateful for?
I had the opportunity to take a few hours and read through Andy Stanley’s Next Generation Leader a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to do a quick review and share some reflections.
The premise of the book is that there are five characteristics of a quality leader. Andy will almost certainly explain them better than I, so a summary in his words:
- Competence - Leaders must channel their energies toward those areas of leadership in which they are most likely to excel.
- Courage - The leader of an enterprise isn’t always the smartest or most creative person on the team. He isn’t necessarily the first to identify an opportunity. The leader is the one who has the courage to initiate, to set things in motion, to move ahead.
- Clarity - Uncertain times require clear directives from those in leadership. Yet the temptation for young leaders is to allow uncertainty to leave them paralyzed. A next generation leader must learn to be clear even when he is not certain.
- Coaching - You may be good. You may even be better than everyone else. But without a coach you will never be as good as you could be.
- Character - You can lead without character, but you won’t be a leader worth following. Character provides next generation leaders with the moral authority necessary to bring together the people and resources needed to further an enterprise.
This is a very good book, and I definitely recommend it. If you’ll oblige me, I’d love to share some reflections with you
“Only do what only you can do.” – In other words, you should delegate everything that you possibly can. Do the things that only you can do, and do them very, very well.
Know what you’re good at. Stanley says, “Successful leaders tend to assume that their core competencies are broader than they actually are.”
It’s okay to delegate things you don’t like doing. This doesn’t mean giving someone else all of the crap jobs, but often others will relish the opportunity to do the stuff you despise. Stanley calls this organizational alignment.
Step out. Often the thing that distinguishes a leader from others is a willingness to step out. Leaders lead. They go where no one else has gone before and they get people to go with them. Yes, it’s scary, but leaders do it anyway.
Coaching is essential. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you need outside evaluation and analysis.
Perhaps the last section of the book is the most important. This is the part where Stanley talks about character, “Character is not essential to leadership… But character is what makes you a leader worth following.”
“Character is the will to do what’s right even when it’s hard.”
“As you will discover, if you haven’t already, the shortest distance between where you are and where you want to be is not the most honorable one.”
“Predeciding to do what’s right will cost you. It will cost you time, money, and opportunity. It may negatively impact your reputation…at least for the short term. It may actually be an obstacle on your career path.”
“There is never a reason to violate the principles of God in order to maintain the blessing of God.”
“What small thing in my life right now has the potential to grow into a big thing?… And who knows about it other than me?”
On the review front, once again, this is an excellent book. My only major complaint is that the section on courage seemed to drag on. While Stanley made some good points, I felt that he could have made them in a fraction of the space.
If you haven’t read Next Generation Leader, you probably should.
I’m giving this one an 8 out of 10. Yes, I grade harshly.
In case you’re not already aware, Lent begins today. Lent is a solemn season of fasting (abstaining from something, traditionally food) that is modeled after Jesus’ 40 day fast in the wilderness.
Lent is practiced in many churches and often looks different for different traditions, but the idea of giving up something in order to spend more time seeking God is fairly common.
I think that it can be especially beneficial to give up something that is or has the potential of becoming an idol to you. An idol is anything that takes the place of God as first in your life.
A while back I gave up working on a web project because it was consuming me. It consumed my time, my thoughts, so I stepped back from it for a week.
For Lent this year I am giving up seeking out new Twitter followers. I’ve been on a quest for the past few months to gain followers, and while I have been able to use this expanded reach for some good purposes, it does have the potential to become all about self-promotion and my ego, about self-worship.
For the sake of honesty, I should mention that there are a few ways that I work on gaining followers, and one of them in particular is what I plan to quit. Not sure about the others yet.
Are you fasting anything up for Lent? Why are you giving it up?
One of the most important things to do when you set goals is to define points at which you look back and reflect on your accomplishment of/progress made on the goals. For my New Year’s resolutions, my first such evaluation point was set for one month. (Yes, yes, I’m a couple weeks late). So, how am I doing so far?
Spiritual Goals
- Pray/Read through Morning Prayer service every morning during January.
Other than one day when I was traveling and had forgotten to print off the service the day before, I accomplished this goal.
- Fasting once/month (through March) plus once for Leadership Retreat.
So far so good
- Scripture Memorization
No progress made.
- Reading through Bible with Rachel
No progress made.
- Reading through New Testament
Progress is slow but being made.
- Intentionality with accountability partner.
Trying, but still working on it.
Physical Goals
- Eat Reasonably
Little Progress
- Run 2x per week
I’ve been running 3 or 4 times this year.
Intellectual Goals
- Book Reading
Little progress made, some books changed out for others
Relational Goals
- Rachel
I have been more intentional about our relationship, and I think it has made a difference.
- Others
I’ve been busy, and some relationships have been put on the back burner. I need to work on these a lot in the coming months. I wouldn’t say I’ve failed at most of these, just that I need to put some extra effort in to them.
Stop Doing
- Limit TV to 15 hours/week
While I was failing at this initially, I’ve been so busy in recent weeks that I haven’t had time to watch more than 15 hours of TV per week.
Why did I write all of this? You probably don’t need to read it, but you probably do need to take a look at the goals you’ve set and your progress. If you don’t have any goals, you should probably think about setting some. You accomplish more when you’re working for something.
How do I feel about my progress? Well, pretty good actually. While I certainly haven’t nailed everything, I feel that I’ve made good progress on the goals that are most important to me (the spiritual and marital ones).
What are your goals, and how are you doing?
If you don’t know what Hulu or boxee are, you can either stop reading now or go here and here to find out.
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Hulu recently cut off Boxee from its content after Hulu’s content providers asked them to. (See Hulu and boxee’s blogs for details.) There was little explanation given beyond this, but I believe that the content providers did not want to cannibalize their regular television viewership.
While one can certainly hook up a computer to a television, browse to Hulu, and begin viewing, Boxee makes this viewing online content on your television easy (or so I understand from reading, never actually used it). I’m guessing that content providers still make significantly more from television commercials than online commercials, so while they may provide content online, they don’t really want online content viewing to replace your regular television viewing.
P.S. I realize this post won’t make a great deal of sense to those who aren’t on the inside of this discussion.
What are you saying that doesn’t need to be said?
We live in a culture of ever increasing noise. The amount of information that is available for us to consume and the entertainment options, products, and services clamoring for our attention are expanding exponentially.
So I ask you again, what are you saying that doesn’t need to be said? What are you writing that doesn’t need to be written? What has already been said better by someone else? What don’t people need to know? What questions don’t need to be asked or conversations don’t need to be had?
Something that I’ve been thinking about recently is just how much is out there to read, and how some of what I write may be worthless. If I write an inane blog post and 50 people spend three minutes reading it, I’ve just wasted two and half hours of other people’s time.
Perhaps it would benefit all of us to consider what benefit is being derived from what we write before we publish it for the world to read.
While I think I have presented a compelling case without bringing faith into the discussion, those of us who are followers of Jesus should consider His words in the book of Matthew, “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” Or as the King James Version translates it, “But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment (emphasis mine).”
I haven’t done any real study of this passage, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt, but while Jesus seems to be talking about good and evil thoughts and words in the preceeding verses, the words “careless” and “idle” are translations of the greek word “argos” which implies laziness, carelessness, idleness, and having no return and is a negation of the word “ergon,”1 which means business, employment, enterprise, undertaking, etc.
In other words, Jesus seems to be saying that we will be held to account for the things that we say without sufficient thought as to their value or whether or not they need to be said.
I should end by saying that I do recognize the irony of writing about the idea that one should be careful what one writes.
1. Here “a” is a negator. (I.e. an a-theist is one who is not a theist [believer in God].) Definitions taken from StudyLight.org’s interliear Bible and An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (founded upon the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon).
Are you buying the new Kindle? If you buy it from this link, you can support our trip to Ethiopia to the tune of $35.90, and it won’t cost you a dime.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00154JDAI?tag=polf-20
Had an interesting thought/conversation/question yesterday. Does designing a blog to look different than most blogs affect the level of engagement (i.e. number and quality of comments) on that blog? I’m not talking about the quality of a site’s design but more it’s similarity to other blog designs.
Blogs tend to look and feel a certain way. They have a post section on the left and a sidebar or two on the right. They look a lot like this blog. When you’re on a blog, you typically know it.
To restate: Does designing a blog that doesn’t look like a blog affect, either negatively or positively, the reader’s propensity to comment? For example, if a blog looks like this:
Is the reader more, less, or equally likely to comment as he or she would be were the same comment to be on a blog that looked more like a standard blog (i.e. my blog)?
I’d love to hear opinions from social media experts as well as personal thoughts/feelings from blog readers.
