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Words I Live By (Pt.1)

May 21, 2012 in Life with 2 Comments

This post is part of a series. Click here to read them all.

I got the idea to write out key phrases on a note card from Austin Kleon. The reality is that I have a handful of phrases that repeatedly run though my mind and affect so many of the decisions that I make. I started writing out a handful of them both as a discipline for me to think through them as well as to have for a reminder. I’ll share a handful of these as blog posts with an explanation of each sentence. Hopefully one or more of them can become foundational for you as well.

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No One Will Remember

April 23, 2012 in Life, Movies with 6 Comments

I got into a conversation this weekend about time management. I was asked whether productive people are born that way or if I thought it was more like a discipline that someone could intentionally choose. While I hadn’t necessarily thought through all of this before, I found it to be an interesting conversation.

My answer is that I think we’re all born with a default setting when it comes to our time management. Beyond that it depends on how we intentionally choose to spend our time. Personally, I budget my time each day in my mind. Like a financial budget, this allows me to tell my hours how to be spent before I get to them.

In our conversation, I also thought of a scene from the movie Troy that has always stuck with me. In the scene, a boy is summoned to get Achilles to fight one on one with the best fighter from a different army. I’ve only seen the movie once, but I’ve never forgotten the following dialogue:

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If only I was “there”

March 19, 2012 in Leadership, Life with 6 Comments

We all struggle with the idea that the grass is greener somewhere else. This thinking pushes us to inactivity and complacency. If only we were “there.”

Contentment, and productivity, are found by settling in and getting our hands dirty. By pushing past the novelty phase of what we are working on and getting to the part where we start to actually get traction and momentum. But most people don’t get to this part. There isn’t any fanfare or excitement through this phase.

It’s always easier to think your silver bullet is on its way to you instead of making the hard decisions you need to today.

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The Bark of the Poodle

February 8, 2012 in Life with 5 Comments

It is never the doberman who says to the poodle, “I too am a dog.”

I originally heard this quote from my dad who credited C.S. Lewis with saying it. After Googling it to pieces I wasn’t able to find any trace of it. So I’ll credit it to my dad until someone can find who originally said it.

The poodle feels the need to convince the doberman that he is his equal. The doberman, secure in his own reality as a dog, doesn’t need to convince anyone of anything. The brevity of the quote misleads how profound of a reality this is.

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Generosity Versus Skepticism

November 21, 2011 in Life, Spirituality with 13 Comments

A few weeks back I had an encounter with a stranger that has replayed in my mind numerous times since then. It was a Monday morning and I was walking from the parking lot to Liberty Market for a meeting with the worship team. A guy stopped me and asked me if I would help him get an inhaler for his brother. I hesitated, like I normally do when suddenly hit up for something odd, but then concluded that this was something I needed to do.

He asked me if I would drive him to a nearby parking lot where he could meet his girlfriend (who had his little brother with her). I took him to it and then he asked me for $13 to buy the inhaler. I only had a $20, but he had seven ones to make change. He then asked if he could use my phone to see where she was. After he called her, he said that she was apparently at a different intersection and asked if I could drive there. While he pitched it as “just up the street,” it ended up being a 10-15 minute drive farther. I asked him a bunch of questions during our drive and he had very specific answers for all of them.

I had the nagging feeling that I was getting scammed.

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