Tag Archive - Reading

Drive

September 21, 2010 in Leadership, Reading with 4 Comments

Daniel Pink - DriveI recently finished Daniel Pink’s book called Drive along with a handful of the leadership team at Central. I absolutely loved the counter-intuitive nature of the content and how much it reminded me of a good Malcolm Gladwell book. If you lead anybody, employees or kids or anyone else to who you have influence, this book is a must read. Here are some of the quotes that stood out to me:

“Harlow offered a novel theory–what amounted to a third drive: ‘The performance of the task,’ he said, ‘provided intrinsic reward.’”

“Companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.”

“Partly because work has become more creative and less routine, it has also become more enjoyable. That, too, scrambles Motivation 2.0′s assumptions. This operating system rests on the belief that work is not inherently enjoyable–which is precisely why we must coax people with external rewards and threaten them with outside punishment.”

“Human beings have a innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

“In a ROWE [Results Only Work Environment] workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time–or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.”

“We forget sometimes that ‘management’ does not emanate from nature. It’s not like a tree or a river. It’s like a television or a bicycle. It’s something that humans invented.”

“The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”

Divine Conspiracy – Ch.3

September 14, 2010 in Jesus, Reading with 1 Comment

Here are some of my favorite quotes from chapter 3 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy:

“Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.”

“The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.”

“We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.”

“As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.”

What the Dog Saw

September 4, 2010 in Reading with 0 Comments

What the Dog Saw - Malcolm GladwellI just finished my last of Malcom Gladwell’s books called “What the Dog Saw.” It is a collection of essays that he has written for the New Yorker Magazine. Each chapter is a completely different topic, so there isn’t much connection or flow overall, and one of the chapters seemed to contradict his points in a couple of other ones. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing read by a guy that has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Here are some of the quotes that stood out to me:

“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that mot things are not interesting.”

“Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.”

“But there is nothing like being an NFL quarterback except being an NFL quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.”

“We associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”

“They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”

Creeping Determinism

September 1, 2010 in Life, Reading with 0 Comments

“[Psycologist Baruch] Fischoff calls this phenomenon ‘creeping determinism’ — the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable — and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events.” Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

The idea of creeping determinism explains the expression “hindsight is 20/20.” When we look back on events, it always seems so obvious that things would turn out the way they did. But that is only because we have had the chance to connect the dots in a way that is unnatural and impossible when we are in the moment.

If you are like me, you often kick yourself for making stupid decisions after you have looked back to see the big picture of how things turned out. (Why did I buy a house before the market completely dropped; why did I not choose to take advantage of some other opportunity; etc). And while we may want to challenge ourselves with the idea that next time we won’t make the same kind of mistake, the reality is that we probably will.

But it also reminds me that we need to live each moment to the full, inviting God’s Spirit to be the driving force of what we are doing, and stop worrying about how things will ultimately turn out. The critics will always look back and analyze the mistakes made, but the real action is living in the moment, accepting its inherent limitations, and being one of the people affecting the future. We can choose to shape our kingdoms, the things that we have influence and control over, to build the Kingdom of God, even if we can’t foresee what that will look like in the future.

Divine Conspiracy – Ch. 2

August 23, 2010 in Jesus, Reading with 0 Comments

Here are some of my favorite ideas from chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy.

“But, to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it.”

“Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling. He goes on to say that this is the very question most pressing for those of us who speak for Christ. Surely something has gone wrong when moral failures are so massive and widespread among us. Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are ‘selling’ is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.”

“But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now–the eternal kind of life–as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts.”

“Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.”

“We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself–when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it.”

“We must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”

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