Coach Lou Holtz offers 3 rules: “I follow three rules: Do the right thing, do the best you can, and always show people you care.”
Archive for the ‘Disciplines’ Category
Three Rules for Life
April 23, 2026Repetition Builds Consistency
April 22, 2026A truly ingrained habit forms not through motivation, but through consistency, through repeating actions until they become automatic. Through repetition. Don’t wait for motivation (he says as he’s waiting to get motivated to practice the guitar).
Because what you repeat becomes who you are.
Cross Pollenating Life
April 3, 2026From my earliest memories of high school, I recall loving to learn from a variety of sources trying to synthesize knowledge and experience.
Fitness has been a goal since the mid-70s when I moved from a job in manufacturing where I walked miles a day to a desk job in engineering where I walked feet per day. It happened in late summer. The first of April I went out to play softball and couldn’t run from home to first base. I joined the jogging craze the next day.
Now in my mid-70s I walk miles and resistance train. Like Yoga was developed thousands of years ago to train the body for sitting in meditation, the physical fitness helps my mental and spiritual fitness.
I use The Pump app to guide my program. It’s designed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and two guy who work closely with him. One just interviewed his boss.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Trained for 60 Years Without Counting a Calorie. Research Explains Why It Worked. The science of decision fatigue, goal complexity, and why simpler approaches to health are also the ones with the strongest evidence.
So I asked him: after sixty years of training, what has actually lasted? He gave me the answer, and I realized I already knew it. The basics. It’s always the basics that work best.
When we’re given too many choices, too much complication, too much nuance, we’re less likely to act on any of them and less satisfied when we do. When a health plan contains too many decisions — which supplement? which protocol? which meal timing window? — every micro-choice draws from the same limited cognitive well. You deplete that resource before you ever get to execution.
A lifetime of studying and teaching the Bible has taught me the same thing about spiritual life. I love studying the earliest Jesus followers. For 300 years, they sought to live out what Jesus taught. We can tell from some early letters that have been preserved that avoiding the too human pitfalls sometimes complicated life.
The answer invariably returned to Jesus’ two commands. You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.
Period. Full stop.
Everyone who tries to complicate those commands with more options and decisions and complexity have strayed from the simple path. Physicists call it first principles.
(Oh, how am I doing? And how are you doing?)
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Paradox of Renunciation
April 1, 2026We are in the season of Lent. Some people practice “fasting” as giving up something for Lent. I had an older friend, a devout Catholic, who gave up fried food, deserts, and beer for Lent. He lost several pounds over the six weeks or so. Easter Sunday was feast day. I think he gained it all back in a day!
The annual story around my village concerned a guy who gave up watermelon for Lent. Of course, there was no watermelon to be found.
How about you? Have you given up (renounced) anything? Maybe like being on a diet. You need to drop 15-20 pounds or more. Instead of changing your lifestyle, you focus on the foods you now cannot eat.
Then, has this happened?
Every time you renounce something, you are tied forever to it.
Some spirituality teaches to give up things. That ties you to them. Simply wake up, understand, and then the desire goes away.
The better way:
- I am the sort of person who eats this way.
- I am the sort of person who practices prayer/meditation daily.
- I am the sort of person who smiles and greets others when we randomly meet.
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Our Tendency For Yes
March 27, 2026I recently heard this phrase a podcaster applied to himself—promiscuous overcommitment.
A great phrase.
I recently wrote about what “yes” is powerful enough to override the default “no”.
Think on this phrase.
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The Value of Prayer
March 24, 2026My last post concerned the value of wisdom. Reading in Evagrius’ Chapters on Prayer last night, I found this nugget.
The value of prayer is found not merely in quantity but also in its quality. This is made clear by those two men who entered the temple, and also by this saying, ‘When you pray, do not do a lot of chattering…” (reference to Luke 18:10 and Matthew 6:7)
I’ll stop chattering.
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Are We Being Manipulated?
March 19, 2026Are you the product—that which is sold?
Many (most?) technologists are amoral. Without morals. They design most products to exploit human weaknesses to capture and sell our attention to advertisers. That attention can also be given (sold?) to governments who wish to track people.
When we allow ourselves to be immersed those created worlds of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and now all the gambling apps, we need to consider the value we receive versus time lost to mindless provocations. What’s lost in the emotional upheaval of negative posts. What value to our life is gained? How much money do we throw at the gamblers?
Let’s face it. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need any more money.
And us? What value could we add to the world through living rather than scrolling.
These thoughts were prompted while watching the only commercial TV programs in our house—Premier League soccer. I can’t believe the gambling apps. You can bet on anything—instantaneously. Talk about getting sucked in.
This isn’t an old man telling you young people not to have fun. It’s an old man who has lived through many things attempting to point to better ways to live. After all, Jesus had fun. He was often the life of the party. He didn’t get sucked in to addictions.
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Simplify Decisions
March 16, 2026The same day I received an essay from Om Malik on simplicity and renewal and from my meditation teacher on stripping away complexity, I downloaded the next podcast from Tim Ferriss. He asked five acquaintances to reply with thoughts about what they have done to simplify life in 2026.
I offer some thoughts that you may find helpful.
Maria Popova noticed that she found herself in long conversations that were not nourishing her life. So, she stopped giving time to those conversations.
Morgan Housel replied with a “do nothing” thesis. His wealth basically consists of house, cash, and funds. He invested in a number of diversified funds. Then, he no longer found himself needing to make constant decisions. “The fewer decisions, the better.”
Computer scientist, professor and writer Cal Newport asks, “What request deserves a yes when the default is no?”
Craig Mod quit alcohol and decided to concentrate on only one craft (he is a writer, photographer, and occasional leader of long walks through Japan and southeast Asia).
Debbie Millman stewed over the decision to leave the corporation she had helped found or accept the offer to become CEO. Her boss and mentor finally told her, “If it takes four months to decide, you probably don’t want it.”
Thinking about deciding once and eliminating future emotional drain for decisions, I think of Steve Jobs. On a trip to Japan, he noticed everyone at the companies wore a uniform. He returned home. Cleaned out his closet. Bought black mock-turtle shirts and jeans. That was his uniform. No daily decisions. [He didn’t have my wife, who constantly wants me to add to my wardrobe—you need more colors…]
Simplify
March 13, 2026I wrote yesterday about how the word “neo” contains the meaning of not just new but re-new—refresh, strip away accumulated crud that a philosophy (or a life) attracts to return to the simple truth.
The same day that the article appeared the provoked my thinking about renewal meaning return to the simple beginnings, my meditation teacher dropped this statement into the day’s meditation:
Strip away added complications returning to simple presence.
Jesus made everything seem so simple. Yet, the bar for achievement often seemed impossibly high for the normal human.
Forgetting the bar, think only on the simple. Throw away all accumulated justifications and fuzzy thinking. Look at the few things he spoke with clarity. Living with these leads to participation in God’s Kingdom.
- Choose to change the direction of our life (the usual translation is the single word Repent)
- Acknowledge the change leads to living with-God in the Kingdom
- Orient our life toward always acknowledging God (Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, mind)
- Live out this Kingdom orientation with our changed life (Love your neighbor as yourself, and Love one another as I have loved you)
Simple, yet keeping it up requires practice and persistence.
God Is Not An Idea
February 20, 2026Sometimes people cross my path who discourage me. So many seem to think that God is an idea. Or a proposition to agree with and/or argue. Certainly many people get their kicks thinking about God. Playing with ideas applying rationality to deduce who or what God is. I even remember the “God is dead” movement, members who looked at culture and deduced if people no longer believe in God, perhaps God no longer exists.
Carl Jung, the pioneering psychologist, was asked toward the end of his life if he believed in God. “Believe?” he pondered. “No, I don’t believe; I know.”
I’m with him. If you have experienced God even in the briefest of encounters, you know that God exists. Perhaps there are things you still need to believe (or not), such as healing an individual or creating the universe.
Jesus said (recorded in John) that God is Spirit and must be worshipped in Spirit. When you feel the experience of the spirit and employ discernment to assure that wasn’t just gas (or some false feeling), then you know.
The reason to develop spiritual practices is to cultivate the embracing of the spirit. Just like when I sit down to write and haven’t an idea, just the sitting with my pad or computer forces my thinking. Sitting in mediation or study (reading, listening, writing) starts me on the path of experience.
A children’t song, quoted by the theologian Karl Barth, goes, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Actually, people knew that for 360 years before there was a Bible. And many people know it in all the centuries since even unto today because of the experience of the Spirit.
It’s open to you. Just open yourself to it.
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Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 