Faith Venture

Try easy.

The motivational, self-help guru market is saturated with now-wealthy people who travel from conference to conference motivating people with their (sort of) unique take on pop psychology and quips.

They are all following in the footsteps, and often just repeating, Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale. For the record, I grew to love Nightingale’s teaching and research.

The first one I ever heard was in 1976. It was at a management conference. This guy wasn’t famous. Even then. But he was a good speaker. He introduced me to DayTimers for productivity.

His message to these alpha males was, “Try easy.” Think of this…that was 42 years ago, and I still remember.

He motivated us to achieve. But not to over stress our lives on the way to a heart attack rather than achievement.

This week became a sort of personal productivity week in writing.

I thought I’d leave you with this thought. Do the “try” part. For which he meant get up and work. But also do the “easy part. Tackle things. Take breaks. Eliminate the negative stress. In the immortal words of The Eagles, “Take it easy.”

We can’t focus on the next activity. We may have decided to tackle this activity. But we worked on it the day before. And the day before that.

It will never get done. I can’t do this. We tell ourselves the worst stories about our ineptitude. We are not smart enough. We don’t have the resources. It’s too much.

We are trying to understand a book we are reading. We are lost. But we look just at one paragraph. It’s too obtuse. I’m lost. Then I notice a key sentence. There is one word in the sentence. I study that one word. What does it mean in various contexts? What is this context? Oh, I see.

My next action is actually too broad.

Maybe the next action is in reality many next actions.

We list the steps to solve that next action.

Then we tackle one step at a time.

One by one. One word. One step. We focus. We understand. We accomplish.

The ability to focus on one task at a time is the key to getting things done. Or the key to learning new things.

I teach soccer referees to learn to use focus wisely. To widen focus and take in more area when a play is developing. Then to narrow focus to just two or three players when a challenge for the ball is about to occur.

Young referees (and many fans) often cannot decide where to focus. They watch too many things. Or the wrong things. And miss the play.

That indecision of where to place focus kills my productivity. I use my Nozbe app to list all my “next actions” as defined in David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Then I can’t decide to check the app.

Life is decisions. Indecision causes us to drift through life unaware and unproductive.

Focus is a marvelous thing.

Don’t you admire, or at least respect, people who have the ability to focus. Their thought are aligned. They work on one thing at a time.

This morning my thoughts are all over the place. Maybe reflects my Enneagram 5?

I had much pressure and many experiences last week. There is still much to process. There was an industrial automation conference, a couple of tours of information technology applications, and a soccer tournament (in a part of Ohio that I’ve never visited).

I’ll need focus.

First calming.

Deciding on a list of “next actions” (from Getting Things Done by David Allen).

Picking one action and focusing until finished.

Focus and we can accomplish much. Let our attention drift among many things and we lose our way.

Focus–my word of the week.

Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor of Rome. 1,900 years ago. An adopted son, he was the last of the “Five Good Emperors.” He was also a Stoic philosopher. Reading him is like a journey through a personalized Proverbs.

He said that happiness is available through how we think.

We expect other people to make us happy.

Or, maybe God. Do we sometimes pray, “God, please help. I’d like to be happy.”

And we’re not.

Maybe we orient our entire life around things and people who make us unhappy. We obsess on them. We are not happy, even though we say we want to be.

Maybe we’re in a project that is not going well (that is one of the stages of every project we’ll ever do). We think about the obstacles. We are not happy.

But…

Maybe we pause. Take a deep breath. Change our focus.

Put those toxic people behind us. Change our thinking to look for positive people. Forget the toxic. Become happier.

Focus on the outcome of the project. Tackle the obstacles a piece at a time. We change our thinking, we change our attention. We move the project forward and become happier.

This is not a new insight with Marcus Aurelius. He articulates it well. So did the Proverbs written 3,000 years ago. So did Víktor Frankl who survived the Holocost and wrote “Mans Search for Meaning” (read that book if you haven’t already).

A famous old proverb goes “We become what we think about.” Become aware of where our thoughts are residing. Change as necessary.

Yesterday’s schedule was killed with an unexpectedly long Tuesday that returned me to my hotel room about midnight.

A project–really three projects–is going down. What should have been just cruising at this point is more like a sailboat in a hurricane.

Rather than my usual discipline of writing at 6:30 am, today it’s 12 CDT and I’m at the Chicago airport awaiting my delayed flight to Dayton. Only 40 minutes. Not bad.

So I look at my projects plus my regular research and writing plus answering a bunch of emails. What to do?

I look at the mass of problems, then take some deep breaths.

Then tackle one thing at a time.

Contact this person. Contact the next. Compile information, contact the next person.

Think through one problem; reach a conclusion; take action.

Then the next.

I’ve been up 7 hours and been able to accomplish a lot notwithstanding a short nap on the last flight and grabbing a quick lunch.

You can get overwhelmed and flustered.

Better is looking at the list and tackling one thing at a time.

There is a story of a person who, when the Clue Train came through, didn’t accept delivery.

Some people know so much that they missed the Clue Train.

There are the people who can tell you what to do, how to do it, what to believe, how to believe it.

Yet, when you look at their lives, they don’t have a clue.

There are other people who must know a lot. But you don’t realize it at first.

These are people less interested in telling people what to do and exactly how to believe.

Their faith is not complex.

Their knowledge deep.

Their empathy strong.

I know many smart people, but talking to them is as easy as talking with a neighbor.

The ones who obviously strive for recognition, these are the people to beware.

Many years ago, maybe more than 20, a company produced software to program industrial controllers. They called it Think and Do.

The idea was that you programmed it not in text but in graphics–graphics that looked like a flow chart that engineers would use to think through a process.

The company failed. The story is too long.

I was pondering people, often with some sort of doctorate degree but not always, who get the “think” part. But they never get to the “do” part.

On the other hand there are people who plunge ahead and “do” without thinking. They typically stir things up. But as Shakespeare once said, “Much ado about nothing.”

There is a key word that is often overlooked in sentences–and.

Think…and…Do.

That is a good way to build your life.

I recently listened to a podcast where the guest was a former government interrogator who knows the telltale signs of whether her subject is lying. It was on the Dr. Oz podcast where he interviews people and his wife is also on the show.

As they are discussing, she asked, “Have you cheated on your wife?”

“No,” he answered.

She says if you just answer simply, you are probably telling the truth. Telltale signs of lying include using the word “never” (Bill Clinton, I never had sex with…) or not directly answering the question (where have you been, followed by why do you ask) or by responding ad hominem (you always grill me, why do you attack me, etc.).

[Disclaimer: I did not watch the “Senate hearings of the century”, nor have I seen news. Doesn’t matter, does it?]

I love to see ethics professionals try to mangle words justifying lying in certain circumstances, or advising never to lie, or splitting hairs on types of lying.

The early church in its first year or so witnessed the consequences of lying. There was a couple. They sold their property and donated to the church. That is a good thing. Except, they told God and the church that they donated all of their money to the church. Except that they didn’t. It would have been OK not to give it all. But they lied to God. They were struck dead. On the spot.

That should make you stop and think.

We can get all wrapped up in a multitude of analysis about whether people in Washington DC lie. Or whether other people lie.

God is not so concerned about your opinion of others. God is concerned with the status of our hearts. Do we feel the need to lie? Why are we duplicitous? What are we going to do about it?