Category: Meanderings

Playing Through

Seth says: “How much life insurance do you have?” Zig Ziglar liked to say that with that one question, you could tell if someone was a successful life insurance agent. If they’re not willing to buy it with their own money, how can they honestly persuade someone else to do so? And this point hurts me as a pastor: My favorite: if you work for a non-profit and you don’t give money to charity, what exactly are you doing in this job? I’ve met some incredibly generous people in the charitable world, but I can also report that a huge number of people—even on the fundraising side—would happily cross the street and risk a beating in order to avoid giving $100 to a cause that’s not their own. And the shame of it is that this inaction on their part keeps them from experiencing the very emotion that they try so hard to sell. Money is more than a transfer of value. It’s a statement of belief. An ad agency that won’t buy ads, a consultant who won’t buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn’t tip big—it’s a sign, and not a good one.

Seth Godin challenges us to follow the money … are you invested in what you say you believe in?

tompeters! management consulting leadership training development project management

Tom Peters offers his thankful thoughts about the importance of the small stuff of life and offers several quotes:

“Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.”—Henry Clay

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.”—Helen Keller

“We do no great things, only small things with great love.”—Mother Teresa

Seth’s Blog: The people you should listen to

Seth Godin asks if the people we listen to have earned the right to be listened to? Here’s an excerpt:

Who do you listen to?

Who are you trying to please?

Which customers, relatives, bloggers, pundits, bosses, peers and passers by have influence over your choices? …

Just for a second, think about the influence, buying power, network and track record of the people you listen to the most. Have they earned the right?

Seth’s Blog: Boundary makers

Seth Godin reminds us that there is a season to tear down boundaries and a season to see the edge of the box:

Some artists continually seek to tear down boundaries, to find new powder, new territory, new worlds to explore. They’re the ones that hop the fence to get to places no one has ever been.

Other artists understand that they need to see the edges of the box if they’re going to create work that lasts. No fence, no art.

Can’t do both at the same time. …

In my experience, either can work, but only by someone willing to push harder than most in their push to be remarkable. Going with the flow is a euphemism for failing.

Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog | Faith & Leadership | Jason Byassee: Innovate (non) violently

“Innovate violently”: That’s the advice the great Pablo Picasso heard from and shared with his fellow groundbreaking artists in France in the early 20th century. The phrase also highlights “Picasso and the Allure of Language,” an exhibit at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art through Jan. 10. Who could argue Picasso and company did anything but innovate violently? He and Georges Braques and others entirely reshaped how artists create — and how the rest of us contemplate — art. Why shouldn’t a viewer be able to look at a figure from multiple vantages at the same time? Why can’t text be part of a painting? Why shouldn’t a bicycle handle be the head of a bull? Countless more innovations led Picasso into Cubism and helped him give inspiration to the surrealism pioneered by his fellow Spaniard, Salvador Dali.

“Innovate violently” contrasts nicely with “traditioned innovation,” a practice in which the church does a new thing, but always by reaching back into the treasure trove of our past. This difference came clear to me thinking back on an interview with Andy Crouch of “Christianity Today.” I asked him what he would do if he got to be a seminary president all of a sudden. “You can break everything,” I said. “How would you start over?” He paused and squirmed a little. “Well, I wouldn’t want to break everything. I might not want to break anything. A lot of how the church trains seminarians is something we should treasure.” Crouch wouldn’t innovate violently. He would do so cautiously if anything, especially at first.

Ed Stetzer at LifeWay interviews Tim Keller, the Lead Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York city.  Keller is popular with atheists and non-Christians and many have come to hear him give apologetics for the Christian faith. His strategy is in his tone. The tone of some Christians & The New Atheists is harshly critical “take no prisoners” demonizing the other side.  Keller says “We need to respect doubts because they have something in them that needs to be addressed.” Take a listen

Tim Keller invites us to enter conversations with athiests and new belivers in a new way.

The folks at Nurture Shock at Newsweek offer a simple set of goals for parenting … Praise them less, and help them develop accurate awareness of how well they’re doing—so don’t try to spin them into believing they’re better than they are. Protect their sleep hours fiercely. When young children hurt each other’s feelings, give them a chance to come back together on their own. You might not see apologies or overt repair, but scientists are learning that repair can be implicitly implied when kids end up side by side again. Choose schools that don’t assign too much homework (more than an hour in middle school is too much), and the schools will finally get the message. Protect play time, and as children mature, help make sure they still have outlets for fantasy. By the time a child is 11, don’t encourage or expect her to tell you everything. Some things need to be none of your business. Set a few rules and enforce them, but in other domains encourage independence and autonomy. Teens need opportunities to take good risks. They need more exposure to other adults, and even kids of other ages—and less exposure to teens exactly their age. They need part of their life to feel real, not just a dress rehearsal for college. They will mature more quickly if these elements are in their life. Colleges have gotten better. It’s harder today to get into the top 30 name-brand colleges, because so many kids apply, but the next 70 colleges are now just as good as the top 30 were when you went to college, and the next 100 are darn good too. Care about your child’s education, not the notoriety of the name printed on his college sweatshirt.

How not to helicopter as a parent (and when its best to hover).

An excerpt from the Nurture Shock column at Newsweek … To vastly oversimplify the homework debate, just for a moment, the evidence suggests high schoolers school performance goes up, a lot, when they have to do homework. Middle school children, though, only get minor benefits from homework, and elementary school kids get no benefit. One theory as to the reason for these findings is that younger kids can’t correctly choose for themselves what to study. They simple perform homework in a rote way, rather than a targeted way. It turns out that kids are better at basic facts, like vocabulary. The metacognition for vocabulary in 3rd grade has a correlation of .90 – kids almost always know if they’re spelling words correctly on a spelling test. (They might misspell much more when they’re just writing and paying attention to the content not the spelling). By 5th grade, even as the vocabulary words get harder, metacognition accuracy is still very high. Here’s the catch: students at this age are not good at applying their metacognition, i.e. they don’t use their awareness to direct themselves to the right study facts to memorize. They’ll study everything equally, or many kids will in fact study mostly words and facts they already know (it makes them feel good). In 5th grade, this ability is still only getting started. They still need teachers and parents to help them focus on what to study. And kids are not nearly as good as having accurate metacognitions about their reading comprehension as they are for facts. They’re not really aware when they’ve understood a passage in a text. Their brains might have read every word, but comprehension is more than merely decoding text – it’s understanding the point. Even by 7th grade, most kids are not really aware if they’ve gotten the point. They’ve become so accustomed to not getting the point that they can no longer tell. Concept maps can help – this is where students draw a diagram of the main points and how they relate – and concept maps are better than merely reading the passage a second time – but neither makes a drastic contribution to metacognition. All of which is to say, most kids still need your help – less so with facts, more so with comprehension.

At what age do you no longer have to check your children’s homework? Don’t let my middle-school kids see this article.