We did not make ourselves

"All things have the same message to tell, if only we can hear it, and their message is this: We did not make ourselves, but the One who abides forever made us.". St. Augustine

The One Thing You Need to Know
Marcus Buckingham


Key To Happy Relationships: Find the most generous explanation for each other's behavior and believe it.

Love entails giving a positive explanation for the other person's behavior.

Learn to recast the other person's weaknesses as strengths.

Believe the other person is doing the best he can with what he has.

Chose your perceptions of others carefully because they will drive your behavior towards them.


Managers need to be catalysts who excel at turning peoples' talents into performance.

Leaders
Rudy Giuliani: "know your values, be hopeful, be prepared, show courage, build great teams, love people."
Army: "Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, Personal Courage."

*********************************
"Great leaders rally people to a better future."
*********************************

Leaders are not satisfied with the status quoa but crave progress to a better future.

Great managers need a coaching instinct and Great leaders need optimism and ego.

A leader not only believes in a better future but believes he is the best person to lead the group into that future.

MANAGING

The Basics of Good Managing
1. Select good people
2. Define clear expectations
3. Define clear consequences
4. Show you care for people

Managers play Chess not Checkers because each individual moves differently. You can't treat everyone the same.

Discover what is unique about each individual and capitalize on it.
1. It saves you time.
2. It makes each individual accountable.
3. It introduces a healthy amount of disruption.

Three Levers:
1. Identify strengths and weaknesses.
2. Identify each person's triggers.
3. Identify each person's style of learning.

LEADING

"If you know someone's fears you will know his need."

*****************************
Every leader must discover what is universal and capitalize on it.
******************************

Five Fears, Five Needs, One Focus
1. Fear of Death--Need for Security
2. Fear of Outsiders--Need for Community
3. Fear of the Future--Need for Clarity
4. Fear of Chaos--Need for Authority
5. Fear of Insignificance--Need for Respect

Fear of the Future and the Need for Clarity is the best place to focus.

Where are your followers crying out for clarity?

1. Who do we serve?
2. What is our core strength?
"Get your strengths together and make your weaknesses irrelevant."
3. What is our core score?
4. What actions can we take today?

The Disciplines of Leadership
1. Take time to reflect
2. Select your heroes with great care
3. Practice

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

Sustained success is more like sculpting than building; you don't need to add new things but cut away things. Identify what weakens you and then cut it out of your life.

Sustained success is making the greatest impact over the longest period of time.

Key To Happy Relationships

Key To Happy Relationships: Find the most generous explanation for each other's behavior and believe it.
Love entails a positive evaluation of other people's motives.

Money

The less you have to live for the more you need to live on.

Integrity

"Integrity is vital because any breach of our integrity pits us againdt reality, and that is a war no perdon ever won. You can stave off reality only so long before it crushes you."

Chuck Colson

Hyperindividualism

Hyperindividualism leads to loneliness, isolation, and despair. When you live for yourself you will end up an exile on the island of your own self-determination.

Missing a Plane

"Is it possible for people to miss their lived in the same way one misses a plane?"

Meaning of Life

"Fear not that your life will come to an end but rather that it will never have a beginning." Walker Percy

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less." Vaclav Havel

Reality

"God's best servants are those who wish to shape their life on God's answers rather than shape God's answers to their wishes.".

Augustine

Peace

"We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves. We are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God."

Thomas Merton

The Question

"My question--that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide--was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man...a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was, 'What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything?' It can be also expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not dedtroy?"

Leo Tolstoy

Humility

Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.

Identity

"A child's need for self-worth is THE condition for his life," so much so that every person is desperately seeking a "cosmic significance." Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially deify. We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion.

Ernest Becker

Sin

The primary sin is not the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ULTIMATE things.

Sin

Translation: Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from God.

Sin

"Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God. Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God."

Soren Kierkegaard

Sin

"Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God. Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God."

Soren Kierkegaard

Discontenment

"It is only right that if we are discontented with what God offers us every moment, we should be punished by finding nothing else that will content us." Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Path of Least Resistance

"The path of least resistance leads to the road of greatest hardship." Thomas Merton

How Do We Change the Culture?

How Do We Change the Culture?

Here is an interesting summary of a part of a chapter in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

Because culture is the accumulation of tangible things, not something vague or ethereal, it can be changed only by creating some new tangible things that gain a wide enough acceptance by the public to reshape their world. Since cultures are always “full,” one has to create something new that will convince enough people to set aside some current cultural good and exchange it for the new cultural good. However, Christians often choose other less effective strategies for changing the culture. Condemning the culture usually doesn’t work since people will continue to consume the cultural goods even if we disapprove of them. Critiquing the culture doesn’t work either, merely producing more sophisticated analyses that have no effect on people’s choices of cultural goods. Copying culture doesn’t work either since it merely creates a sub-culture that consumes its goods while the larger culture ignores them. Consuming culture is also a poor strategy for change since individual consumers have a negligible effect on a global, or even national, culture. Instead, the best way to change the culture is to create new cultural goods that are better or more attractive so that the public will consume them, and thus change the culture.