Painter and Visual Artist Chuck Close on Inspiration

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work. 

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

Source: James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter for February 15, 2024, which, in turn, quoted Interview (March 2007).

The Five I's in Change

(Yes, I know there are no I’s in “Change” — I just think it’s a funny title.)
Credit to Mike Hamilton, PCG Church Coach, for the five I’s.

Intentionality

It won’t happen on accident.

Innovation

If it’s not working, try something new.

Improvement

If it’s not better, you’ll go back to what you had.

Identification

Open your eyes and look for something to improve.

Importance

If nobody cares, nobody tries.

Recommended Media for Pastors from Church Coach Brad Carignan

pcg.org/coaching

Week 1
One of the ways I grew and transformed as a leader was through reading. Leaders are readers. Please take 2022 and read many many books! Most of the following are good audio books. I like listening to audio books when I’m travelling. I can put the speed on 1.5x and knock out a book in just a few hours.

Have your church buy the books or audiobooks for you. When you get better, the church gets better.

In no particular order:

Culture of Honor by Danny Silk
Emotionally Healthy Leader by Peter Scazzero
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
Extreme Ownership by Jocko Wilnik & Leif Babin
21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell
When Heaven Invades Earth by Bill Johnson
Unpunishable by Danny Silk
It’s Your Ship by Michael Abrashoff

Week 2
Listening to leadership Podcasts has changed my life. Here’s a few to get started with:

Craig Groeschel Leadership
Gerald Brooks Leadership
The Emotionally Healthy Leader

Week 3
You need to get stuff from Chris Hodges at Church of the Highlands.
Download it, customize it, rewrite it, make it your own. Get Growth tracks 1, 2, 3.

Highlands Resources

Also, get this:
Poverty, Riches, and Wealth by Kris Vallotton

Week 4
Basic Training for the Prophetic Ministry by Kris Vallotton
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
YouTube:Gift of Prophecy — Brad
YouTube:Prophecy 101: False Prophets, Prophets, and Prophetic Words — Kris Vallotton
YouTube:All Must Prophesy — Bill Johnson
YouTube:The Process of Walking Out Your Prophetic Call — Kris Vallotton
YouTube:Prophecy 101 - Teaching Moment — Kris Vallotton

Week 9
Leading on Empty by Wayne Cordeiro

Week 24
If your church hasn't grown in 18 months, you're stuck. Read The Unstuck Church by Tony Morgan and start changing everything except the gospel ASAP.

Week 25
Some churches who are leveraging facebook well:
Gospel Lighthouse, Colgate, OK
LifePoint, Perkins, OK
Uncommon Church, Euless, TX
Bethel Community Church

Cereal Grains -- more calories, less filling

Cereal grains, historically, were cultivated in order that limited agriculture areas might supply food to support population densities not otherwise possible. They are concentrated forms of food, readily assimilated by the body, containing small residue of bulk, and so may be eaten in quantities far in excess of the calorie needs without sensation of fulness. All carbohydrate foods and most drinks fall into this category, either by virtue of their origin or the reaction of the body to them. Milk is actually a liquid infantile food, the use of which man has carried over into his adult life and which, in general, satisfies the definition of concentrated carbohydrate. -- George Thorpe, quoted by Dr Michael Eads in The Arrow #27

Kevin Wallace -- Fresh Oil

Link: Fresh Oil | Kevin Wallace | Redemption to the Nations Church

An oil-less church is in trouble.

A church that has no oil in the Spirit is in trouble.

You can have gadgets;

You can have smoke;

You can have lights;

You can have a massive LED screen; 

But at the end of the day, 

None of that will bring breakthrough; 

None of that will bring deliverance; 

None of that will bring healing.

Relevance to a blind man is NOT

How cool is your light show?

Relevance to a blind man is

Do you know a man that can make me see?

Relevance to a broken family is NOT

How cool is your church?

Relevance to a broken family is 

Can you take me to a man that can heal our wounds and bind us up?

I want the oil!

Amy-Jill Levine -- Short Stories By Jesus

p. 3

Religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, “I really like that” or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.

p. 13

What is infectiously appealing about Jesus is that He likes to celebrate. He is consistently meeting people not at the altar but at table, whether as host, guest, or the body and blood to be consumed.... He is indiscriminate in his dining companions, who include Pharisees, tax collectors, sinners, and even an upscale family consisting of two sisters and a formerly dead brother. The Feeding of the Five Thousand is the one miracle story recounted in all four Gospels. To be in his presence is not only to be challenged and comforted; it is to celebrate at table.

Lost Sheep
p.41

The parable [Lost Sheep] presents a main figure—the owner, not the sheep—who realizes he has lost something of value to him. He notices the single missing sheep among the ninety-nine in the wilderness. For him, the missing sheep, whether it is one of a hundred or a million, makes the flock incomplete. He engages in an exaggerated search, and when he has found the sheep, he engages in an equally exaggerated sense of rejoicing, first by himself and then with his friends and neighbors. If this fellow can experience such joy in finding one of a hundred sheep, what joy do we experience when we find what we have lost? More, if he can realize that one of his hundred has gone missing, do we know what or whom we have lost? When was the last time we took stock, or counted up up who was present rather than simply counted on their presence? Will we take responsibility for the losing, and what effort will we make to find it—or him or her—again?

p.43-44

As the flock of one hundred is incomplete at ninety-nine, so the silver coin collection is incomplete at nine. It is easier to notice one item missing from a collection of ten than one out of a hundred, but it is still difficult to distinguish nine coins from ten in a pile. the woman, like the owner of the flock, counted. When she found a coin missing, she went all out for the search.

Lost Son(s)
p.69

If we hold in abeyance, at least for the moment, the rush to read repenting and forgiving in to the parable, then it does something more profound than repeat well-known messages. It provokes us with simple exhortations. Recognize that the one you have lost may be right in your own household. Do whatever it takes to find the lost and then celebrate with others, both so that you can share the joy and so that the others will help prevent the recovered from ever being lost again. Don’t wait until you receive an apology; you may never get one. Don’t wait until you can muster the ability to forgive; may may never find it. Don’t stew in your sense of being ignored, for there is nothing that can be done to retrieve the past.

Instead, go have lunch. Go celebrate, and invite others to join you. If the repenting and the forgiving come later, so much the better. And if not, you still will have done what is necessary. You will have begun a process that might lead to reconciliation. You will have opened a second chance for wholeness. Take advantage of resurrection—it is unlikely to happen twice.

Good Samaritan
p.93-94

[Regarding the possibility that the priest in the Good Samaritan story avoided the corpse due to uncleaness laws]
Josephus sees Jews as expected to attend to a corpse on the roadside, not to pass it by.

The Mishnah, Nazir 7.1, reads: “A high priest or a Nazerite [a person under a vow of utmost purity] may not contract uncleanness because of their dead [relatives], but they may contract uncleanness because of a neglected corpse.” The Babylonian Talmud is even stronger: “As long as there are no other people to look after the burial of a corpse, the duty is incumbent on the first Jew that passes by, without exception, to perform the burial” (Nazir 43b; Jerusalem Talmud, Nazir 56a). Judaism still takes this mandate seriously. That is why Jews stood vigil at Ground Zero until every corpse was recovered. Burying the dead is one of the highest mitzvot, most important commandments in Judasim, for it is one of the few acts that cannot be repaid by the person who benefits from it.

Dutch Sheets -- Watchman Prayer

p. 141—a paraphrase of Hebrew 4:12-13

“The Word of God is alive—actively alive—it is filled with the life of God and is full of His energy. It toils and works in us and is operative and effectual. It is sharp enough and fully competent (adequate, sufficient, ample, has enough ability) to channel itself through the various areas of the soul and spirit, reaching its desired end and attaining its desired goal. It is fully adequate! It will arrive and will accomplish its goal once it gets there! It will divide between the soul and spirit, apportioning to each what is needed as it critiques the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” ... “when necessary it lays the knife to the throat of anything found in the soul that is contrary to His Word.”

Jess P. Shatkin - Born to Be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks and How We Can Help Keep Them Safe

"To be normal during the adolescent period is by itself abnormal."
~ Anna Freud

I would that there were no age
between ten and three-and-twenty,
or that youth would sleep out the rest;
for there is nothing in the between
but getting wenches with child,
wronging the ancientry,
stealing, fighting.
~ Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

Thou know'st the o'er-eager vehemence of youth.
How quick in temper, and in judgement weak.
~ Homer, The Iliad

Misc Quotes

“Forgiveness is not an emotion. Forgiveness is act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.” ~ Corrie Ten Boom

"Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time" ~ Oswald Chambers

"Discernment is God's call to intercession, never to fault-finding." ~ Corrie Ten Boom

2019-2020 Evangelical Sunday School Lesson Commentary, "Job's Friends' Perspectives" (Sept 22, 2019):

We can learn from their mistakes and consider doing five things that would have benefited Job's friends in their efforts to comfort him.

1. Do not rashly judge grieving people by things they might say.
2. Listen carefully to what people in pain have to say to understand their perspective and feelings.
3. Recognize that just being present with grieving people may be the best service you can offer.
4. Refrain from offering advice or explanations for the purpose or cause of their troubles or pain.
5. Pray for them often and be available if they need you.

Clint Hill - Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford

pp. 211-212

The president truly believed that if he could just get a face-to-face meeting with the leader of the Vietcong, if he could figure out what the man needed, and what we could provide, he could sway him, manipulate him, just as he did to get things passed through Congress.
By this time the reporters had been in the White House for well over an hour, but Johnson had one more thing he wanted to share. “Come on with me,” he said. “I want to show y’all something.”
Back to the mansion and upstairs they went, down the hall to the Lincoln Bedroom. The centerpiece of the large room was the bed itself, which, with its intricately carved mahogany headboard that stood against the wall like the back of a throne, had been witness to a century of presidential burdens.
“Sit down on the bed,” President Johnson said to the reporters.
“Oh no, Mr. President,” they said. “We can’t sit on that bed.”
The president insisted. “No, I want you to sit on the bed. Everybody else does. We have visitors who come here and sleep on the bed.”
Muriel Dobbin, the spunky, red-haired, Scottish-born reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and the only female of the group, piped up and said, “All right, Mr. President, I’ll sit on the bed.”
The fellows followed her lead, and once they were seated, the president explained why he’d brought them up there. In a somber voice, he said, “I come down here virtually every morning about two o’clock, and I sit on that bed. I pick up the phone and I call the Situation Room, and I say, ‘How many of my boys are out there?’ ”
The only light in the room was coming from the hallway, so it was difficult to see the president’s expression, but the desperation in his voice was unmistakable.
“I may stay here through the night, and I keep calling to find out how many of my boys didn’t come back today.” The reporters sat there, speechless. This was a side of Lyndon Johnson none of them had ever seen before. He walked over to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and said, “You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.” He looked up at the president who had weathered the burdens of the Civil War and said, “I sure hope I have better generals than he did.”

p. 346

Agnew was disgusted by the demonstrators. In his speech at the fundraiser in New Orleans, he said, “Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’ A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Child's Rights vs Mom's Rights

My son came home from school one day,
with a smirk upon his face.
He’d decided he was smart enough,
to put me in my place.

“Guess what I learned in Civics Two,
that’s taught by Mr. Wright?
It’s all about the laws today,
The ‘Children’s Bill of Rights.’

“It says I need not clean my room,
don’t have to cut my hair.
No one can tell me what to think,
or speak, or what to wear.

“I have freedom from religion,
and regardless what you say,
I don’t have to bow my head,
and I sure don’t have to pray.

“I can wear earrings if I want,
and pierce my tongue and nose.
I can read and watch just what I like,
and get tattoos from head to toes.

“And if you ever spank me,
I’ll charge you with the crime.
I’ll back up all my charges,
with the marks on my behind.

“Don’t you ever touch me,
my body’s only for my use,
not for your hugs and kisses,
that’s just more child abuse.

“Don’t preach about your morals,
like your mama did to you.
That’s nothing more than mind control,
And it’s illegal too!

“Mom, I have these children’s rights,
so you can’t influence me,
or I’ll call Children’s Services Division,
better known as C.S.D.”

Of course my first instinct was
to toss him out the door.
But the chance to teach a lesson
made me think a little more.

I mulled it over carefully,
I couldn’t let this go.
A smile crept upon my face —
he’s messing with a pro.

The next day I took him shopping
to the local Good Will store.
I told him, “Pick out all you want,
there’s shirts and pants galore.

I’ve called and checked with C.S.D.,
who said they didn’t care
if I bought you K-Mart shoes
instead of those Nike Airs.

And I’ve canceled that appointment
to take your driver’s test.
The C.S.D. is unconcerned
so I’ll decide what’s best.”

I said “No time to stop and eat,
or pick up stuff to munch.
And tomorrow you can start to learn
to make your own sack lunch.

“Just save that raging appetite,
and wait ‘til dinner time.
We’re having liver and onions,
a favorite dish of mine.”

He asked, “Can I please rent a movie,
To watch on my VCR?”
“Sorry, but I sold your TV,
for new tires on my car.

“I also rented out your room,
you’ll take the couch instead.
The C.S.D. requires
just a roof above your head.

“Your clothing won’t be trendy now,
and I’ll choose what we eat.
That allowance that you used to get,
will buy me something neat.

“I’m selling off your jet ski,
dirt-bike and roller blades.
Check out the ‘Parent’s Bill of Rights’,
It’s in effect today!

“Hey hot shot, are you crying,
and why are you on your knees?
Are you asking God to help you out,
instead of C.S.D.?”

Three Who Got Something Good at the Tomb

From Carolyn Dowd's Easter Sunrise Sermon...

• Mary Magdalene's hope was renewed.
• Peter received a second chance.
• John received a reason for living.

John Loren Sandford - Elijah Among Us

p59

Unfortunately, many times what God intends when He speaks through His prophets is aborted because His people do not respond in faith and obedience. Sometimes God’s first and best will is not done because we interfere. If His will were always done, our Lord would not have commanded us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

p62

Whenever God promised something good is coming, duck! God is most likely going to humble and prepare your heart first. Sometimes prophetic blessings do not come because we fail to pray consistently until the blessing comes to pass. [regarding Dan 10] Don't leave your “angel” stuck halfway. Pray your prophesied blessings all the way to fruition.

p63

Job 31:32 “The stranger did not lodge in the street: but I opened my doors to the traveler.”

More verses on Hospitality:

• Matt 10:41 - receive a prophet, get a prophet’s reward
• Gal 6:7 - sow & reap
• Matt 6:9-10 - lay up treasures in heaven [via good deeds?]
• Luke 24:28-29 - Emmaus road “constrained”
• Heb 13:2 - entertained angels unawares
• Gen 18 - Abe entertained God
• 2 Same 6:11 - Obed-Edom hosted the ark

p64

The people knew this principle and prayed that a holy man might come and stay with them.

p65

This is also why Jesus sent His disciples out without provisions and extra clothing (Matt 10:9-10, Luke 10:5-7)

2 Kings 4:10 - The Shunamite woman who made a room for Elisha

Job 31:16,17,19-22,32

p69

Sirach 2:1 “My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing..”

p73-74

[Story of Gladys, healed of lung cancer] But the people were not glad she had been healed! This would mean that God was real and that all of their sins were upon them.

p82

Bill Hamon, Prophets: Pitfalls and Principles:

The line between pronouncing God's genuine prophetic judgments and ministering out of a wounded heart or spirit of rejections is a thin one.

[Judgment] is an area most susceptible to presumption and carnal judgments rather than the purity of the Holy Spirit.

p97

When a sheep does not walk closely enough, the shepherd breaks its leg.

p142

Many students of prophecy believe they know how to decipher verses about the end times. They know what “seventy weeks” means, for example, and have charted history in clever timetables that seem to “fit”...

These studies walk close to divination because they try to see what God has kept hidden.

p143

The Lord said to me, “John, before I came the first time, all the biblical scholars thought they knew who I would be and what I would do, and they were all wrong.”

p150

Do not make your prophecies happen... wait for the Lord to engineer His own answers — do not try to make your prophecy come true.

p157

Very seldom have I received any revelation from the Holy Spirit that was not connected to some immediate need while serving Him.

p159

The secret of abounding or suffering is found in losing your life for Him, until you literally do not care what people thing about you.

All your security is vested then in His love for you, and ambition withers and dies like a plant that no longer finds nurture.

p164

Numbers 12 - Five Ways God Speaks to Prophets (in order from least clarity to most):

• Dreams
• Visions
• Dark Speech
• Mouth-to-mouth Directly
• Aloud

Three Levels of Visions:

• Only imagination seems involved
• Imagination plus cognizance of the Holy Spirit’s involvement
• Physically-opened eyes like Stephen

p205

You have no authority unless you are under it.

p206

When the Lord makes a list, He normally begins with the most extreme. For example, in a list of negatives, He names the worst first.

Recommended Reading

Bill Hamon - Prophet's Personal Words
Ernest Gentile - Your Sons and Daughters Shall Prophesy
Michael Sedler - Stop the Runaway Conversation
John Paul Jackson - The Veiled Ploy

Positive Results of Troubles and Trials

• 1 Peter 1:6-9
• Romans 5:1-5
• James 1:2-3

We retain:
10% of what we hear once
40% of what we hear twice
60% of what we hear three times
50% of what we see
80% of what is acted out

N. T. Wright - The Challenge of Jesus

Chpt. 1, p. 31

This is not a task simply for a few backroom specialists. If church leaders themselves spent more time studying and teaching Jesus and the Gospels, a good many of the other things we worry about in day-to-day church life would be seen in their proper light. It has far too often been assumed that church leaders stand above the nitty-gritty of biblical and theological study; they have all done that, we implicitly suppose, before they come to office, and now they simply have to work out the “implications.” They then find themselves spending countless hours at their desks running the church as a business, raising money or working at dozens of other tasks, rather than poring of their foundation documents and inquiring ever more closely about the Jesus whom they are supposed to be following and teaching others to follow.

Chpt. 2, p. 37

[Three options open to the Jesus who had their geographical deliverance, but not their political or theological deliverance:

1. Quietest: Separate/hide and wait on God, like the dead sea scroll writers at Qumran
2. Compromiser: Suck it up and prosper, like Herod or Matthew/Levi
3. Zealot: Fight, like Simon Zelotes

Jesus was not any of those.
] He went back to Israel's scriptures and found there another kingdom-model...

p. 39

If His way of bringing the kingdom was the right way, then Herod's way was not, the Qumran way was not, and the Zealot way was not. And the Pharisees, who in Jesus’ day were mostly inclined to the Zealot end of the spectrum, were bound to regard Him as a dangerous compromise.

Three Main Thrusts of Jesus” Kingdom-Message:

1. The End of Exile
2. The Call of a Renewed People
3. The Warning of Disaster and Vindication to Come

p. 40

Isaiah 6:9-10 is quoted in all four gospels and Acts:
Matt 13:14-15
Mark 4:12
Luke 8:10
John 12:40 Acts 28:26-27

Mark Buchanan - Your Church is Too Safe

Comments on John 1:14 (,,,full of grace and truth)

Good news is always show-and-tell.

God pulled out all the stops to create creation. How much more to create new creations?  To accomplish the first, God spake. To accomplish the second, God came.

"Full" - not one more drop of truth or grace could fit in Him.

He bursts at the seams with both.  Everything He is, everything He does, drops truth, exudes grace. There's never a moment when Jesus runs short on either. If Jesus were facing an enemy, or dealing with disappointment, or saw a beautiful woman, or was betrayed by a friend, or met a gay man, or was given a million dollars, or whatever, what He would say and what He would do would be the perfection of grace and truth.

When we speak truth, it should be so grace-soaked, it's hard to reject; when we show grace, it should be so truth-soaked it's hard to accept.

Rosaria Butterfield - The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.

Importantly, we don’t see God making fun of homosexuality or regarding it as a different, unusual, or exotic sin. What we see instead is God's warning: if you indulge the sins of pride, wealth, entertainment-lust, lack of mercy, and lack of discretion, you will find yourself deep in sin — and the type of sin may surprise you.

Homosexuality, like all sin, is symptomatic and not casual — that is, it tells us where our heart has been, not who we inherently are or what we are destined to become.

Sin is not a mistake.  A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway.  A sin is treason against a holy God.  A mistake is a logical misstep.  Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do our bidding.

Lorretta Kelley - Dream Stealers

When you commit your works unto the Lord, even your thoughts will be established.

Delay does not mean denial.

You cannot transform another's life - only God can do it.

Fatigue can steal or kill your dream... you gotta learn to say, "No!"

Not everyone will support your dream or vision... you gotta be careful who you tell it to.

Fasting and Keto

From my Virta Dietitian:

There is a rich literature on human recovery following energy or protein privation. In the Minnesota Experiment, lean healthy males who were fed ‘half-rations’ (1600 kcal and 50 g/d protein) for 6 months lost 1/3 of their lean body mass. Once refeeding with adequate protein and energy was begun, it took them over 4 months to approach their original baseline of strength and function, and in so doing, they added excess body fat. In addition to the Marliss study (Errol Marliss, J Clin Invest, 1978), multiple human studies demonstrate that the maximum rate at which a protein-deprived person can gain back lost lean body mass is ¼ pound per day (ie, 4 g/d positive nitrogen balance). So if a day of total fasting causes the loss of ½ to 1 pound of lean body mass per day (depending upon one’s level of keto-adaptation), then it takes at least 2-4 days of full feeding with protein and energy to recover that one day’s loss.

Given the current popularity of intermittent fasting (IF), one would assume that there would be well-designed studies published to demonstrate that its practice does not impair lean tissue preservation, mineral status, or function in humans. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Yes, there are multiple published studies of ‘intermittent fasting’, defined as not eating from morning until early evening every other day, or not eating any protein until the evening meal. There are also a few studies of people eating 75% less or total fasting for every other day. Weight losses are typically about 5% but plateau quickly. At this amount of weight loss, accurate measurement of body composition are problematic, so good data on lean body mass changes are lacking. But many people who practice IF eat nothing or no protein for more than 24 hrs at a time. And more importantly, some people choose to fast for days at a time, assuming that their body can effectively conserve its functional tissue, or make up for it by rapidly recovering lean tissue in the intervals between these fasts. There are other reasons why people fast besides weight loss. Boosting blood ketone levels is increasingly associated with reduced aging and oxidative stress. There are also many reports of energy restriction and reduced cancer growth, but this benefit is not consistently seen in animal models of intermittent fasting (implying that the benefit is in consistent restriction rather than intermittent restriction).

So what does this really mean? Yes, total fasting can cause rapid weight loss, but typically half or more of this will come from lean tissue. And most importantly, depending upon the amounts of protein and energy one consumes after a period of fasting, the rate of recovery of lean tissue will likely be slower than the rate at which it was lost. To be blunt, in the real world, recovery of lean tissue lost as a result of any period of total fasting takes 2-4 times as long as the period of fasting itself.

John Maxwell - The 360° Leader

“He who mistrusts most should be trusted least.” ~ Greek proverb

It takes nine months to produce a baby — no matter how many people you put on the job.

You cannot give what you do not have. In order to develop your staff, you must keep growing yourself.

Max DePree said that it is the first responsibility of a leader to define reality.

When you don’t want to have a difficult conversation, you need to ask yourself: Is it because it will hurt them or hurt me? If it is because it will hurt you, then you’re being selfish. Good leaders get past the discomfort of having difficult conversations for the sake of the people they lead and the organization. The thing you need to remember is that people will work through difficult things if they believe you want to work with them.

p240

Re: The Law of the Niche: All players have a place where they add the most value.

When I was in high school, I was fortunate to have a coach who understood this. During one of our varsity basketball practices, our coach, Dan Neff, decided he wanted to teach us a very important lesson about basketball. He got the first- and second-string teams out on the floors to scrimmage. That wasn’t unusual—we scrimmaged all the time. Our second team had some good players, but clearly the first team was much better. This time he had us do something very different from the norm. He let the second-string players take their normal positions, but he assigned each of us starters to a different role from our usual one. I was normally a shooting guard, but for this scrimmage, I was asked to play center. And as I recall, our center was put in the point-guard position.

We were instructed to play to twenty, but the game didn’t take long. The second team trounced us in no time. When the scrimmage was over, Coach Neff called us over to the bench and said, “Having the best players on the floor isn’t enough. You have to have the best players in the right positions.”

What’s worse than training your people and losing them? Not training them and keeping them.

p268

If your people aren’t following, you need to listen more. You don’t need to be more forceful. You don’t need to find more leverage. You don’t need to come down on them. If you listen, they will be much more inclined to follow.

p275

I’ve never known a person focused on yesterday to have a better tomorrow.

p276

St. Francis of Assisi said, “Start doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing what is impossible.”

p286

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.

p287

There’s an old saying that a smart person believes only half of what he hears, but a really smart person knows which half to believe.

p288

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The biggest job in getting any movement off the ground is to keep together the people who form it. This task requires more than a common aim; it demands a philosophy that wins and holds the people’s allegiance; and it depends upon open channels of communication between the people and their leaders.”

Megyn Kelly - Settle for More

Chpt 3, Loc 635

Ten days before Christmas 1985, my family was beginning to gather together for the holiday, with Suzanne home from college. Pete was attending college nearby and was frequently underfoot, though on this particular day he’d opted to watch a football game with his friends rather than at home. I wanted to get the same class ring [my friend] Kelly was ordering. Dad said it was too expensive. I kept complaining, and he kept saying we couldn’t afford it.

I wouldn’t let it go.

He’d had it. He turned and walked out of the kitchen. That was the last exchange I would ever have with my father.

I watched him walk toward the living room, and then I stormed up to my bedroom without saying good night or even acknowledging him. I turned out the light and went to sleep angry. The last image I have of my father alive is of him alone on the couch, staring at the Christmas tree. That sight would haunt me for the rest of my life—the picture of a good man, exasperated and alone.

Just before midnight, Suzanne ran into my bedroom.

“Wake up!” she shouted. “Daddy had a heart attack.”

Chpt 4, Loc 857

One year we [Megyn and Jim (college boyfriend)] went to a Final Four championship dinner; the teams included Yale, Loyola, UNC North Caroline, and Syracuse. Each captain gave a speech to a packed hall. The guy from Yale said, “There have been a lot of eyes on Yale this year, a lot of questions about us. People wonder why we do drills the way we do, why we warm up the way we do. . . . The way we wear our socks is very innocuous. It’s all about teamwork and brotherhood.”

Jim gets up there for the Syracuse team and says, “I can’t speak for all the teams, but we at Syracuse did not have our eyes on Yale, and we didn’t wonder about their drills or their socks. But we were wondering what the word ‘innocuous’ means.”

Chpt 17, loc 3153

I've never worked at a place where some star employee—man or woman—was unknown to everyone, tolling away unnoticed. If you believe this is happening to you, ask yourself if you have worked as hard as possible, studied extensively, and made yourself invaluable. If you can’t honestly say you have done all of those things, quit complaining.