Author: watchstandpray

211 – Escape the Zero Sum Spiral

Solutions to society’s problems require innovation in order to escape the spiral of a seemingly zero-sum game. Necessity is the mother of invention, but that means we need to be allowed to be in need as well as be allowed to invent. If necessities are always provided then invention’s mother is dead. If invention requires permission from whatever bureaucracy is central, then necessity’s child has been kidnapped.

Being in need carries with it a sense of danger. What if I don’t earn money? Will I end up on the street? The need to survive and the healthy sense of urgency to work was given to us by God—the same God who makes sure to provide for us.

Even in poor countries where poverty is widespread, the problem is not as simple as having a giant Santa Clause shower everyone with food. People need education, government needs internal compliance, and society as a whole must study the work of responsibly maintaining lists. It also helps to prevent wicked men from using ultra-powerful companies to cripple natural resources, but these are all issues separate from the value of a “healthy sense of urgency” that drives us to live productive lives.

Unless we live lives that produce more prosperity than we consume, we won’t be able to help those in need. And, as much as others need food, they also need the permission to have some “healthy need”—at least enough need to foster invention. Never provide people with so many of their basic needs that the “provision” sanitizes the urgency to invent.

Invention, innovation, new ideas, responding to a personal urgent need to adapt yesterday’s resources to the problems that didn’t sprout until this morning—entrepreneurial ingenuity is the only answer to the problem of not having enough wealth to go around. That ingenuity needs an appetite, a little hunger, some desire for more. Sometimes our “healthy sense of urgency” comes from fear of becoming homeless, other times it comes from the strictly-enforced habit of making every day better than the day before.

Once your inner inventor awakens, people will rise up just to cooperate because the mere act of inventing extinguishes the poverty around us.

210 – Lists Are the Reason for Meetings

Meetings are one of the greatest wastes of any organization. The Sunday morning monologue worked well in a world without phone lines, but today a weekly monologue at an indoor amphitheater is a waste since a podcast will do much better. The same is true of companies. “Conference” is different, but shouldn’t be more than once a month. The purpose there is to cultivate widespread excitement over common interests. But, “conferences” are different from “meetings”.

The purpose of having a meeting is to host discussion.

Healthy operations require lists, but humans are born to not understand lists. Learning to understand, create, follow, keep, update, and recognize items on a list is part of growing up in a civilized society—and the learning never stops nor is it ever easy. Good parents teach their children the art of “listing” at an early age just as a good supervisor and mentor helps employees, volunteers, and students see how lists work in the real world.

Even God gave Moses a list, the Ten Commandments. It’s hard to obey all ten as with any moral code. Sometimes remembering is the hard part, sometimes it’s applying, sometimes it’s understanding, but, with morals, most of the time the hardest thing is the willingness to obey. But, remembering that even morals are simply a list of things to do that, if done, will result in a perfect product, the obedience part becomes a little less difficult.

Listing is a lifelong study. That’s why managing lists are best done at group meetings.

Every member of an administration—every employee and volunteer—along with every member of a family—everyone already has two “lists”, sometimes we even write them down. The first list is the “de facto” list, the list of things we actually do. The second list is the “prescribed” list, the list of things we should do. The list to write down first is not the prescribed, but the de facto.

Know what you are doing day to day. Write it down as if you needed to guide yourself over the phone. Talk with others about how to “list” better. Then, you’ll have a better idea of what you should be doing.

209 – Respectful Authority Has Respected

No one who has truly learned to respect authority will argue. They won’t argue with their leaders. They won’t argue with their subordinates. They won’t argue.

The basics of command structure start with knowing what battles to choose, including inside baseball. When someone has a decision to make, and that person makes the decision, then the decision is made. If there are facts or other information the person doesn’t know, then those above and below in the command structure will inform that decision-maker. Interruptions are welcome if they advise, whether from above or below. But, once the information and facts are known, the decision-maker must make the decision. Then, it is final. Even if it wrong, discussion it won’t help.

Continuing discussion without any affect on decision is called a filibuster; it is a tactic of legislative bodies with warring parties. In a filibuster, people keep talking because they don’t like the decision, so they hope to delay the decision—forever if possible. But, in a command structure, that can’t work. In a family, a company, organization, or military—a filibuster is immature. Many argue that a filibuster is also immature in a legislature, but then legislators are often accused of being immature as well as dishonest. But, I digress.

Stay on topic. When the decision is made, it’s finished. That is true whether it is your decision or someone else’s. Don’t be rude about it. In fact, one sign of maturity is to be kind when you tell someone that a decision is already made—whether it is your decision or not.

Mature leaders do not argue with those under them. Someone who respects authority knows to respect oneself when one has the place of authority. Never trust a leader who argues, resents, or is irritated by subordinates. That leader doesn’t understand respect for authority, yet such leaders are likely to talk about “respect” often. More importantly, make sure that you never become that leader.

Learn to identify and then to accept when the decision is already made. Move on to other topics. Finish the job. Fix problems with the decisions that are within your power. Respect-worthy people don’t argue once decisions are passed.

208 – Deliverance and Strength by Waiting on the Lord

Sometimes, not always, God delivers and strengthens us by means of us waiting on Him. In the ark, Noah had to wait on God. Israel had to wait and let God deliver them from Egypt. Israel wanted to keep waiting when it was time to step up and seize. So, in the desert, though the older generation was being punished, the younger generation was being nourished and trained for battle to seize. In that season of forty years, they had to wait on God every day.

As warriors in training, knowing that God Himself would fight for them—since God Himself strengthened them with manna everyday—was an advantageous military tactic. Few armies flank only one side, expecting God to flank the other. But, when you have to wait for your food—every day for forty years—as two generations of able-bodies soldiers did in nomadic Israel’s dessert season, the “God” factor is a tactic you learn to trust in. When they finally left the desert and marched straight for Jericho, Israel’s armies didn’t doubt Joshua when he told them that God’s tactic was to march in circles and shout.

Running from Saul, David had to wait. In the pit, Jeremiah had to wait. In the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego could only respect the king wait on God. In the lions’ den, Daniel waited ’til morning. In every one of the “waiting” situations in the Bible, God swoops in and saves His people mightily—to the detriment and shame of their enemies every single time.

We can’t calculate nor forecast with strategy when to win by waiting and when to win by fighting. But, waiting must not be ruled out as a “lesser” tactic or a “last resort”. Timing is everything. Nearly every military force involves “waiting” in their attack plans. “Get in position” are three words many Americans know. The grand strategy makes it all make sense. Waiting is not about laziness, apathy, or passivity; it’s about scruples, timing, maturity, and self-control.

God may have already dispatched His evac force to your location. You may be the evac force for an entourage on its way to you. Be there when it’s time.

207 – Good Operations: List & Complete Vision

Less organized cultures tend to think of getting things done as “hard, passionate work”. This idea may be common in a poorer part of town or in developing nations. It generally goes hand-in-hand with the idea that “being angry” as a parent means the parent is “serious” and therefore “responsible”. None of this is true. Being “angry” does not make one more in-charge; having all rules memorized while acting calm does.

The way to get things done well is to have a complete list, both on paper and in mind. Do everything according to the list—both to-do items and procedural rules—and the job will be done perfectly. This doesn’t require any passion or desperation or “hard-working” attitude.

A good work ethic works hard and with a purpose, but that isn’t what makes the work quality. Hard work simply makes the work happen. Whether the work is accomplished with quality depends on whether it was done to specification.

This is a problem in the manufacturing third-world where high-maintenance Western consumers look for features and factors that developing nations don’t even know exist, let alone matter.

Consider Vietnam. When a grandfather was young and went farming to feed his family, but blew his leg off on a land mine because an American president died and a vice president took over, presuming the right to start a war neither nation wanted. He grew up not being able to walk, so things around the house never got done. The concept of “finished” had been literally blasted to bits for his family. They raised kids with dangers and hazards in the house, but the house was considered safe because it didn’t have any land mines. When the eight year old grandson goes to school, he doesn’t have time to think about whether he has folding or patch pockets on his shorts. So, as an adult working in a clothing factory, he might overlook that detail on the product specification—10,000 times. It is the responsibility of the West to help him learn.

Envisioning the resulting product and managing its list of specs are the keys to good operations. Learn these yourself and help everyone else understand them better.

206 – Operations Are the Second Great Command

Operations refer to the normal flow of work, whether in family or administration. “Operations” work is “secular”, being neither religious or non-religious. Anyone can become good at operations or never learn and do a bad job with operations—regardless of religions. The skill of “operating” a boat or bicycle is part of operations. You can learn good operations from anyone.

Operations are neither more nor less important to God than loving God and people. Just how the Second Great Command flow in a sequence, not a hierarchy or priority, operations second in sequence to living God first. Operations actually are part of the Second Great Command.

To make friends, be a friend. To be a friend, do a good job.

Love includes making sure that people don’t get wet from a leaky roof, regardless of whether residents of a house feel affection for the roofer who did a good job. Keep the car working, pay the bills, keep food on the table—these things are part of love. Love also includes tenderness, giving others personal space, and smiling or frowning as needed to get through each unique moment.

Martin Luther taught that the street sweeper and cobbler should find just as much glory in their work as a bishop or priest, not because they are equally glamorous, but because God likes good shoes and clean streets. Jesus himself learned the secular skill of carpentry. But, Jesus’s lifestyle of teaching was also a matter of operations. When his disciples would quarrel mildly or the religious teachers challenged him, Jesus always knew what to say. Jesus’s ultimate work of operations was to die so that anyone who simply welcome’s Jesus in their minds and hearts would be able to continue a positive existence in the next life. Dying at the cross was Jesus’s main operation in his first Earthly ministry.

Since operations are part of the Second Great Command, flowing from the First Great Command to love God, loving God and loving others will make operations flow more smoothly. If you do your work because you love others, knowing that your boss is a Jewish carpenter, you will gain more insight and everything will work out best.

205 – Stand or Fall

You must decide who you are, what you want, what you do, what you won’t ever do—you need to know clearly, backwards and forwards, your worldview’s DNA.

When one knocks over a glass of water, sand doesn’t pour out. Whatever is inside of our hearts will spill out when we get shaken. Hardships helps us see what our de facto values are—our values at their core, the ones we may not even admit to even in our own minds.

We must clearly resolve whose team we’re on, which game we’re playing, what our target is, and where our boundaries are. Know them, think them through, imagine worst case scenarios. Imagine someone blackmailing every member of your family and each of your friends in the worst way. Dwell on it. Imagine the cost of what you believe. If it’s not worth believing, then change those beliefs now—only believe in something if you have truly thought through the greatest cost for believing it.

If you can’t think of something worth paying your most feared price to keep believing in, then your life will come to a shameful end and you will eventually be unwittingly recruited to the ranks of people who do what they hate, to help wicked people destroy the lives of millions through corruption.

If you don’t stand for something—anything—then you will fall for anything. If you believe that there exists a belief that could never cause anyone pain, that belief would likely cause the most pain. The best chance you have of victory and protecting those you love is if your mind is already made up, so your mind won’t change when the hard times come—because you are a person who seriously, truly, thoroughly, fully, completely, painfully evaluates your ideas all the way to their end. No one is safer to be with—no one is more sober—no one has such a clear mind to focus on actually keeping people safe—no one has the faculties to navigate through challenges and dodge retaliation fire.

When you stand, you will offend one and befriend another. Will you choose your friends or wait for your enemies to choose you?