Tag: needverse

145 – Build People

Invest in friendship. When you find a good friend, take time out for a productive conversation. When time’s up, good soldiers are glad to get back to work. Don’t waste time and call it “friendship”.

True “fellowship” has a known and defined purpose, a task to achieve or discuss. Talk over coffee. Talk along the way—on a run, swim, flight, climb, workout, walk, or commute. But build friendships, don’t just shoot the breeze about surface conversation that you all hope will never go anywhere. Know when to jest and joust. Be hearty in humor, but keep your substance.

When it’s time to sit and “just be” with people, that’s no waste. Set aside time for quietness also, just don’t become addicted to an idle life. The best friendships in which to share mutual silence are the friendships built while working to achieve something excellent.

The greatest friendships are often between parents and children. As you age, be a cheerleader for your parents and don’t dwell on whatever they did that irritates you. Most people who get hung up in life are hung up on what their parents did or didn’t. But remember, your future is not about your parents, it’s about your future. Encouraging your parents will make you strong enough to overcome whatever weakness they handed down to you. They might have their own “parent” issues; dealing with yours just might deal with theirs as well and you’ll find a new best friend.

If you’re a parent, make the task easier for your kids: Do some homework and get a third opinion before you execute your “perfect plan” to make things better for the next generation. If you’re a young parent, don’t presume—like everyone else—that you’ll be the first in human history whose kids don’t talk back. Love shines brightest as a choice, not a passing feeling. Don’t overbear and know when to protect your space, but don’t be the “professional” who helps everyone but his own family. And, don’t be the parent who runs off to have an affair because the marriage no longer feels like a high school prom.

Friendship is a choice that starts in the little things.

143 – Fantasy: Counterfeit of Dreaming

Fantasies come in many shapes and sizes, but they have in common that they make fantasizers unable to function. Porn makes it difficult for men to interact with women. Romans fiction has the same effect vice versa. Daydreams about money keep people broke, so don’t put up a poster of an expensive car or house unless you actually have a timeline and step list planned out for making the money to buy it.

Fantasy is healthy as a genre, but numbing as a lifestyle. Humans were endowed as the Image of God with creative imaginations. Seeing results in your mind, knowing that something is possible, keeping your mind focused on your goals—that is vital and necessary. Fantasy delivers some of the thrill and a variance of the ideas, but it leads to a dead end. Fantasy is the engineering of criminal brilliance, the devil’s plan to make people think they are dreaming of the light at the end of a tunnel when they’re really looking at the headlights of an oncoming train.

Anyone can become addicted to fantasy, whether gaming, movies, novels, clubbing, or just wasting time under the delusion that you’re getting something done by creating to-do items and checking them off. When fantasy addictions beckon your return, think about something else—anything else. Get out of the house, go for a walk, pray. When someone is deeply addicted to anything, reading the Bible is the most likely time for the devil to attack with more calls to fantasize. Resist.

Fantasy is an addiction, even in genre. Addictions take thirty to ninety days to break. The key to breaking addictions is to control your thought life. If you must become dependent on others to break an addiction then you are not in control of your own life. See the fantasy for what it is, then take back your place at the helm of your thought life, then fantasy will be less impossible to break out of at any stage and more likely to help you in the long term.

The best way to avoid a life of fantasy is to fill your mind with a real dream, with a grounded, plotted, God-sized dream.

142 – Foundations Take Years

It can take decades of learning and preparation for some things to take off. Don’t limit yourself with artificial time tables. You never know how long something may take.

If you can’t continue indefinitely, don’t begin. If you start something, but later decide it’s not worth it, then you have a serious problem with making decisions; you need no less than one week for reflection and at least five new rules to live by. Think about what you do before you get involved. A lengthy negotiation involves someone who doesn’t know what he wants. Whatever you are willing to compromise after twenty hours should be left at the door. It’s better to hold a visioning session with a life coach and hash out your mission with a negotiator who has no vested interest in your future.

Someone who tries to change your mind thinks you don’t know what you want. But, if you know what you want then manipulation tactics won’t affect you. If you know your mission, manipulative leaders will accuse you of rebellion; actually they’re just angry that they can’t assign your mission to you. Don’t be that kind of manipulative leader. True leadership helps others discover what they want and run for it.

There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going. Of course some things can be done more quickly, but that discussion returns to the matter of having your mind made up in the first place. We’re all wrong at times; capitalize on those times by reflecting on what will make you a better decision-maker in the future. Once you know your destination, you can choose the right path and keep going down it and reach destinations that most people are locked out of merely by their lack of attention span.

Commitment and wise decisions go hand in hand. You’ll never find out if you’ve gone down the wrong road if you never go down any road very far. Unless it’s clearly dangerous, press on just for the sake of finishing what you start. See things only seen with time. Then, you’ll choose your roads more wisely in the future and you’ll arrive to enjoy what awaits you at their end.

141 – Keep Your Regiment

Diet, exercise, reading, learning, practicing, growing, praying, advancing… Don’t let school exams, big projects, travel, holidays, weather, long recoveries from injury, or other interruptive circumstances knock you off your track. When you have to take a break, remember to get back to work. Make adjustments and keep the vision in your mind.

My father was fit, slim, and ran every day until my mother became pregnant with me. He stopped running and quickly got “furniture disease”—where the chest falls into the drawers.

Don’t pursue romance until you’ve grown up enough to come out the other side an even better person. Have your business or career ready, have money in the bank or some schedule thought through. Many good projects get abandoned because the software developer had a kid or the business had an expensive start and money didn’t come in soon enough. Many children don’t know their fathers who either won’t abandon their pet projects or have to work extra because they weren’t financially ready for kids. People get married or begin a twenty-year job and their priorities change both for better and worse; go into every day expecting that, don’t be ignorant.

Select your priorities to maintain before the unexpected surprises you. Through uphill climbs, hold your standards as high as you can and know that no life worth publishing happens by itself. God is always in control, but don’t let circumstance take you out of the driver’s seat of your diligence. Stand alert at your watch.

When you get off track, don’t wait for your friends to call you; keep yourself in line. “Accountability groups” are useful, but overrated. “Confession circles” are for people just beginning to admit their problems to themselves. Planning with a wingman is a blessing beyond words. Two can achieve the work of five; it’s called “synergy”. But, don’t let so-called “accountability partners” be your excuse to fail. Don’t let “accountability salesmen” tell you that you’ll fail without affirming their egos and buying their books. At times you will be your only wingman—that is one of the steepest uphill climbs. A little self-accountability and intrinsic motivation during easy times will prepare you for summits worth their ascent.

139 – Deal with the Inside

Trying to advance your position on the social ladder will backfire. Your progress faces two challenges: your faults and your need to grow. Growth comes with strength, which takes exercise, persistence, and time. Faults, however, come from damage that must be mended. If you try to elevate your status without dealing with these two, you will implode.

This actually explains the problems of many flawed leaders, the “head-scratcher” leaders of whom their suffering, subordinating staff ask, “How did this idiot get in charge with so many failing results?” It’s easy so see with a simple glance at what’s under the hood. Such a leader polished the bodywork, but neglected the frame and engine.

So-called “progress” with the social recognition, without growing in character first is only external. There is much more to building a car than buffing old paint.

The problem is temptation. Everyone feels the pressure to keep up with the exterior progress of those around us. It’s often called “peer pressure”. And, interestingly enough, most people paint their facade of “success” because of their neglected faults, usually to get back at a phantom haunting from childhood, if not to simply prove someone wrong.

Don’t be seduced by thirst to keep up with the Joneses; it will drive you to take shortcuts that shouldn’t be taken, receive favors that shouldn’t be given, and make deals at the expense of your soul. Then you will become that leader everyone loathes.

Don’t seek promotions; think thrice before accepting them. Focus on building your character, restoring whatever’s broken, and unloading whatever you’ve been carrying around in your trunk. By striving to be strong, whole, and valuable, that success you were created to desire will come looking for you. And, it will surely find you, once you are strong, solid, and lean enough that you won’t buckle under the pressure.

Success crushes a great many people. Delays may seem like setbacks, but self-destructing because you got too much power faster than you knew what to do with takes a lot more time than slow, foundational growth. Fame and position draw fierce enemies and strange complexities. Some extra time in the garage will make sure you’re ready for it.

138 – Worldview Schools of Thought

If you want to have a strong life, you must draw a line in the sand. In self-improvement, there three main opinions: disdain for the entire topic, people who will take any criticism or hardship to improve themselves, people who want to impose change on the external world and are easily offended.

This book is written for the second category only. If you are in one of the other two categories, you hopefully won’t like this book because it conflicts with your worldview’s DNA.

This book’s approach to self-improvement is to hear-out criticism, search for “inner” strength, and deny yourself the right to claim “victim”, especially if you are one. If you’re not looking for that, don’t read this book.

If you are unhappy with your body, this book advises you to accept yourself from the inside and be physically healthy, not to do plastic surgery or other forms of medical treatment. If people treat you rudely, this book teaches you to find “inner power” to press on with your life, without policing or modifying or making laws to regulate what other people say. If you want want to medically alter your body in order to be emotionally satisfied with your body or if you want to protest about “hate speech”, then this book’s philosophy cannot help you because you seek a different type of “life coaching” opinion.

Know your approach to life. Recognize your mode of operation and put it into words. People have different philosophies about “being better people”, identify which group you fall into and do not judge the specific advice of a worldview you are not a part of.

If you don’t believe in the Bible, don’t critique the hermeneutics or theology of those who do. If you believe in the Bible, don’t criticize the morals or philosophies of those who don’t. If you’re a Republican, don’t criticize the politics of someone who is a Democrat. Learn to say, “We are in different schools of thought,” or, “I’m a Republican, you’re a Democrat,” or, “I don’t believe the Bible, you do,” or, “I deny myself the right to cry victim, even when I am one.” Then you can disagree with dignity.

137 – Fiefdom Dictators & Controlling Spirits

Beware of the strange desire to control, merely for the sake of control. Another “thing” that can get situated onto people is the “controlling spirit”. It might show up as megalomania or meaningless manipulation or creating chaos just for the sake of attention. When people have this controlling “thing” on them, they would be satisfied to have a small corner in the room to control, torture, manipulate, get a reaction out of, get attention from, get a “quarrel fix” with, and entertain themselves with absolute dictatorial powers, merely for the pleasure of the experience.

It tends to gravitate toward leaders of groups that recruit numbers, religious or otherwise, because controlling spirits want to have something to control. Any sensible slight to its pride will set that controlling spirit off its rocker, prove to the host that the problem is real, and, if that host keeps cooperating with it, the host might socially and professionally self-destruct.

Remember, someone with a controlling spirit doesn’t actually hunger for this control. Like a parasite that gives unnatural hunger, the spirit “thing” rests on its host, creating the appetite to act so strangely. Of course, the person must cooperate and welcome the controlling spirit. Simple resistance would make the spirit shrink, lose its size and thus its power, and eventually leave. But, too many people won’t give up that resistance because they somewhat enjoy the feelings the get from carrying a controlling spirit on their backs.

In East Asia it’s such a common problem that Western expats and Asian bloggers write about it. The boss holds numerous meetings merely to “feel like a boss”, makes his office inaccessible, and the solution to “problems” is the same solution to “suggestions”: The boss is the god, everyone else is a cockroach created only to preserve the boss’s godhood. If it’s hard to imagine, ask someone from Asia. But, it is a living, real caricature of the controlling spirit.

If that’s you, quitting your position might make the spirit go away. That actually happens.

If you struggle with a “controlling” person, use these strengths: Be among the hardest working, remain super-calm when the bear gets provoked, and expect insanity because spirits don’t reason.