335 – The Middle Demotivation Trap

Poverty and affluenza are two extreme demotivators, but the most common is in the middle: averageness. Medium-sized success can be the biggest obstacle to success. Stay on your guard so that success never gets in the way of your success.

Routines sneak up on us. Ruts attract rivers and rats. Graduate, then find yourself driving on the road during the same two 30 minute rat races as everyone else, morning and night. Once rat-race fever sets in, many buy their dreams on borrowed money, locking themselves in even more. They didn’t plan to get there because “not planning” is exactly what got them there. They don’t lead their own lives, so their families don’t respect them either.

By the time they see it, it’s seems impossible to get out. The only way out of a rat race requires sacrifice. Once you recognize that “average normalness” has its noose around your neck, the next step is to recognize what holds you there. Getting out may not be as difficult as it seems.

Consider the monkey trap in which the monkey won’t let go of the peanut, even to save his own life. The monkey can never get the peanut, but opening its hand will allow it to slip away.

Let go of whatever keeps you stuck in whatever rut finds you. The most common rut is impatience. If you’re willing to learn a little from personal study every day and add a few doses of delayed gratification, you’re more likely to break your cycle. But, that will involve pausing, stopping, reassessing, taking a deep breath, releasing frantic feelings, and, of course, praying.

Few people get themselves trapped in any vicious rut because they prayed for it. Prayerlessness helps get us into ruts and prayer helps get us out.

Ruts find us more easily when we over-extend ourselves until our ships are too bulky to steer. Over-spending is only one subcategory of over-extending. Over-working oneself is another, the cause behind prayerlessness and too many resources squandered on unprofitable hobbies.

Determination keeps us out of ruts. Breaking out of ruts requires enormous determination—the same amount of determination that will prevent the next rut from pulling you in.

337 – Routines

Know life’s routines—food, exercise, sleep, study, work, whatever. Know them in yourself, know them in others, keep them, change them, always respect them in others. If changing your routine proves a difficult necessity, tell yourself that changing your routine might be part of the routine. Still, changing and managing routine remains an individual task. The most important thing in having a routine is to know that one has a routine and to then respect it.

If you get fat, miss your exercise, lose needed nutrition, skip a Sabbath rest, lose sleep, oversleep, don’t read your daily Bible, fail in your commitment to positive entertainment, or don’t add the daily brick to your road—you will have many more problems than you thought you saved yourself. Staying true to necessary steps of your routine is one part in keeping your personal integrity and staying true to your values.

You can’t always keep normal routines. In travel and holidays, routines can get upset, which will test your resolve. So, you must be prepared to return to your routines after those disturbances. Moreover, you must structure your routines in such a way that you can keep them going to some extent, even during irregular times. Itinerant speakers and highly productive people have very sporadic schedules, but their routines must stay maintained to some extent in their travels. The key is to be low-budget and scalable.

Resourceful routines endure. You do not need to buy super expensive food to eat healthily or to get minimum nutrition supplements. Convert some junk food money to Calcium or change “beer to sleep” time into exercise time. Learn to do push-ups on your bed, and include multiple skills in your exercise repertoire, including street dance and martial arts. Buy the cheaper, smaller computer first, if computing is part of your routine, then you can take it with you. Sometimes your only place to work or exercise is at the airport and your only place to buy food is a gas station. Some shoulder freezes at the train station will draw YouTube likes and a chili dog with sour kraut, extra ketchup, and double mustard might compensate for a day without vitamin tablets.

338 – I Didn’t Notice

You are only as big as the problems you ignore. Anything that rents free space in your mind is only bigger and stronger than you because you allow it to be.

Our problems don’t have power over us because they dominate and overwhelm us, but because it bothers us when they do. There will always be a bigger fish who eats what it wants, but you can choose whether to allow the bigger fish to get under your skin and irritate you while you should be sleeping or whether to just not notice. Sometimes it helps to remember that God’s Sovereignty means that God decides which fish are bigger and smaller. God might have sent a big, evil fish your way just so you can practice not caring.

No matter how big, strong, resourceful, or vast your obstacle may be, never give anything else the power to control your will. You are always and always will ever be responsible for your own choices. This includes your choice to be angry, regretful, or grateful. Don’t give your foes the power to select your level of happiness, they don’t deserve that much credit. This means you must also reject the lie that you must dominate foes in return before you can be happy.

Even while a larger force harasses and disturbs you, even before you bring “justice” or “hit back” or otherwise stop it from doing bad things—before you take any action at all, you can and must choose happiness in your heart. Until you do, you will never have the mental, psychological, emotional, and spiritual clarity to confront the heart of the problem. Jesus explained this by saying, “First remove the plank from your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother’s eye.”

I was driving my motorcycle down a street just after a ten minute rain. Puddles lined the road when a semi-truck-sized flatbed pulled in front of me and charged at top speed. While I passed him, I think he splashed a puddle on my shirt because it seemed a little damp when I arrived. But, I’m not sure if he did because I just didn’t notice.

341 – Forty Is Too Young to Have a Baby

Maturing takes centuries. The lifelong process of learning means that we barely get started before we grow geriatric. Unless we take drastic measures to disrupt the natural ignorance of our inborn sin, our skin will shrivel and fall off before we ever grow up.

There’s more to understanding babies than simply having them. During normal child-bearing years, we still aren’t ready to raise children. No parent can ever be perfect. Don’t wait to become perfect, don’t hold it against your parents for not being, and never, under any circumstances, allow yourself to think that you’re perfect merely for becoming a parent. While no parent is “perfect”, we can each be “ideal” by inviting others to help us along the way.

Raising children together as family helps to instill a strong work ethic and respect across generations. For millennia many Eastern cultures, from the Mediterranean through the Far East, had three generations under one roof—the grandparents raising the children while mom and dad ran the family business. In Vietnam, it’s not uncommon to become a grandparent at only 35 years old. These societies flourish because they master the art of “imperfectly ideal” parenting. Simply put, the “perfectly ideal” parents know they are not perfect and therefore welcome help.

The more children we have, the more we all learn. God created both humanity and Earth; only Satan needs a population small enough to centrally plan. If every population on Earth flourished as God commanded, we’d have more scientists and thus might have already developed the technology to colonize Mars a century ago.

Every society relies on a growing birthrate in order to survive. Over-fascination with entertainment and surrender to immorality will plunge a population into nothingness, being overwhelmed by societies that have many children. Growth and strength in family are in direct conflict with entertainment and immorality. As imperfect as everyone of us is, it helps to have fewer problems, not more. Whatever your household situation is, seek to have more help and fewer distractions.

Even fifty years old is too young to raise a family—if we try on our own. Drop the delusion of household “independence”, welcome help, then families will flourish much easier.

342 – It’s not Enough to Be Angry

It is remarkably, notably, strangely, and uniquely boring, unoriginal, and universal for humans in their youth to determine to be different from the generation before.

Things aren’t as good as we like them. Perhaps something truly terrible happened—which happens all too often. Or, we might just complain because things aren’t better—which is good because good parents want their children to improve the future. Whatever we decide in the earlier years of life to make different in the future, that decision makes no one special since it is instinctive for every human. Accordingly, that determination itself isn’t enough to make any difference at all.

If we want to make a difference, we must determine to do more than make a difference. Especially among poorer families in whatever country or economy of the world, many who are eagerly determined to improve things for the future never want to learn and figure out the right way—they don’t want to learn how—they presume they already know how—to make the future better than the past.

Perhaps they decide that they need a college education—or that their children need a college education. College can help, but it’s not the way for everyone’s education and there is no universal guarantee that it is one way or even a possible way to help the next generation. Parents who blindly decide their children need college in order to make life better may raise hyper-wealthy children who never go to college, but whom they alienate while trying to force them to.

Some may decide they need hard work, without a care for “smart” work. Some may decide that “innovation” is a waste, that consciously becoming fat is a healthy way to be “strong”, or some other nonsense. Usually, our emotional response about “how” to make the future better is no more than a reaction to a specific past, while the future always surprises. Past failure can warn us or fuel our resolve to improve, but it’s not enough to navigate the uncharted waters ahead.

If we want to improve the future, we must resolve to learn how improvement must be made. Getting help is vital. And, never stop learning.