“(They) had never seen such a sun…You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travelers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward towards the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills…The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.”

- C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew

The kids from the Chronicles of Narnia are seeing something that most of us have only experienced in the opening pages of Genesis or on felt boards in old Sunday school classes.  They are witnessing Aslan (the Singer) creating the heavens and the earth.

“You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, “Papa! Father!” Doesn’t that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you’re also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance.”  

- Paul, to the church in Galatia

Let’s face it.  Television is a minefield.  We are constantly searching for appropriate things to watch with our children that might stir the right things and prompt relevant conversations.  This last weekend, we watched the first part of a four part series on Netflix called Daughter’s of Destiny.

There are places that feel holy because of their breathtaking beauty or their immensity.  But there are others that are holy because we define them that way, set them aside, and honor them as a place where we encounter God.  

In the Exodus, they tell about Moses and his “tent of meeting."

As a leader of his people, Moses was seeking time alone with God to receive his counsel and his direction.  He did it in a very formal and visible way.  Everyone knew why he was going into that tent and who he would be encountering there.  Because he was communing with God on behalf of his people, there was a power and authority to that time in the tent.

“Taking a trip for six months, you get in the rhythm of it. It feels like you can go on forever doing that. Climbing Everest is the ultimate and the opposite of that. Because you get these high-powered plastic surgeons and CEOs, and you know, they pay $80,000 and have Sherpas put the ladders in place and 8,000 feet of fixed ropes and you get to the camp and you don’t even have to lay out your sleeping bag. It’s already laid out with a chocolate mint on the top. The whole purpose of planning something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain and if you compromise the process, you’re an @$$#*!& when you start out and you’re an @$$#*!& when you get back.”

- Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

Yvon is a little crusty around the edges.  He never set out to successfully lead a huge corporation, but that is precisely what he is doing.  His unconventional path to building a large business has provided him with some very unique perspectives.  To be completely candid, I disagree with many of the things he says, but I think he nails it when it comes his thoughts on it being about the journey and not the destination.

In the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s is trying to field a competitive baseball team for 2002.  The problem is that he has a payroll of less than $40M when other teams, like their nemesis the NY Yankees, have a team payroll of over $125M.  

That feels familiar, right?  

Ever felt like you were competing against others with a much bigger checkbook?  I can point to numerous examples throughout my business career, but the most visceral is probably competing against all those rich boys in college…but that’s a story for another time.

We're more than halfway past the beginning of the new year, when hope seemed to spring eternally.  When we looked at the year ahead, and it felt like we could accomplish almost anything.  But in the chaos of the tyranny of the urgent, even the best laid plans we made feel like distant memories.  Like sets of endless waves crashing on the beach over time, the day to day issues we face in our lives and enterprises, can really begin to wear us down.

Ok, so maybe we are half-hearted and are too easily pleased, but we come by it honestly.  Marketers are spending billions to get us to spend our thousands. Tyler Durden in “Fight Club” says:

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy $#*! we don't need.”

Probably the greatest "aha" I have found in becoming a certified Storybrand guide is that the best marketers are trying to sell us an aspirational identity.  Watch an Old Spice, Apple, or even a Viagara advertisement and it is pretty unmistakable.  They are selling the idea that things (well, “us” really) can be different.

If you’ve spent any time in this blog or around me for that matter, you might have picked up on the fact that I really like movies.  Let me restate that:  I love the story of restoration (because it is our intellectual property as believers) and it is found in every great story.  The movie producers, directors, and screenwriters of our day, just happen to be the great storytellers of our time.

"Slow to hire.  Quick to fire."

Okay, I need a show of hands:

• Who’s heard those two phrases together before?  
• Who’s said those two phases before?
• Who actually does that?

Yeah, that’s what I figured.  I know some folks who are quick to hire and quick to fire, but most of us are very quick to hire and seemingly unable to fire anyone.  Add the challenging ingredient of our Christian faith to that equation, and being slow to hire and quick to fire becomes really, really difficult.  It doesn’t change the fact, however, that it is really, really good advice.

I live in deep south Texas.  It’s pretty dry here.  When we talk about water, it is typically about scarcity, restrictions, and about how that finite and essential asset will one day disappear.  

Whenever Jesus talks about water, he seems to talk about it completely differently.  He uses words like…

My partner is an ex-Air Force guy.  When we first started working together, he would use the term “delta” the way it is used in the second set of definitions above.  He used it to describe the difference between where a client is and where they are going to be…from here to there.  I use it all the time now.

Staying with an idea or concept until it finds success sounds like the reasonable and responsible thing to do.  Willing something to be successful, despite everything being shown to you that is contrary.  Funny, the concept that is likened to “sunk cost bias” is the “gambler’s fallacy"...

RSA Animate created an incredible animation about the concepts in Dan’s book Drive a few years ago.  He makes a pretty compelling argument for external and financial rewards not being of value in terms of motivation.  Music to our ears, right?  You mean, we can stop spending all that money to motivate our teams (or even our kids)?  Those types of motivation still have value, but just way less than a few other things...

It has been pretty interesting to watch.  My son is working with a master craftsman a couple of generations older.  They do timber frame construction and in their down time create furniture and other household items.  And they do it almost exclusively using the typically destroyed trees that have suffered from “oak wilt."

As they work, they tell stories of restoration.  What was previously discarded is being refined into beautiful and strong things.  They use ancient tools and put a high premium on craftsmanship.  There is obviously a lot of demand for the kind of work that they beautifully do through their collaborative OAKWRITES.  But there is something even more interesting that I’ve noticed.

I used to be jealous of some of my friends when we were early in our careers.  They all had jobs where they traveled a lot and earned points to take their families on extended vacations at virtually no cost.  We weren’t able to do that.

A decade or so into my career, I had a job for 2 years in Chicago that required a lot of travel.  Turned out that in order for me to earn the right to some nice free vacation travel for me and my family, I pretty much had to travel all of the time.  It wasn’t that there was no cost for my friend's nice vacations, it was a cost I decided I could not afford.

About 15 years ago, I led my first retreat.  Up to that point I had done a lot of presenting, but for all the wrong reasons.  Thankfully, what I intended for personal gain or affirmation, He had somehow intended for good.  

There was one young man with a serious stutter who said he had never spoken in front of other people.  At the end of the weekend, he wanted to address the others in attendance.  He nervously took my place in front of the crowd and started to tell his story.  He stammered and struggled with the articulation of each thought and word.