Book Notes

I love reading, but honestly have little patience to get to the end of most books. But, when I meet an epic book. I’ll read it over and over. 

While reading or listening to an audiobook, I use my Evernote app to write down the quotes that impact me most. 

Here are the notes from my app I’ve kept over the past few years, just raw quotes I pulled right from the books that stood out. Also, gives you a sense of what I like to read. They are broken into these topics: Enterprise, Mindset, Religion, Biography, Technology, Civic-Minded, Classic and Family. 

The books that have impacted me enough to go back and read over and over are: War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Linchpin by Seth Godin, Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo, and The Gospels. 

Enterprise

The Virgin Way by Richard Branson

Good to Great by Jim Collins

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon

Measure what measures by john Doerr 

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

Successful Salesman by Frank Farrington

Linchpin by Seth Godin

Welcome to Management by Ryan Hawk

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by a Chip and Dan Heath

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

What you do is who you are by Ben Horowitz

Biz Dev 3.0 Changing Business As We Know It by Brad Keywell

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff

Let’s Get Real Or Lets Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt

Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Thank you economy by Gary Vaynerchuck

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Mindset

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely

Joy At Work by Dennis Bakke

Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success by John Wooden and Jay Carty

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

Mindset: the Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Accidental Executive: Lessons on Business, Faith, and Calling from the Life of Joseph by Albert Erisman

Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good by Steven Garber

Naked and Unafraid by Kevin Gerald

Rescuing Ambition by Dave Harvey

Legacy by James Kerr

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

Work Matters by Tom Nelson

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

When by Daniel Pink

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Unwanted by Jay Stringer

Richest Man in Babylon by Dennis Waitley

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

Religion

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Life together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan

Common Prayer by Shane Claiborne

Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

Kingdom Man by Tony Evans

Fasting by Jentezen Franklin

A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work by Timothy Keller

Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas

You are what you love: the spiritual power of habit by James KA Smith

Biography

The Fire Next Time by james Baldwin

Francis: Life and Revolution. A biography of Jorge Bergoglio

The Fish That Ate The Whale by Rich Cohen

An Empire of wealth: the epic history of American economic power by john Steele Gordon

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

To Shake The Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Chaos monkeys by Antonio García Marquez

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Random Reminiscences of Mem and Events by John D Rockefeller

Everything Store by Brad Stone

Sam Walton Made In America by Sam Walton

The difference between larry Ellison and God by Mike Wilson

Technology

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The Second Machine Age by Andrew Mcafee

Digital Sense by Travis Wright 

Civic-Minded

Hunger in Paradise by Rasmuss Ankersen

Locking up our own by James forman jr

Entrepreneurship for Human Flourishing by Chris Horst and peter Greer

White Awake by Daniel Hill

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich

The Economics of Neighborly Love by Tom Nelson

Soul of an Entrepreneur by David Sax

Classics

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross

Family

That artists way for parents by Julia Cameron

For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macauly

The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

A Dad Is For Spending Time With by Dr Charlie Shedd

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Enterprise

The Virgin Way by Richard Branson

-save your notes and listen intently.

-good phrases to use as a leader: “I’m not sure, what do you think?”, “please” and “thank-you”

-bad phrases: maybe, double negatives

-better to have the reputation of great customer service to live up to rather than average

-it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

Good to Great by Jim Collins

-good is the enemy of great

-Revolutionary results through evolutionary process: 

1) level 5 leaders: not celebrity leaders

-you can accomplish anything in life, so long as you do not mind who gets the credit (Harry Truman)

Leadership levels:

-level 1: highly qualified individual 

-Level 2: contributing team member

-Level 3: competent manager

-Level 4: stage 1 of effective leadership

-Level 5: humility and will; ambitious first for the cause and not for themselves

-get the right people and then decide where to go

-no positive correlation between executive compensation and company growth/success

-the best people you hire do not need to be managed 

-put your best people on your greatest opportunities, not your greatest problems. 

-good to great company’s have employees that are more concerned with external realities of how the company may be in trouble more than what they’re bosses think

-charismatic personalities can be a liability as a leader because people are more focused on you than the facts

-How to deal with the truth and bad times:

1) lead with questions not answers: only in order to gain understanding

2) engage in dialogue and debate not coercion 

3) conduct autopsies without blame

4) build red flag mechanisms – The key here is not better information but more information that cannot be ignored

-what separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life. 

-enduring companies see profit not as the point of life, but as essential to life.

-not so important what your core values are but that you have them and do not leave them over time 

-value example: we run best at the end. (Instead of measuring mile time; measuring how many competitors past at the end)

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon

Solution Sales

• The Challenger sales person is the most successful in solution selling
• Solution selling is the model compared with transactional selling. Transactional selling sells individual products while solution selling cells a bundle of Products 

1. Requires consensus

Sales Profiles:

1. Hard Worker: Always put in extra effort. Enthusiastically seeking feedback. 
2. Relationship Builder: very generous with their time. Accessibility and service. 
3. Lone Wolf: do things their way or not st all. 
4. Reactive problem solver: naturally drawn to make sure promises are kept post deal. 
5. Challenger: the debaters of the yeam. Deep knowledge of customer business and use the knowledge to push the customer. Assertive with customers on strategy and price

Who is the challenger?

1. Offers the customer unique perspectives
2. Strong two-way communication skills
3. The rep knows the customer’s value drivers
4. The rep can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business
5. The rep is comfortable discussing money
6. The rep can pressure the costumer 

• Teach, tailor, and take control While leveraging constructive tension. 
• They teach their customer something valuable about how they can compete in their market 

Who’s is the relationship builder?

1. Challengers push customer’s out of their comfort zone, relationship builders want to accepted into it

Challengers: 

• Challengers don’t discover what customers need, they tell customers what they need. They are great teachers. 
• Loyalty isn’t won with marketing or product developments, but in the field with reps. You win it in the sales process itself. 

Commercial Teaching 

1. Lead to your unique strengths: the sweet spot in customer loyalty is outperforming your competitors in those things you’ve taught your customers are important 
2. Challenge customer assumptions: Reframe. Your customers should be saying, “huh, I never thought of it like that before”. 
3. Catalyze action: best ROI calculators have nothing to do with your solution. Rather they calculate the losses they are incurring or profits forgoing by doing nothing. 
4. Scale across customers: Have a few key insights and questions for sales reps they can use. Segment customer by need not by geography or vertical. 

World Class Commercial Teaching Pitch: 

1. The Warmer: Assessment of your view of the customer’s key challenges. Great place to provide bench-marking data. “These are three challenges we see again and again. Is that what you’re seeing too or would you add something else to the list?” (Hypothesis-based selling)
2. The Reframe: The central moment of the commercial teaching pitch. This is the headline and should surprise and catch your customer off guard. Not, “yes, I agree!” From your customer, but “huh, I never thought of that before.” 
3. Rational Drowning: lay out the business case for why “Reframe” is important to your customer’s business.  This should be numbers-driven and should make your customers squirm a bit. Fear. “I never thought we were losing this kind of money before”. 
4. Emotional Impact: You don’t want to hear “we’re different”. They need to internalize what you’re telling them. Make it personal. Tell the story about how similar companies went down a similar path. 
5. A New Way: this is a specific description of the capabilities they would need to have in order to make good on the ability to make money or mitigate risk the way described above. Still about the solution, not the supplier. Customer says: “you’re right, that’s the kind of company I want to be”
6. Your Solution: how your solution is better than anyone else to equip them differently. 

• Your success as a seller in the commercial teaching model is found in your ability to teach your customer something, not to sell them something. 

Measure what measures by john Doerr

• Ideas are easy, execution is everything
• Objectives key results (OKR)
• Management methodology that ensures he company focuses on the same important issues throughout the company
• Objective: what is to be achieved. They are to be significant, Concrete, action-oriented. Ideally inspirational 
• Key results: measure how we get to the objective. Specific and time-bound. Aggressive yet realistic. Measurable and verifiable. 
• Four OKR Superpowers 

1. Focus and commit: OKRs compel leaders to make hard choices. They dispel confusion. 

2. Align and connect for teamwork:goals are openly shared,

• Everyone’s goals are shared, no matter how high in the org.
• Top down alignment brings meaning to work. 
• Deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement and innovation. 
• Track for accountability 
• OKRs are animated by data. 
• No judgement accountability
•  
• Stretch
• OKRs inspire us to do more than we thought possible
• Give us creative freedom to be our most ambitious selves. 
• OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unnatainable to really stretch yourself to new heights. 
• A tool, not a weapon. Bonuses and compensation are best kept separate. 
• Chapter 3
  • OKRs are to be time-bound and explicit. 
  • Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them. 
• Chapter 4
  • Short term goals are what drives the work.
  • Quarterly goals tend to be the best to keep up with a competitive market. 
  • There should be a quantity goal paired with a quality goal in order to ensure the best results. 
  • Done is better than perfect. 
• Chapter 7
  • Transparency is the biggest strength of OKRs
  • Transparent and Aligned OKRs brings the management tax to zero. 
• Chapter 8
  • OKRa help the team stay focused on the North Star values of the organization 
  • Leaders are for setting context, asking important questions, and providing data. 
  • OKRs give fulfillment to individual jobs because they know how their work ties into the larger company goal.

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

Eight Practices of successful CEOs

1. They ask: What needs to be done?
2. They ask: what is right for the enterprise?
3. They developed action plans
4. They took responsibility for decisions
5. They took responsibility for communicating
6. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems
   • Put the best people in the biggest opportunities 
7. Ran productive meetings
8. They thought and said “we” rather than “I” 

• The products knowledge worked make are ideas and effectiveness

Four realities of the executive that limit results and performance 

1. The executives time tends to belong to everybody else: captive of the organization
2. Executives are forced to keep on operating unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work
3. He’s within an organization. He’s only effective if and when other people take advantage of what he contributes 
4. The executive is within an organization. They view the outside with distorted lenses. 

5 habits of the mind to become an effective executive:

1. An executive knows where his time goes. Work systemically to control time
2. Focus on outward contribution. Gear efforts to results, not work. 
3. Build on strengths. Their own strengths and strengths of colleagues, subordinates. 
4. Concentrate on few areas where superior performance will bring outstanding results. Force themselves to stick to their priorities 
5. Make effective decisions through a right system and sequence. Few but fundamental decisions, 

Chapter 2 – 

-nothing distinguished an executive more than their care of “time”

-executive sessions: what are you seeing that I’m not? What do you want to know about the organization?

-a well managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it. (Lack of innovation)

Chapter 3: what can I contribute?

• The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness
• Knowledge workers don’t produce things but ideas in specialities.
• Executives ask the question “what contribution do you need from me?”
• What is the most important contribution I can make to the effectiveness of this organization?

Chapter 4: Making Strength Productive 

• You can’t build on weakness, but rather build on strength
• Make jobs BIG rather than SMALL. This way it will enable the strong man to rise to the challenge. Give his strengths a chance to have full play
• Japanese way of doing things. Appraisals focusing on positive rather than negative (lifetime employment)
  1. What has the employee done well?
  2. What will he therefore do well?
  3. What does he have to learn or acquire to get the full benefit of his strength?
  4. If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing for them to work for this person?
• Making strengths product is more than essential, it is the responsibility of authority. 
• Nothing is more conducive to success as a rapidly rising superior. Build on your superiors strengths. 
• What can this man do versus what can this man not do?
• The job of the ceo is to multiply talents like in the Bible

Chapter 5: first things first

• If there is any secret to effectiveness, it’s concentration
• Yesterday’s successes often linger too long and end up taking the life blood of an organization because of managerial ego
• Companies that only hire internal, get inbred and lack innovation
• CEOs struggle with concentration because they postpone priorities (which leads to abandonment).
• Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities. 

Rules for Isentifying Priority: 

1. To pick the future rather than the past
2. Opportunity rather than on problem
3. Choose your own direction rather than climb on the band wagon 
4. Aim high, aim for something to make a difference rather than something safe

Concentration: the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first. 

Chapter 6: The Elements of Decision Making

• Decision-making is THE task of the executive 

The Elements of the Decision Process

1. The realization that that problem was generic and could only be solved through a decision which established a rule or principle
2. The definition of the specifications Which the answer to the problem had to satisfy. 
3. The thinking through what is right, 
4. The building into the action to carry it out
5. The feedback which teas the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the results. 

What Makes An Effective Executive by Peter Drucker 

1. what needs to be done
2. What is right for enterprise
3. Made action plans
4. Took responsibility for decisions 
5. Took responsibly for communicating 
6. Focused on opportunity not problems 
7. Ran productive meetings
8. Said “we” not “i”

-effective executives do not splinter themselves and focus on one or two tasks 

-promotions should only be given based in measurable results and nothing else

A decision should be not been made until people know:

1. The name of the person responsible for carrying it out
2. The deadline
3. Names of people who will be effected by the decision
4. The names of the people who have to be informed of the decision

Successful Salesman by Frank Farrington

Chapter 1

• Every salesman should assume that he is competent to handle any class of trade. He should acquire a self-confidence that will enable him to hold up his head at any company. He should have faith in his ability to make people think about his goods as he himself thinks.
• The employer is entitled to get more work from his employees than he pays for, or he will not make any profit on them. 
• The man who would be a good salesman must have the courage to stick to the learning. 

Chapter 2: 

• Reading news makes literary sewers of our minds.
• Recommended Reading: 
  • Life of Johnson by James Boswell
  • Emerson’s essays (representative men)
  • Shakespeare’s dramas
  • Honore de Balzac
  • Lives by Plutarch (Specifically Alexander the Great)
• Scientific Salesmanship: There is a scientific side to selling just like banking and pharmacy

Chapter 3: Salesman and Salary

• We like to buy of people that know their goods and how to sell them. 
• There is no trouble in getting men who are honest, who will work full time, and who will keep sober. Men who will technically obey orders are not hard to find. The country is full of mediocre salesmen, but the mediocre ones will not carry the business to a great success. 
• If you are not giving your best efforts to your employer at your present salary, neither would you give them at a salary 50% higher. 

Chapter 4: The salesman’s attitude

• Who wouldn’t prefer the work of a man taking pride in the way he does his work to that of a man whose boast is that he gets through in record time? 

Chapter 6: What Customers Want

• Good service may make up in some degree for poor goods, but poor service will not be atoned for by good goods.

Chapter 7: Keeping the Customer List

• Any well-trained salesman can do missionary work. 
• Keep your relations with buyers ostensibly on a strictly business basis, but don’t lose a chance to develop an undertone of friendliness that will have the effect of getting orders from you and keeping them away from the other fellow, when everything else is equal.

Chapter 8: The Entering Wedge

• Don’t make the mistake of singling out the one successful competitor, for that will put your buyer in an antagonistic mood. Make it your line against the field.
• Persistent dropping of water will wear a hole in a stone.

Linchpin by Seth Godin

Welcome to Management by Ryan Hawk

Lead Yourself

• Building Skills: having the job skills is not the same as leading others
• Earning credibility: compliance cannot be commanded l, but commitment cannot.

Pocket awareness

• Self awareness is not natural but a skill that can be grown
• Build yourself into a learning machine: thoughtfulness and intentionality

Learn… Mentors:

1. Follow up the meeting with notes
2. Mentor criticism is a gift

Test:

1. Set a specific goal
2. Cultivate intense feedback
3. Ask for immediate feedback
4. Seek frequent discomfort

Reflect and adjust

Teach

1. I teach and I know

Lead yourself: voluntary hardship

• Time management
  • Recording time
  • Managing time
  • Consolidating time 

-What are those few things that absolutely must go right for you to be successful?

Keys to respect. Must get your team’s buy in to your respect. 

1. Demonstrate competence
2. Exhibit conviction
3. Set high standards
4. Listen to your team
5. Work hard
6. Do the difficult 
7. Be consistent 

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by a Chip and Dan Heath

• We need ideas to stick 12-52 times a year
• Repetition does not help ideas. 
• Sticky ideas share certain key traits those are: 

1. Simplicity: if you argue ten points, the jury won’t remember any. Master of seclusion. Proverbs are ideal
2. Unexpectedness: violate people’s expectations. 
3. Concreteness: explain in terms of human ideas. Mission statements and business talk can be ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness. Apples with razor blades, ice filled bathtubs
4. Credibility: if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere
5. Emotions: we are wired to feel things for people not organizations. Peopl make donations to people not whole groups of people. 
6. Story: 

• The villain in sticky stories is knowledge. 
• All happy families resemble one another, but very unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Don’t bury the lead

• Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in order to entertain the audience, instead work to make the core message itself more interesting 
• Generative metaphors: disneys employees are cast members vs sandwhich artists

Chapter 2: Unexpected

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

-there is no formula to get through the hard things, and there is no formula for success.

-leadership is the ability to get people to follow you even if out of curiosity

-by doing “everything” you lose the most important things

-you need two types of friends: one to celebrate the good, and one to call when things go bad.

-during weekly business meetings, find out what “you are not currently doing” rather than in what you are Doing that you could do better.

-nobody takes the loss harder than the person responsible. If there is a problem don’t hide and 

1)get as many brains on the problem as possible 

2) -if employees fundamentally trust the CEO, than communication becomes more efficient – less communication is needed to explain things.

3) good news travels slow, bad news travels fast in a bad culture 

-bad politics is people trying to gain advancement outside merit

-the mean on the test of a CEO is 22

-two core skills for running an organization

1) knowing what to do

2) getting the company to do what you know

-biggest misconception of successful CEOs is they are ruthless and callous… Not true because first job of CEO is to get great people to work for them

-shit sandwhich: good, bad, good

“A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.”

What you do is who you are by Ben Horowitz

• Obviously good ideas are not truly innovative and truly innovative ideas often look like really bad ideas when they are first introduced. 
• Virtues are what you do, values are what you believe. 
• Who you are is what people say about you when you are not around. 
• In the 1600s, over half the world’s population was enslaved. 
• Touissant defeated Spain, france led by Napoleon, and England with just a slave army. 
• If a rule begs the question “why” some people in the company the answer will stand out in always be remembered
• Napoleon suffered more losses deaths at Saint domingue to louverutre than at Waterloo. 
• One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are
• Rules for writing culture rules 
  • It must raise the question “why”?
  • Must be memorable
  • Must encounter rule daily 
• Walking the talk is the most important part of creating a culture. 
• Samurai: always thought about death. Bathed with wooden sword to remember impending death. Dressed and bathed nicely so they would die looking good. 
• Samurai had a culture of empathy and politeness. Japanese friend takes off his hat if you don’t have one
• Nothing signifies the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it 
• Culture travels

Biz Dev 3.0 Changing Business As We Know It by Brad Keywell

• Biz dev is a fantastic equalizer. When small companies and start-ups forge meaningful, market specific alliances and partnerships with larger companies, the competition is suddenly faced with a serious threat
• Biz dev is the agility that all small and young companies need to embrace in order to become giant killers
• Don’t replace the salesperson-rather glorify him. Make the salesperson a resource to an entire portfolio of value-added 
• Small companies using biz dev don’t grab market share fast because they actually were big but because they acted big
• Touch-and-go biz dev is about where you’re goin, not where you’ve come from
• The great strength of biz dev is not that it levels the playing field but that it RECREATES the playing field so that each player is positioned to play to his strength

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff

• Pitch based not on how you try but on the method 
• Presenter’s Problem: it’s not about procedure but about keeping attention
• Pitching is NOT a natural talent
• The better you are at keeping attention, the better the pitch
• Our brains are hard wired to be bad at pitching because we want to protect ourselves from unknown situations
• Pitches sent from higher part of brain but received by by clients by their lower part of brain that is less smart
• Goals of pitch should be: 

1. Should not be threatening or seen dangerous (DISAGREE)

STRONG METHOD

Set the Frame

Tell the story

Reveal the intrigue

Offer the prize

Nail the hook point

Get the deal

• Two “frames” meet in every human interaction 
• Most common frame: “power frame”
• If they don’t show, tell them next meeting they come to you 

Let’s Get Real Or Lets Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig

• Helping clients succeed is the essence of sales 
• Sales is often perceived as doing something to somebody versus with somebody 
• a client will assign an “intent” to you whether you like it or not. Know your intent by creating an intent statement 
• world class inquiry precede world class advocacy      
• mutual exploration with the client to the true resolution of their needs is the best

Three traditional approaches to interacting with clients:

1. We tell

    – We tilt away from inquiry and towards advocacy. Can make us irrelevant and not in alignment with the client.

2. We accept

    – Client tells us what they want, and we propose to give it to them

      – The client could be wrong, we’re not adding value

3. We guess

    – We guess and assume alignment, which isn’t true alignment

4th approach: Mutual Exploration

– Mutually qualify, with the client, if this is an opportunity worth both of our time

Qualifying

-the process of mutual exploration and mutual understanding 

-when there is value and trust, information flows freely 

• Language: ask clients what the buzzwords mean to them. “We’ve found ERP can mean different things to different people. What does it mean to you with what you are trying to achieve?”
• Yellow lights: things that happen telling you to slow down with the deal
• Client requests a feature you don’t provide 
• Client glancing at their watch 
• Stricturing the conversation:

1. Move off the solution
2. Gather evidence and impact 

• the sooner the client gives us something monetarily to measure, the closer we get to the sale. 

Five golden questions for measurement: 

1. How do you measure it ?
2. What is it now?
3. what would you like it to be?
4. whats the value of the difference?
5. whats the value over time?

Finding evidence for soft issues:

-“how” and “what” questions help us get there. Example questions:

• How does “x” show up as a problem?
• how did you or the company become convinced that “x” is a problem?
• If we did management by walking around, how would someone demonstrate that “x” is a problem?
• When you can’t do “x”, how does that negatively impact your business?
• what let’s you know that “x” is a problem?
• what KPIs go up and down when “x” is happening?
• when you can’t do “x”, what happens?

questions for results evidence:

• How would you and others know you were successful?
• how will we prove success?
• what would let you know we were successful?
• what would be your lunch list for success?
• If you were successful, what would you be able to do that you can’t do today?

-getting to the heart of the matter by questioning is for the client’s benefit, not just for you. 

Qualifying Chapter 2

• Even if the person were selling to doesn’t need the business impact, someone else will
• move off the solution

Talking about money:

• Must never be at the presentation of the proposal

Match and Lead

• If you don’t have the ability to meet someone where they are, you don’t have the right to lead them somewhere else

Time:

• The time you spend talking to clients used skillfully is the single biggest differentiator in making the sale. Whoever gains and uses that time skillfully wins. 

The Buyer’s Options:

• Often, doing nothing or doing it themselves is an option. If they are options, talk about them. Treat it like a competitor. 

Winning: The Art of Enabling Decisions

1. Don’t Present Until You are Ready to Present

• present quality over quantity 
• the goal should be to have everyone at the presentation that will be making the decision
• Pesent in order to enable a decision 
• present in person
• in order to set an in-person requirements: 
• We understand what the client is trying to accomplish 
• what resources are available (budget)
• how the client will make the decision 

Elements to a Good Meeting:

1. End in Mind: what do we want the client to say or do by the end of the meeting? 
2. key beliefs: what will the client need to believe to comfortably decide what end you have in mind? 
3. Proof or Action: what proof or action will we provide in order to support the key beliefs?
4. Questions: what would we most like to know from the client? What questions are they most likely to ask us?
5. Yellow Lights: What reasons might the client have for deciding or not deciding in our favor?

• never do something for nothing

• Next Steps: What next steps if any should we be prepared to offer?
• What is a Consice agenda that integrates all of these ideas?

Six Approaches for Solving Yellow Lights:

1. Facts and data: 
2. 3rd Party Stories: I know you’re situation is unique, you may not find this helpful
3. Logic: 
4. Analogies: 
5. Metaphors and Stories: 

• take the most frequent objections you face and create stories and metaphors for them. 
• Reframing perceptions: 

“Studies have shown that profitability is most affected by account retention, account expansion, and being the primary provider of services in an account. To ensure that we get benefits from helping our client succeed over the long term, consider the following:

– ensure a smooth transition from sales to delivery

– measure results

– establish an account management strategy” (p. 167-168)

“If we don’t treat current clients like prospective clients, they will become former clients” (p. 168)

Initiating New Opportunities (Get people to call us)

1. Prioritize: do fewer and do them better. 

• Invest 95% of your time into 5 prospect/opportunities. 
• Prepare: Do in-depth knowledge of the company and the people you will call on in order to prepare client-oriented communications.
• Interview yourself on your prospect: what key business problems would have to happen before your prospect would be EXCITED about your solution?

• Personalize: No cold-calls. Get a referral to the person you want to see.
• Practice: Rehearse what you will say and how you will say it. Rehearse your response to potential questions and yellow lights. 
• Preposition: Get agreement in advance for what will be a good use of time. 

Example Agenda For New Logo Meeting:

Meeting Purpose: To decide if a revenue transaction analysis makes sense or not

Agenda:

1. Is there something worth finding? 
2. Is the necessary investment of time appropriate and feasible?
3. Do the economics make sense?
4. Decide: should we conduct this revenue analysis or not?

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

-It’s the boring stuff that matters most.

-Entrepreneurship is management

-build measure learn: fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products and get customer feedback

-entrepreneurial management: 

-a startup is: a human institution designed to create a product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty 

-anything customers experience in interaction with a company is part of the  “product” 

-cultivating entrepreneurship is the responsibility of senior leadership 

-big companies can hold themselves accountable innovation strategy: 1) number of new customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago 2) percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago

-validated learning: demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a teams present and future prospects

-minimum viable products (mvp): until you know the customer, you cannot know value

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt

• Knowledge workers: by peter drucker: this approach focuses on “management skills” not “technical skills”. 
• New workers are the “smart creative” combining business and technical expertise
• Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and startups 
• Hippo: highest paid persons opinion Versus meritocracy 
• Obligation to descent disagree 
• Say “yes” as much as you can – it helps us learn and grow 
• When you have low barriers for a customer to leave then you have to win on merit
• Hiring is the most important thing you do

Radical Candor by Kim Scott

• Guidance, team, and results are the responsibilities of any boss. 
• Your relationship with your direct reports affect the relationship of their direct reports. 
•  Candor, not honesty, because more humility in thinking you may not know the truth. 

Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives Sales by Samantha Stone

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

-it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. 

-Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as if the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

Thank you economy by Gary Vaynerchuck

-thank you economy with your customers is essential, not important

-social media created a “word of mouth” economy. Engage with your customers

-Be a service above being a merchant

-what ROI is there to being kind and generous to customers? NONE

-if there is an ROI in friends and family, then there is an ROI in social media

-speed kills – changes in NFL

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

• Multipliers create collective, vital intelligence in teams
• Bad leaders have ideas only flow from themselves to others
• Manager #1: Midas touch – feel smart working for him. Typically only spoke 10% of time during team meetings
• Manager #2: idea killer – very smart but killed other ideas. 
• What you know doesn’t matter. What matters is how much access you have to what other people know.
• Diminishers tell people what to do, multipliers challenge people

The 5 Disciplines of a Multiplier

1. Attract and optimize talent: people want to work with multipliers because they know they will grow. 
2. Create intensity that requires best thinking: create a motivating environment and remove fear that allows for best thinking. Diminishers is tyrant, multiplier is liberator
3. Extend challenges: lays challenges and a belief that they Can achieve it.
4. Debate decisions: drives sound decisions by driving good debate.
5. Instill ownership and accountability: diminishers are micromanagers, multipliers are investors

Messages you will hear in this book

1. Diminishers underutilize people and leave resources on the table
2. Multipliers increase intelligence in people and in organizations  
3. Mulitipliers leverage their resources

How does a talent-magnet release talent into their organization?

1. Look for talent everywhere: genius comes in many forms, not just IQ or a single test. They ignore organizational boundaries!
2. Find peoples native genius: sometimes people don’t recognize it their genius. 
3. Utilize people at their fullest: 
4. Remove the blockers 

Mindset

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely

• Dishonesty is not based on a “cost-benefit analysis”
• Getting caught isn’t what keeps us from cheating 
• Our sense of morality is connected to the level of cheating we are comfortable with.

Key Idea: We cheat up to the level we are comfortable with to retain our self-image of reasonably honest individuals. 

“Morality means drawing the line somewhere” -Oscar Wilde

US OPEN: “you might as well praise me for not robbing banks.” -golfer who took stroke 

-We are always influenced by the areas where we have a financial stake.

Joy At Work by Dennis Bakke

-the principles and purposes that I espouse are meant to be ends in and of themselves, not techniques to create value for shareholders or to reach other financial goals.

-Joy at work gives people the freedom to use heir talents and skills for the benefit of society, without being crushed or controlled by autocratic supervisors or staff offices

-fairness or justice means treating everyone differently

-values and principles mean something only when they affect everything we do, every day of the week

-the person in control of the moment has more fun than people who are less likely to affect the outcome

-joy at work starts with individual initiative and individual control. Individuals not a bureaucracy make the decisions and hold themselves accountable

-I believe that leaders have three main roles. They are responsible for interpreting the organizations shared values and principles. They are senior advisers to everyone in the organization. And they are the collective conscience, pushing the organization to reach its goals and live up to its ideals.

Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success by John Wooden and Jay Carty

• All success is bound up in how we relate to one anothr and God 
• Thou didst thy best, that is success
• There is no end to a “win at all costs” approach and we will lose our peace of mind
• Industriousness: 1) work and 2) planning
• Work as if working for the Lord (Ephesians 6:7 also 1 Cor 10:31)
• “Lord teach me to work for you and not other people”
• Planning: “planning places effort where  effort is most needed” – Prov 21:5
• Enthusiasm: an unenthusiastic leader will keep those under them from achieving their best 
• Do not be slothful but be fervent in spirit (Romans 12:11)
• Friendship: must not be taken for granted. 
• If success in other’s eyes is more important than your own eyes, your reputation will be fine but your character will be off
• Cooperation: listen if you want to heard
• Loyalty: keep your self-respect
• 2 Sam 11:2-13 (Uriah’s loyalty)
• God demands “old school” loyalty of us
• Self-control: Good judgement and common sense are essential. Keep emotions under control
• Knowing God leads to patient endurance. Patient endurance leads to godliness (2 Peter 1:5-11)
• Alertness: Be observing constantly. You don’t know anything you didn’t learn from somebody else
• Don’t have tunnel-vision but always search for truth. 
• Gideon’s men were staying alert. That’s why God chose them. 
• (1 Peter 5:8)
• Initiative: cultivate the ability to make decisions and think alone. Do not be afraid of failure but learn from it.
• The team that makes the most mistakes will probably win. 
• Jesus faced fear so much he actually sweat blood. 
• Intentness: Set a realistic goal. Concentrate on its achievement and be persistent. 
• The ability to resist temptation and stay the course. 
• Condition: physical, mental, and spiritual 
• Conditioning produces confidence. 
• Skill: a knowledge of and ability to execute the fundamentals. 
• Proverbs 22:29
• Team Spirit: Genuine care for others
• Eagerness to self sacrifice for better of the team
• Poise: just being yourself in any situation
• Confidence: Respect without fear 

Atomic Habits by James Clear

• It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you in the path toward success. 
• You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results 

Chapter 2

• Identity-based habits versus “outcome based habits” start by focusing on who we wish to become rather than what we want to achieve 
• It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this 
• The biggest barrier to positive change at any level — individual, team, society — is identity conflict. 

Chapter 3

• “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
• All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem 
• Four Laws of Behavior a change 
  • Make it obvious
  • Make it attractive 
  • Make it easy
  • Make it satisfying 

The First Law: Make it Obvious

• The human brain is a prediction machine 
• Your ability to notice the relevant cues in a given situation is the foundation for every habit you have.
• Many of our failures in performance are largely attributed to a lack of self-awareness
• People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. 
• Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. 

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

-high achievers have grit defined by two things: 1) unusual resilience and hard work and 2) knowledge in a deep way of what they want (Determination and direction)

Mindset: the Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Statements that test if you have growth mindset:

1. Your intelligence is something very basic about you that c annoy be changed.
2. You can learn new things but you can’t really change how intelligent you are
3. No matter how much intelligence you have you can always change it quite abit
4. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are

• Is success about learning or proving you’re smart!?
• People with growth mindset cope with setbacks with “determination”. 

Characteristics of a hero:

1. The loss
2. Vulnerability near defeat
3. Comeback
4. Final triumph

Accidental Executive: Lessons on Business, Faith, and Calling from the Life of Joseph by Albert Erisman

• While Joseph was in prison he did two things. First, he worked hard and honorably. He was appointed to be in charge of all of the other prisoners and was completely trusted by the jailer. Second, even while he did this, he never missed an opportunity to send a message out of lesion stating that he was there because he was falsely accused, and he wanted out
• First phase: worked at the bottom. Slave and prisoner
• Second phase: he saved civilization from starvation, enabling the wo e to survive a great famine in Egypt. In, short, he created a strategy for global business that had an impact on the world; not unlike what Microsoft or Boeing has done today
• Three levels of insight from Joseph

1. Mora questions related to our work.
2. Technical aspects of business: leadership, planning, execution, and globalization
3. Insights into big questions in business: finding a career, seeing meaning in our work, and building the bridge between our faith and our work.

Chapter 3

• Pittron’s view of business: I am not an arbitrator, a mediator, or a negotiator. I am a peacemaker.
• I tried to put in place anything that would demonstrate to people that they were valued

Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good by Steven Garber

-we are responsible for “love’s sake” for the common good. 

-vocation is integral, not incedental to the Misseo Dei

-to know the world and still love it? That is the most difficult call

-we are more implicated for love’s sake now that we see

-the God who cries

-love as God loves because we see as God sees

-pilgrim in the ruins

-a mind without a heart is nothing

-pedogqgy of silence – Jewish father film 

– we must not just know rightly but do rightly 

-when we are not in relationships that matter, it is impossible for us to see ourselves as responsible to and for others

Naked and Unafraid by Kevin Gerald

• How many ideas are never shared? How many books never get written and published? How many companies are never created? How many potential relationships never get the chance to ignite? How many creative writers, talented artists brilliant influencers and strong leaders are playing it safe rather than risk the rejection, the criticism, or the failure?
• At that low point and for a few years after, it seemed to me that the smart people were the ones who stayed on the window. 
• Things had settled down and I had settled in. I had won some battles as a leader. I had the respect of my critics, and even though we were considering taking on a building project, I was determined to minimize the risk. That’s where we got stuck. It’s where a lot of people get stuck. In the place where you decide to play it safe and not take any risk. 
• Every time you see someone who has experienced unusual level of blessings in their life, you can be sure there was a high price paid in the process. 
• When you play it safe. You pass up the opportunity to have the conversations that could have changed your life and someone else’s. 
• Physical growth is something everyone can see in real time, but internal growth happens in quiet places and becomes visible when opportunity comes and demand is placed on it. 
• Adversity doesn’t just make you strong, it reveals the strength of lack of, that’s already there.
• It’s interesting how when you start to step out, the people closest to you can become your greatest critics. Sometimes people try to destroy you because they recognize your power and don’t want it to exist. It’s not that they don’t see your strength: it’s that they envy your strength. 
• I’m doing great work. I can’t come down. Nehemiah’s response to his critics (Neh 6:2-3)

Rescuing Ambition by Dave Harvey

-we all need ambition

-Jesus said those that didn’t follow him didn’t because they feared the Pharisees. But it wasn’t fear, but instead because of the love they had for the glory of man above the love of the glory of God

-The gospel is God’s glory crucified… Jesus in the cross

-we constantly pursue what we value – it’s what makes us human 

-we grow small trying to be great

– in Christ I no longer live for approval but from approval

Legacy by James Kerr

1. Character
   • Story of successful game
   • all blacks sweeping after themselves.
   • brcause no one looks after the all blacks , the all blacks look after thensekves
   • what is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?
   • performance = capability + behavior
   • issues are centered around one thing “the ability or inability to convert vision into action. Translate vision into simple, ordinary, every day actions. 
   • Interrogative culture
2. Adapt
   • rosd to success: 1) learning phase, 2) growth phase, 3) decline phase 
   • go for the gap
3. purpose
   • What I’m interested in is what gets people up every single day to do something, maybe pay a premium, maybe suffer inconvenience, maybe sacrifice because they’re driven by something else. What is that thing?
   • i have a “dream”, not I have a “plan”

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

• For scientific leader ship give me Scott for swift and efficient travel Emilynson but when you’re in a hopeless situation and there seems no way out, get down in your knees and pray for Shackleton 

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

• No other career allows someone to build himself wealth from poverty.
• True wealth is of the heart, not the purse
• Sales is the loneliest profession in the world
• Wisdom is more to prevent failure then to give success

Scroll #1: I will form good habits and become their slave.

• Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are the unlocked door to failure.
• Only a habit can subdue another habit

Scroll #2: I will greet this day with love in my heart. 

• Love for others. Love for the obstacles. Love for the resistance. 

Scroll #3: I will persist until I succeed.

Scroll #4: I am natures greatest miracle.

• I will accent my differences and hide my similarities. I am proud of my uniqueness. 
• There is value in all rarity. 
• I am here for a purpose, to grow into a mountain.
• I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy. 

Scroll #5: I will live this day as if it were my last

• I will avoid the killers of time. Doubt, procrastination, fear, idleness. 

Scroll #6: today I will be the master of my emotions

• If I feel insignificant, I will remember my goals
• If I enjoy moments of greatness, I will remember moments of shame.

Scroll #7: I will laugh at the world

Scroll #8: today I will increase my value 100 fold

• Set goals 
• I will announce my goals to the world, but never my accomplishments

Scroll #9: my dreams are of no value unless they are followed by action. I will act now.

• Better to act and fail then not act and flounder
• Happiness in truth may not be the fruit plucked by my action, yet without action or fruit will die on the vine.
• I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. I WILL ACT NOW.
• Only action determines my value in the marketplace

Scroll #10: Only for guidance will I pray. 

Work Matters by Tom Nelson

Introduction 

• Pastoral malpractice is impoverishing the congregation in its spiritual formation and gospel mission. 

Neighborly Love

• Is there meaningful work for me to do?
• Compassion needs capacity if we are to care well for our neighbors 
• “The human drive to be self-supporting can be tied to a determination to be productive in order to bless others.” -Dallas Willard ‘The Divine Conspiracy Continued’

Chapter 2

• “The Intern”- Robert Deniro plays retiree who has a big hole in his life and applies for unpaid internship. Theme is engaging our human need to find meaning by both connecting with others and contributing to the world.
• To regard work as a calling is to suggest that we live to work, that our work is of central significance for our person
• Our work is for an audience of one
• When we find value in our work, we transition from a job to a vocation

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

• Don’t follow your passion, let it follow you and be so great they can’t ignore you. 
• Don’t find the right work, but work the right way. 
• Passion takes time 
• Working right trumps finding the right work
• Craftsman mindset: a focus on what value you’re bringing to your job
• Passion Mindset: a focus on what value your job offers you.  
• Problems with passion mindset:

1.  
   1. when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyper-aware of what you don’t like about it. Leading you to chronic unhappiness
   2. Questions about your passion like “who Am I”? “What do I love to do?” – are impossible to answer. Making you unhappy at your work. 

• The tape doesn’t lie – for musicians the product doesn’t lie about how much you worked. Sales = the numbers don’t lie 

Career Capital: the unique skills it takes to get a great job. Traits that define great work. 

• Creativity: 
• Impact:
• Control:

• False: the biggest obstacle to work you love is courage to take the leap

Three disqualified jobs to applying the craftsman mindset

1. Your job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
2. The job focuses on something that is useless or perhaps bad for the world 
3. The job forces you to deal with people you really dislike

Productivity Hack: Keep track of how many hours a day you check email. Limit yourself to a certain amount like 90 minutes. 

• Deliberate practice trumps “practice”: activity designed typically by a teach for the purpose of developing a specific part of the persons performance

How to Deliberate Practice 

1. Decide what capital market you are in
2. Have good goals
3. Deliberate practice should be painful and stretching
4. Embrace honest feedback

Rules:

1. Rule of financial viability: if you make money from it, it shows your skills are rare and needed
2. Think small act big

American Treasures TV Show

When by Daniel Pink

• Never make important decisions in the afternoon

Hidden Pattern of Every Day Life

• Circadian Rythms: 
• what gets scheduled gets done.
• Schedule your breaks prior to the day starting. 

Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero

Chapter 1

• We each left home for college, trying unsuccessfully not to look back
• Your family like mine is also marked by the consequences of the disobedience of our first parents as described in genesis three shame secrets lies by trails relationship breakdowns disappointments and unresolved longings for unconditional love live in in the near of even the most respectable families
• when people have authentic spiritual experiences such as worship prayer Bible studies and fellowship they mistakenly believe they are doing fine even if their relational life is fractured in their interior world is disordered. Their apparent progress then provide spiritual reason for not doing the hard work of maturing
• I have crafted a life for you a yoke for you to wear that perfectly fits who you are it is light and easy I promise
• Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable
• Sadly some of our misguided Christian beliefs and expectations have as Thomas Merton Road nearly dead and our humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly in all its capacities under the influence of grace
• The glory of God is a human being fully alive -Iraneus
• Are ways of relating mirrored much more our family of origin than the way God intended for his new family in Christ
• Self-care is never a selfish act it is simply a good stewardship of the only gift I have the gift I was put on earth to offer others
• The pathway to unleashing the transformative power of Jesus to heal our spiritual lives is found in the joining of emotional health and contemplative spirituality

Chapter 2

• The vast majority of us go to our graves without knowing who we are we unconsciously live someone else’s life or at least someone else’s expectations for us.
• When we deny our pain losses and feelings year after year would become less and less human
• When I begin to allow myself to feel a wider range of emotions including sadness depression fear anger revolution in my spirituality was unleashed
• Allow yourself to experience the full weight of your feelings allow them without censoring them. Then you can reflect and thoughtfully decide what to do with them. Trust God to come to you through them
• Matthew 317. “You are lovable you are good it is so good that you exist”
• Differentiation is the persons capacity to define his or her own life goals and values apart from the pressures of those around them
• The degree to which you were able to affirm your distinct values and balls apart from the pressure is around you separateness will remain in close to people important to you togetherness helps determine your level differentiation.
• I may not agree with you or you with me. Yeah I can remain in relationship with you. I don’t have to detach from you reject you avoid you or criticize you to validate myself. I can be myself apart from you
• In Normas distractions keep us from listening to our feelings. We need to be alone so we can listen
• Christian disciplines of silence, escaping from noise and sounds, and solitude, being alone without human contact.

Chapter 3

• Learning how to pray read scripture participate in small groups worship and use our spiritual gifts are the easy part. Routing out deeply ingrained messages habits and ways of behaving especially under stress proof far more complex and difficult
• The most significant language in the New Testament for becoming a Christian is “adoption into the family of God“
• In gods family success is defined as being faithful to God‘s purpose and plan for your life.
• Discipleship then is working these truths into our practical every day lives
• God had a plan in placing us in our particular families and cultures. And the more we know about our family is the more we know about ourselves and the more freedom we have to make decisions about how we want to live.
• There are daily choices centered around our walks with God that are critical for us to serve as an instrument of blessing to many

Chapter 4

• Journey through the wall. Our great temptation is to quit or go backward but if we remain still listening for his voice God will insert some thing of himself into our character that will mark the rest of our journey with him
• Christians can be notoriously judge mental in the name of standing up for the truth. But people have been through the wall are broken. They have seen as Carl both notes that the root and origin of sin is the arrogance in which man wants to be his own and his neighbors judge.

Chapter 5

• The quickest way to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west chasing after it, but to head east into the darkness until you finally reach the sunrise
• “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him“ remains one of the most radical commands of our day it requires enormous humility

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

• Those who are “inspired” are much more likely to succeed. They act for the good of the whole not themselves
• Lead by design not by default

Unwanted by Jay Stringer

• Addressing sexual struggles through the lens of “abhorrent behavior” intensifies shame and shame drives us deeper into the very behaviors we wish to stop. 
• Another approach: begins by listening to our lust. 
• Sexual brokennnes is a roadmap to our past harm and shows the roadblocks to the freedom we desire. 
• God is not surprised by or ashamed of our sexual behavior. Instead, He understands it to be the very stage to which the work of redemption will be played out inkur lives. 
• Present sin is the doorway to the wider work of the gospel to bring healing to the wounds of the past and comfort, even power, to the difficulties of the present. 
• Erasing shame from sexual intimacy
• Storehouses of entitlement, when we don’t take care of ourselves. 
• There is a sensual world around us if we open our bodies to it. Listen to music with good headphones. Smell good things. Don’t turn to counterfeit sensuality. 
  • Get yoga or gym membership
  • 7.5 hours of sleep
  • But good headphones and great playlist 
  • Take inventory of unhealthy parts of your life. 
  • Put 4-5 things per month that bring you delight. Highlight them on your calendar.
  • Restaurants that have won janes beard awards and bed and breakfast while traveling 
• The mark of healing is not simply the cessation of problematic behavior But rather a life filled with greater passion, contribution and purpose 

Richest Man in Babylon by Dennis Waitley

-A portion of all you make is ours to keep

-budget your expenses that you may have coins to pay your expenses without spending 9/10 your earnings

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

• Leaders must hold others accountable 
• Leaders should never be satisfied
• It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate
• There are no bad teams, only bad leaders

Religion

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Preface (Matthew 11:28)

• Jesus invites all those who “labor and are heaven-laiden”. Lets get away from our human dogmas and to the beauty of Christ 
• The call of Jesus is hard, but his burden is light. 
• Discipleship means joy 

Chapter 1: Costly Grace

• Cheap grace requires no contrition. It is infinite and requires nothing. 
• Costly Grace is the pearl of great price for which he sells everything. It’s the call of Christ that takes us from our fishing nets. It is the door at which we must knock. 
• It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. 
• The religious cloister of Luther was only another form of the world. Only when he went into the world was he truly living like Christ. 
• We must be troubled daily by our sin and daily find forgiveness 
• Costly grace is the only type of real grace. 
• The cost of cheap grace has been more than any order of works
• We must admit we are a church that no longer is following true discipleship, truly following Christ

Chapter 2: The Cost of Discipleship

• In discipleship, the Christian is pulled out of a life of security into a life of absolute insecurity
• It is complete bondage to Christ – Jesus is the only significance. He alone matters
• No man can choose to follow Christ on his own but must be called
• His word is not an abstract doctrine, but the recreation of the whole life of man. 
• Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient, believes. 
• Romans 1:17 (from faith to faith)
• There is only one thing God takes seriously, that it is time to hear and obey. 
• Man’s total godlessness is revealed where men take moral difficulties too seriously and enslaved them because they are not open to the freeing act of obedience. 
• All his activities are sheer disobedience until he obeys. 

Chapter 3: Single-Minded Obedience

• The offer of obedience to Christ is not something we offer to Him, but something he offers to us

Chapter 4: Discipleship and the Cross

• The Christian life is now no more distinguishable than a life of the world. 
• When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. 
• Only a man that is dead to his own will can follow Christ 

Continued Chapters:

• Discipleship means adherence to Jesus Christ alone and immediately 
• Are we bound to Christ or to the Law? Christ says he fulfills the law by dying a sinner’s death on the cross. 

Life together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Community

• Christian community through Christ. 

1. A Christian comes to others only through Jesus christ
2. A Christian needs others because of Jesus christ
3. In Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.

• Alien righteousness 
• The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brothers is sure. 
• The more we received the the more we were able to give and the more meager our brotherly love the less we were living by gods mercy and love
• The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by god by other and by himself
• How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from him the little things?
• Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake spiritual love loves him for christs sake
• Spiritual love knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ. 
• Life together under the word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being part of the one, holy, catholic l, Christian church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole church. 

the Day With Others

• At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind
• A Christian family fellowship should surely be able to read and listen to a chapter of the Old Testament and at least half of a chapter of the New Testament every morning and evening
• God’s Word is to be heard by everyone in his own way and according to the measure of his understanding. 
• Consecutive reading of biblical books forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men.
• But one who will not learn to handle the Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian 
• Where the singing is not to the Lord, it is singing to the honor of the self or the music, and the new song becomes a song to idols.
• It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship. 
• In work the Christian leans to allow himself to be limited by the task, and this for him the work becomes a remedy against indolence and sloth of the flesh. The passions of the flesh die in the world of things. But this can happen only where the Christian breaks through the “it”, which is God, who bids him work and makes that work a means of liberation from himself. 
• It is well that there be a special place for the prayer of brotherly forgiveness in every evening’a devotion, that reconciliation be made and fellowship established anew. 

Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan

Common Prayer by Shane Claiborne

-you can’t be doing well if “we” aren’t doing well.

-the most significant thing in our past is not our most shamed transgressions but  the death and resurrection  of Jesus 

Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

Romans 13:11 – now is the hour for us to rise up.

• Choose to make decisive leap into counter-cultural way of living Christianity or doom our children and children’s children to assimilation.
• Learn habits of the hearts
• Learn to be the church, without compromise. 
• Rule: school for the Lord’s service
• We cannot give the world what we don’t have
• withdrawal isn’t to create heaven on earth but to gain strength.
• The soul has been disturbed, and a monk enters the monestary accepting strict rules because he knows he must fight to achieve that rightness of soul. 
• Politics is no substitute for personal holiness 
• Religious people would be better off creating thriving subcultures then seeking positions of power. Because the common culture does not matter as much as it used to. 
• Christian Christians should focus on creating their spiritual center rather than seeking positions of power as unbelievers have moved to the fringes.
• Christians need to internalize what it means to be in a minority posture
• We have a first amendment right to be wrong
• We must choose between being a good Christian and a good American
• The parallel policy is not about creating gated communities for Christians, But rather about establishing Or reestablishing common practices or reestablishing common practices And institutions that can reverse The fragmentation of contemporary society. 
• The most important political work of our time is the restoration of our inner Order harmonizing with the will of God. 
• “Denying bodily desire for the sake of spiritual growth is a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it.” Wendell Berry
• Rather than seeker friendly, we should be finder friendly. They will come to us. 
• Turn your home into a domestic monastery. 

Kingdom Man by Tony Evans

• Purpose is far greater than pain.
• A kingdom man understands that God never said a godly life would be easy he just said it would be worth it.
• Jesus wants men who will carry out his agenda, governance, and guidelines in a world crisis.
• The kingdom agenda is simply the visible demonstration of the comprehensive rule of God over every area of life.

Fasting by Jentezen Franklin

A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez

Chapter one

• The first two phases of theology are wisdom and rational knowledge
• Theology as wisdom:
  Influenced by platonic and Neoplatonic categories. Greek fathers.
  The spiritual function of theology, so important in the early centuries and later regarded as parenthetical, constitutes, nevertheless,- permanent dimension of theology.
• Theology as rational knowledge
  Albert the great and St Thomas Aquinas
  The essential feature of st Thomas aquinas work is that theology is an intellectual discipline, born of the meeting of faith and reason.
• Theology as critical reflection on praxis
• According to the Bible, faith is the total human response to God, who saves through love.
• This stage can be considered as a transition to Ignatian spirituality, which sought a difficult but fruitful synthesis between contemplation and action: in actions contemplativus (contemplative in action). This process, strengthened in recent years by the search for a spirituality of the laity, culminates today in the studies on the religious value of the profane and in the spirituality of the activity of the Christian in the world.
• They are active loci theologici for the doctrines of grace, the Incarnation, and the redemption, as expressly promulgated and described in their detail by the papal encyclicals. They are poor theologians who, wrapped up in their manuscripts and scholastic disruptions, are not open to these amazing events, not only in the pious term or if their hearts but formally in their science… (p7)
• It must not be forgotten that the signs of the times are not only a call to intellectual analysis. They are above all a call to pastoral activity, commitment, and to service.
• “To do the truth” as the gospel says, thus acquires a precise and concrete meaning in terms of the importance of action in Christian life.
• But the Church has for centuries devoted its attention to formulating truths and meanwhile did almost nothing to better the world. In other words. The Church focused on orthodoxy and left orthopraxis in the hands of nonmembers and nonbelievers.
• Communion with the Lord inescapably means a Christian life centered around a concrete and creative commitment of service to others.
• Theology as critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word does not replace the other functions of theology, such as wisdom and rational knowledge; rather it presupposes and needs them.
• The present in the praxis of liberation, in its deepest dimension, is pregnant with the future.
• But it does not mean doing this from an armchair; rather it means sinking roots where the pulse of history is beating at this moment and illuminating history with the Word of the Lord of history, who irreversibly committed himself to the present moment of humankind to carry it to its fulfillment.

Chapter Two

• The poor countries are not interested in modeling themselves after the rich countries, among other reasons because they are increasingly more convinced that the status of the latter is the fruit of injustice and coercion.
• What is at stake in the South as well as in the North, in the West as well as the East, on the periphery and in the center, is the possibility of enjoying a truly human existence, a free life, a dynamic liberty which is related to history as a conquest. 
• To conceive of history as a process of human liberation is to consider freedoms as a historical conquest… the goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, or a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.
• Populating progressio: building a world where every man, no matter what his race, religion, or nationality, can live a fully human life, freed from servitude imposed on him by other men or by natural forces over which he has not sufficient control.
• The fullness of liberation – a free gift from Christ – is communion with God and with other human beings.

Chapter 3 –  the problem

• In the past, concern for social praxis in theological thought did not sufficiently talk into account the political dimension. 

Chapter 4 – Different Responses

• New Christendom – by Jacques Maritain ‘the task of constructing the human city would consist above all int he search for a society based upon justice, respect for the rights of others, and fellowship.’
• By acting in the sphere of civilization, which means in the temporal order and in history, she fulfills her mission to be the soul of human society. 
• In their temporal endeavors, lay persons will seek to create with others, Christian or not, a more just and more human society. 
• This chapter is really about the move away from the power of priest and towards the power of lay people to make changes in society outside the church for the purpose of its soul.

Chapter 5

• The ‘social problem’ or the ‘social question’ has been discussed in Christian circles for a long time, but it is only in the last few years that people have become clearly aware of the cope of misery and especially of the oppressive and alienating circumstances in which the great majority of humankind exists. 

Chapter 6 – The processes of liberation in Latin America

• after more than half of the decade of the ’60s passed, the gap between the two worlds is growing bigger rather than slowly decreasing as was expected. p.50

chapter 7: The church in the process of liberation

• This hostility led the church to seek the support of the established order and economically powerful groups in order to face its adversaries and a shirt for itself what is believed to be an opportunity to preach the gospel peacefully. P58 speaking about Latin America 
• A unifying theme is a general attitude of the church is the acknowledgment of the solidarity of the church with the Latin American reality. The church avoids placing itself above this reality, but rather attempts to assume it’s responsibility for the injustice which it has supported both by its links with the establish order as well as by its silence regarding the evils this order implies. P63 quote from Peruvian priests 
• A true solution to these problems can come about only within the context of a far reaching transformation of existing structures.
  • Finally the process of liberation requires the active participation of the oppressed… it is the poor who must be the protagonist of their own liberation.

Chapter 8: statement of the question

• Five years ago who would’ve thought that in our continent priest would be murdered, Christians persecuted, priest deported, the Catholic press silenced and attacked, classical promises searched, and so forth? p72
• But the Christian community in Latin America is now living in a post managing.… In short it began to be aware of its own coming of age into take the reins of its own destiny.
• We are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility toward his brothers and toward history. p.81 

Chapter 9: Liberation and Salvation

• Gutierrez is arguing that this life is not a ‘testing ground’ for salvation or trial-run. 
• On salvation… “they reject union with God insofar as they turn away from the building up of the world, do not open themselves to others, and culpably withdraw into themselves.” (Mt 25:31-46
• Salvation – the communion of human beings with God and month themselves- is something which embraces all human reality, transforms it, and leads it to its fullness in Christ. p.85
• Salvation – the communion of human beings with God and among themselves. 
• The salvific action of God underlies all human existence. 
• Creation itself is a saving action. p. 87
• The liberation of Israel is a political action. p.88
• Yahweh liberates the Jewish people politically in order to make them a holy nation. p. 89
• To work, to transform this world, is to become a man and to build the human community; it is also to save. p. 91
• The expression from Ex 3:14 is correctly translated not as “I am who I am”… but rather as “I will be who will be…” God is revealed as a force in our future not as an ahistorical being. p.95
• The self-communication of God points towards the future, and at the same time this Promise and Good News reveal humanity to itself and widen the perspective of its historical commitment here and now. p. 95
• The struggle for justice is also the struggle for the kingdom of God. p.95
• Temporal progress is seen preferably in the dominion of nature by science and technology and in some of the repercussions on the development of human society, there is no radical challenge to the unjust system on which it is based. p. 100
• Christ the liberator: An unjust situation does not happen by chance there is human responsibility behind it. p102
• But in the liberation approach sin is not considered an individual private or merely interior reality. Period. Sin is regarded as a social, historical fact, the absence of fellowship and love in relationships among persons, the breach of friendship with God and with other persons, and, therefore, an interior, personal fracture. 

Chapter 10: encountering God in history

• Since the incarnation, humanity, every human being, history, is the living temple of God. The “profane“ that which is located outside the temple, no longer exists. P110
• From Medellin: “when this social piece does not exist there Will we find social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities, there will we find the rejection of the peace of the Lord and a rejection of the Lord himself
• The neighbor, as has been said, it’s not the one whom I find in my path, but rather the one in whose path I place myself, the one who my approach and actively seek. -Good Samaritan 
• A knowledge of humankind is a prerequisite for the knowledge of God. -Paul VI
• The future of history belongs to the poor and exploited. True liberation will be the work of the oppressed themselves; in them, the Lord saves history. p 120

Chapter 11; eschatology and politics

• The death and resurrection of Jesus are our future, because they are our perilous and hopeful present. p124

Chapter 12: the church- sacrament of history

• The church must cease considering itself as the exclusive place of salvation and orient itself towards a new and radical service of people. P. 144
• In the sacrament the salvific plan is fulfilled and revealed; that is, it is made present among humans and for humans… The sacrament is that the efficacious revelation of the call to communion with God and to the unity of all humankind. P146
• It has been said for this reason that the theology of the church in the world should be complemented by “theology of the world in the church“. P147
• The Eucharist in the gospel of John is washing of the feet
• In a divided world the role of the ecclesial your community is the struggle against the radical causes of social division. If it does so, it will be an authentic and effective sign of unity of the universal love of God. P161

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work by Timothy Keller

Foreward from Tech Exec:

• I started to see my work more as a crucible where God was pounding and grinding and refining me, rather than as a place where I was actively and effectively serving him. p.xvii
• Cheer up: you’re a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope. p.xix

Introduction

• The idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own advancement. p.2
• A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it. p. 2
• If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. p.14
• “Good endeavor” is referring to “Leaf by Niggle” a story by Tolkien about a work that never got done but still had value. 
• Why do you want to work? Why is it so hard to work? How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel? The purpose of the book. p.16

Chapter 1: Design of Work

• Creation, then, is not the aftermath of a battle but the plan of a craftsman. God made the world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist makes a masterpiece. p.20 (God has no rivals. We aren’t competing to bring other people down, but do bring everyone up)
• In the beginning, then, God worked… No God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration. p.21
• If you ask people in nursing homes or hospitals how they are doing, you will often hear that their main regret is that they wish they had something to do, some way to be useful to others. p. 24
• You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. 
• Work must regularly give way not just to work stoppage for bodily repair but also to joyful reception of the world and of ordinary life. 

Chapter 2: 

• Work of all kinds, whether with the hands or the mind, evidences our dignity as human beings – because it reflects the image of God the Creator in us… Only man is set apart and given a job description (in creation). p.35
• Work has dignity because it has something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his representatives. P.36
• For Christians even our ultimate future is a physical one. p.39
• No other religion envision matter and spirit living together in integrity forever. P.39
• And every Christian should be able to identify, with conviction and satisfaction, the ways in which his or her work participates with God in his creativity and cultivation. p.41

Chapter 3

• God does not want merely more individuals of the human species; he also wants the world to be filled with the Humane Society. p.44
• God owns the world, but he has put it under our care to cultivate it. p.45
• God made the world to need work. He made it such that even he had to do work for it to become what he designed it to be, to bring forth all it’s riches and potential. p.46
• And that is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw material of gods creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish. p.47

Chapter 4

• Vocation: A contribution to the good of all and not… A means to one’s own advancement. P.55
• How, with my existing abilities and opportunities, can I be your greatest service to other people, knowing what I do of God’s will and a human need? p.57
• The masks through which God cares for us, but so are the most basic social roles and tasks, such as voting, participating in public institutions, and being a father or mother. p61
• Why should I not there for free Lee, joyfully, with all my heart, and with an eager will… Give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me… Since your face I have an abundance of all good things in Christ?  p63
• Our gospel trained eyes can see the World ablaze with the glory of God‘s work to the people he has created and called in everything from the simplest actions, such as milking a cow, to the most brilliant artistic or historic achievements. P64
• Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others. p65
• The difference between a wilderness and a culture is simply, work. p66
• The church is approach to an intelligent Carpenter is usually can find to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly and his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. With the church should be telling him is this: but the very first demand that his religion makes  on him is that he should make good tables. p67
• But if they call the Christians to participate in gods ongoing creative process, the bedrock of our ministry Hass to be competency.

Chapter 5

• As a sailboat is designed for the water, such that if it runs around it is damaged and useless, we human beings run a ground when we choose to be our own source of authority. p77
• From the moment of the fall, human kind of suffered from moral schizophrenia: neither able to deny sinfulness north to acknowledge for it for what it is. p80
• “ in language after language the same word is used for toil in childbearing e.g. labor and travel.“ p81
• Yeah now he learned at work becomes, understand, painful toil. p82
• Our deepest aspirations in work will come to complete fruition in gods future. p89

Chapter 6

• While many workers are frustrated by unconsummated skills and unfulfilled aspirations, many others experience no satisfaction or fulfillment in their work even when they have realized their aspirations and become successful. p91
• If we base our lives and work and cheese in it, I love and pleasure, or on knowledge and learning, resistance becomes anxious and fragile. p93
• The author of Ecclesiastes is consciously contrasting us with the God who is labor lead to real rest, and unconsciously with the Savior who could even sleep through a storm. p98
• Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheet, more Dostoyevsky, and the book of Job. P102
• The business of the worker is to serve the work. p105
• Without the gospel of Jesus, we will have to toil not for the joy of serving others, nor the satisfaction of a job well done, but to make a name for ourselves. p107

Chapter 7

• Work instead becomes a way to distinguish myself from my neighbor, to show the world and prove to myself that I’m special. p109
• We either get our name – our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness – from what God has done for us and in us revelation 2:17, or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves. P110
• The two things we all want so desperately – glory and relationship – can coexist only with God. P111
• we say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or clever, or better looking than others. P112
• our acceptance of our own brokenness – and the world – keeps us going back to God to remember what we cannot do on our own. p113
• She becomes a person of greatness not by trying to make a name for herself; and you will become a person of greatness not by trying to make yourself into one, but by serving the one who has said his father for your sake they will be done. p124

Chapter 8

• He defined idolatry is looking to some creative thing to give you only what God can give you. p128
• When we fail to believe that God excepts us fully in Christ, and to look some other way to justify or prove ourselves, we commit idolatry. p129
• Technology, uncertainty, and the market and become the idols of a post modern society. p144
• If something can be done through technology, it will be done, because our technology has new hire our ideals or moral values to guided or limited. p144
• Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines a happy life as a life that is “going well“ – full of experiential pleasure – lots of the agents, happy life meant the life that has lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice. p147
• Final points :
  • Gospel offers alternative story line for work which is partnering with God and his love and care for the world. ALL work.
  • Gospel gives us a new moral compass for work
  • Gospel radically changes our motives for work and fills us with a new and durable inner power I will be with us through thick and thin.

Chapter 9

• As far as I can tell, the Bible is unique in its rejection of all attempts to either demonize some part of creation as the root of our problems or to idolize some part of creation as the solution. p160
• Look again at the uniqueness of Christianity. Only the Christian worldview locates the problem with the world not in any part of the world or in any particular group of people but in sin itself (our loss of relationship with God). p161
• The whole world is going to be redeemed. Jesus is going to redeem spirit and body, reason and emotion, people and nature. There is no part of reality for which there is no hope. p.162
• The gospel is the true story that God made a good world that was marred by sin and evil, but through Jesus Christ he redeemed it at infinite cost to himself, so that someday he will return to renew all creaiton; end all suffering and death; and restore absolute peace, justice, and joy in the world forever. p. 162
• The gospel of business: sin runs through the heart of every worker and the culture of every enterprise. The result is polluted rivers, poor service, unjust compensation, entitlement attitudes, dead-end jobs, dehumanizing bureaucracy, backstabbing, and power grabs. p167
• Yet one of the things less senior employees can do is ask quesitons about the company’s mission and, if it is a sound one, treat it seriously and help keep it in the conversation. p168
• Your care and commitment to those values, assuming they are good ones, could be just the encouragement your boss needs. p168
• Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines, and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. p181
• Great questions to ask about your industry and job. p.182

Chapter 10

• For without an understanding of grace we will believe we must (and can) earn our salvation. p196
• If we have a thin view of sin, we will feel safe if we remove from our view anything that could tempt us to commit actions of overt sexual immorality, profanity, dishonesty, or violence. p196
• A theologically “thick” view of sin, by contrast, sees it as a compulsive drive of the heart to produce idols. This view should lead neither to withdrawal nor to uncritical consumption, but rather to humble, critical engagement with culture. p197
• The integration of faith and work is the opposite of dualism. We should be willing to be very engaged with the cultural and vocational worlds of non-Christians. p201
• Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them and non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them. p201

Chapter 11

• And he realized that to work for the money instead of the value that the work itself might contribute would damage the culture of the company he was joining. ,p208
• At the end of your life, will you wish that you had plunged more of your time, passion, and skills into workk environments and work products that helped people to give and receive more love? p211
• Christianity held that all human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have an inviolable right to be treated with honor and love, regardless of whether they culturally, morally, and personally appeal to or offend us. p213
• Because they have an unimaginable reward in Christ, their work does not have to be unduly tied to the amount of reward that they get from their masters. p220
• How Christians are to work: p221
  • Work is to be done with all your heart and might, as skillfully as you can, and it should feel not like a burden, but a privilege. 
  • We do not work hard only when being watched; nor do we do only what is necessary to get by. 
  • Look to an audience of one, our loving Heavenly Father, and that gives us both accountability and joy in our work
• How Christians are to be known: p224
  • Christians should be known not to be ruthless
  • Christians should be known to be generous. 
  • Christians should be also known to be calm and poised in the face of difficulty or failure. 
    • Only if Jesus is your treasure are you truly rich, for he is the only currency that cannot be devalued. And only if he is your Savior are you truly successful, for status with him is the only status that can’t be lost. 
  • Christians should not be seen as sectarian. 
• Christians are to think persistently and deeply about the shape of work in their field and whether (in biblical terms) it accords as well as possible with human well-being and with justice. p232

Chapter 12

• He set himself apart for the goal of our salvation. 
• When you realize what he has done to rescue you, your price and envy begin to disappear because you don’t need to get your self-worth from being richer, cooler, more powerful, or more comfortable than other people. 241
• Chariots of fire: “When I run, I feel his pleasure” He ran for the joy of running itself, and to delight the one who gave him the gifts to do so. 

Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas

-George Whitfields revolution of grace through Christ people received as if something they knew all their lives but had forgotten

-his conversion was slow over time

-all we have time, wealth, talents were given to us for use for God

You are what you love: the spiritual power of habit by James KA Smith

Chapter 1:

-“what do you want?” Is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want.

-discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than knowing and believing

-Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves

-it’s not that I know in order to love, but rather: I love in order to know.

-“you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”

-you can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. And you are what you love.

-you are what you love because you live toward what you want

-to be human is to be a lover and to love something ultimate. (Journey)

-the more virtuous someone is – that is, the more they have an internal disposition to the good that bubbles up from their very character – the less they need external force of the law to compel them to do what they ought

-learning virtue is more like practicing scales on the piano than learning music theory.

-how do we acquire virtue?

1. Imitation: this is part of the formative power of our teachers who model the Christian life for us
2. Practice: 

-if you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit

-kung fu panda dragon warrior 

-these (rituals) aren’t just things we do; they do something to us

-rival liturgies orient us to rival versions of their good life 

-learning to love God takes practice 

Week 1 Questions:

• What do you want to get out of small group? What is the goal of discipleship?
• How do I acquire such virtues?
• What liturgies can we put in our lives today? When negative liturgies do you see in your life today?

Chapter 2

• Sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do
• Your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits 
• The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do
• Cultural practices are liturgies. They aren’t just things we do but things that do something to us
• As lovers-as desiring creatures and liturgical animals-our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral
• Our loves and imaginations are conscripted by all sorts of liturgies that are loaded with a vision of the good life 
• The point of apacolyptic literature is not prediction but unveiling the realities around us for what they really are
• Consumption rather than confession
• Advertising is all about “that’s not me message”? WRONG
• When you see something like the mall through a liturgical lens, you begin to see things differently. You begin to sense how the mall is a formative space, covertly shaping our loves and longings 

Chapter 3

• Our hungers are learned through certain practices
• Steps for rehabilitation: 1) pledge yourself to be part of a covental community 2) commit yourself to practices you do not like to do (exercises and habits birth new desires)
• Our loves are habits and desires 
• Teaching children is one of the most important activities in the body of Christ because we are forming their habits
• Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Colossians 3:12-16)
• The liturgy as the reformers understood is based on God acting and us responding. 
• Worship is not something we do, it’s something God does to us

Chapter 4 What story are you in?

• Christian worship liturgies needs touch the heart AND The body
• Consumerist chief end of man? To acquire stuff with the allusion that I can enjoy it forever
• Jesus Christ is the end to which we are called. The embodiment of what we should become 
• Where ship is a ritual reminding us of the primacy and sovereignty of God not worshiping our self
• Confession is not something we ought to do but something we get to do

Chapter 5 guard your heart (the liturgies of home)

• We are loved into loving
• God meets us in the son became flesh
• The real sin of marriage today is not adultery but an idolization of the family itself 
• The view that family is “happy” versus crucifixion is bad 
• Children are a gift to marriage: an invitation to put on virtues like: gratitude, humility, steadfastness. 
•  CHow can the home be a place to “recalibrate” our households? What is the “hum” of our home? 
• Tune your homes to sing grace
• What vision of the good life does your homes daily habits portray?

Chapter 8 you Make What You Want: Vocational Liturgies

• This isn’t just “nature”, this is “creation” (created by our Heavenly Father)
• That is why “everything” matters
• The “image of God” is a tasK. We need to “unfold” God’s purpose in creation
• Creation is good but not complete 
• We are made to be makers. 
• We cannot be renewing the world if we are constantly reinventing the church
• Vocations should be ways we pursue God Himself

Biography

The Fire Next Time by james Baldwin

• You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. 
• I know your countrymen do not agreee with me about this, and I hear them saying “you exaggerate”. They do not know Harlem and I do. 
• If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you could go. 
• Please try to be cleared dear James. Through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. 
• Well, the black man has functioned in the white mans world as a fixed star, and an immovable pillar; and he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
• And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. 
• Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably would want to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. 
• White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them – sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their grave and sexless little voices. 
• Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and if destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue. 

Francis: Life and Revolution. A biography of Jorge Bergoglio

Preface: 

• When the Risen Christ appears to the Apostles, the first thing he does is show them his wounds, those wounds that he carries with him when he returns to the right hand of the father. 
• The Holy Father views morality in the context of an encounter with Christ that is “triggered by mercy; “the priveleged locus of the encouter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on our sins, and thus a new morality – a correspondence to mercy – is born.” 
• Pope Francis’ clarity of vision and confidence is shown in his decision to celebrate the Holy Thursday Mass during the first two years of his pontificate outside the traditional Rome basilica. residential rehabilitation centerRome prison for juvenile offenders. 
• Evangelii Gaudium: “sometimes we lose our enthusiasm for mission because we forget that the Gospel responds to our deepest needs, since we were created for what the Gospel offers us: friendship with Jesus and love of our brothers and sisters.”

Chapters 

• Jorge decided to leave the seminary at villa devoto and become a Jesuit: he was determined to become a missionary
• Resources
  • The Jesuit – Pope Francis conversations with Jorge Bergoglio his life in his own words 
  • Meditaciones para religiosas
• Ada Falcón singer that became nun, interesting story
• Jesuit’s were expulsion from the americas in 1767
• Bergoglio dreamed of being a missionary in distant lands. 1965
• The initial Jesuit reaction to Jorge Bergoglio becoming Pope was very negative because of claims he hurt jesuits in Argentina during reign of Perón
• 1968 Latin American episcopal conference meeting in Medellin was very influential at this time, “the church at the present time of transformation in the light of the council” declared a preferential option for the poor. Formation of “grassroots communities” in which the poor could be taught to read the Bible, with the aim of freeing the people from the “institutionalized violence“ of poverty and letting them know that poverty and hunger could be avoided, that they are not the will of God.
• Father Lucio Gera was influential on pope Francis 
• Bergoglio has charisma which concentrates the will, that is a gift – Ernesto giobando
• April 22 1973 renews his vows of chastity poverty obedience and obedience to holy father 
• Bergoglio saved the society of Jesus – when first joined order 400 members and vocations. Then 1973 only 166 priests 32 brothers and 20 novices left. 
• Mindset on leadership: “ you see, Dr., the only pastoral charge I understand is face-to-face, I don’t believe in those utopian Depersonalizing and dehumanizing schemes.
• Greet people when you go up, because you will meet them again when you come down (one of Jorge Bergoglio mentors said this)
• Bergoglio greatly admired theologian Romano guardini 
• Bergoglio decided that the jesuits should leave the university in the hands of laymen so that they (the jesuits) could go and work with ordinary people, returning to the poor districts. 

The Fish That Ate The Whale by Rich Cohen

-Amazing read. This man was absolutely fascinating entrepreneur that sold United Fruit company and came back to take it over to make it even more successful. 

An Empire of wealth: the epic history of American economic power by john Steele Gordon

• Rome conquered the known world by force of arms. And every Great Power since has exercised formal political hegemony over alien peoples to advance its own interests… the United States, however, has always been, at most, a reuctanr imperialist… Today the United States possesses only 6 percent of the worlds land area and 6 percent of its people- virtually all of whom regard themselves as American and speak English… the reason is the American economy. 
• The internet, the most powerful means of communication ever devised, is largely an American invention, and English is the language of more than 80 percent of four billion web sites now in existence 
• Until the second half of the twentieth century, North America was largely immune from foreign attack, and the hand of the government (and thus the tax man) lay very lightly indeed upon it for most of that time 
• Puritans wrote on their ledgers, “in the name of God and profit”
• Cod never dominated the New England economy the way tobacco did Virginia’s 
• America is the most mobile society on earth 
• South Carolina senator in 1850 “you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make was upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered.”
• It was commerce, not migration… that spurred road developments after the Revolution. 
• The steam engine is not more important to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind 
• In 1900 the largest single category of employment tasked but the us census would still be domestic service 
• On resource depletion: in 1820 Michigan was nearly uninhabited by Europeans. By 1897 it had shipped 160 billion board feet of white pine lumber, leaving less than 6 billion still standing. 
• The business of wall street – the trading of securities – was greatly increased by civil war. 
• Commodore Vanderbuilt’s business model 
  1. Run the most efficient, lowest-cost organization possible 
  2. Compete fiercely by means of price until the opposition is either broke and can be bought out or pays you to stop competing
  3. Love up to your agreements 
• It is simply a myth that monopolies will raise their prices once they have the power to do so. Monopolies, like everyone else, want to maximize their profits, not their prices. 
• What makes monopolies (and most of them today are government agencies, from motor vehicles bureaus to public schools) so economically evil is the fact that, without competitive pressure, they become highly risk-averse- and therefore shy away from innovation-and notably indifferent to their customers’ convenience. 
• Nothing has so consistently characterized the American economy throughout its history as the tendency of new fortunes to supplant old ones. 
• When the income tax was instated, 7 northeastern states, which collectively paid about 70 percent of the income tax, votes 61-14 to eliminate the tax, while fourteen southern and western states, which paid only eleven percent of the tax, voted 5-61 to retain it. In other words, support for the income tax was almost perfectly inversely correlated with its local impact. 
• As with any new technology, Edison had to devise solutions on the fly to endless problems that had not been though of until they arose. One problem was that if there was a leakage of current under the pavement, horses would conduct it through their shoes and panic. Many of Edison’s on-the-fly solutions were patentable, and he applied for no fewer than 102 patents in 1882, the most in any one year l, as he was building his system. 

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

-humanities can help to better breakthroughs in mathematics 

To Shake The Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins

• On goals and dreams: each of us has a mash-up if talents and experiences and potential that plants something in us, and becomes a dream. A dream of being creative, or an executive, or a father. A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a him, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a death, and it doesn’t negate the dream. 
• On traveling and purpose: “Harry devert’s Instagram posts and blog had one sustained theme: human beings are lovely and kind. Each story testified to the kindness of strangers, the beauty of travel, the universal goodness of humanity, and the freedom of deciding to ignore fear and trust people.” (P. 163)
• On money and capitalism:  
• On belief: it is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest eas where Walt Whitman has waned every morning before working on leaves of grass, the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies it or damns it. I had decided South America was the land of Indiana Jones adventure and sacred mountains and my spirit-quest revelations. I expected it, and so now biking it. I felt it coming. I felt it promising me everything. 
• On the soul: “thanks to him (Weston), I had come to realize that there were doors and rooms in the house of my mind that had always been there, but had been boarded up. He’s kicked some of those doors open. I had peeked through, broken rules, walked down dark hallways. And the house, even in its misery and darkness, was still my home, and surprisingly still felt like it”

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

• World Exposition impact in the world 
• Frosted wheats, bubble gum, Cracker Jack
• Roman architecture, libraries etc
• Light bulbs at scale

Chaos monkeys by Antonio García Marquez

• The startup is a long, stressful interview for your acquiring company. 
• Facebook is your personal newspaper
• Facebooks culture was never to speak badly about the company and be completely enraptured by the company company. He calls it “corporate fascism”. 
• The company wants you for your experience in a certain industry. Facebook wanted García for adgrock experience. 
• Ad blocking is tantamount to theft 
• The whole point of the ad auction and the bid for your attention is figuring that out. 
• Advertising is the only business model that has worked for all but a few publishers
• Almost nothing you share on Facebook is worth anything in commercial terms
• Facebook doesn’t sell your data it buys it. It does this by providing services to advertisers that incentivize them to let Facebook ingest the data you generated outside Facebook. 
• Why do big companies acquired tiddly little companies? By  Hybridizing their corporate DNA with the pluck in the daring of the entrepreneur they add traits to their culture that are typically found in their recruitment fodder. Smart but obedient engineering grads. 
• We don’t build services to make money, we make money to build services.
• Vesting in peace 

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

-focus investments in one area versus being spread around

-study culture and writings, they will have a deep impact in business dealings because there is a shortage of it. 

Random Reminiscences of Mem and Events by John D Rockefeller

Chapter 1 

on friends in business

• The most successful are typically the most conservative because they have much to lose. Needs to be balanced with the young, risk-takers
• Flagler: Better a relationship founded on business than a business founded on a relationship. 
• Go into business not for money but for association with interesting, quick-minded men
• Vacation often… don’t be just a “diligent business man”

Chapter 2 

• Deal with an employer’s money more careful than your own. 
• Stick to good business principles, you don’t know who may be watching and admire you stuck to your guns
• Pitch: say you don’t wish to interfere with already existing partnerships but wish to see if we can help
• “Now little success, soon you will fall down. Soon you     will be overthrown because you haven’t got a start. you think you are quite a merchant. Look out or you will lose your head. Go steady”

Chapter 3 standard oil company 

• Cooperations are the future versus individual enterprises just as much as technology is the future versus hand labor
• The success of others should inspire us not get us down 
• Real efficiency in work comes from knowing your facts and building on that sure foundation
• A worker is worth his hire and no more. Guaranteed wages are not reality 
• I have been a beggar for Capital all my life

Everything Store by Brad Stone

don’t be worried about your competitors but about your customers

-don’t underestimate how hard it is for established businesses to be nimble and adjust to the market

-network effect: products and services become more valuable with more people using them

-bezos’ preferred managers “athletes” they move fast and get things done

-call in the eye of the storm of public sentiment – Icewater in his veins

-keep a chair open for the customer during negotiations

-that either or mentality that if you are doing something good for a customers then it is bad for shareholders is amateurish 

– rather than focus on the good press Jeff focused on the bad press for inspiration

-in extremely motivated by people counting on me

-bezos uniquely thinks of the long term. Clock project

Sam Walton Made In America by Sam Walton

-I did something I would for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent

-this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price. 

-as good as business was, I never could leave well enough alone, and, in fact, I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Walmart 

-So we would buy huge quantities of something and dramatize it. We would blow it out of there when everybody knew we would have only sold a few had we just left it in the normal store position.

The difference between larry Ellison and God by Mike Wilson

• Are you the smartest person you know? If they answered no, they’d ask who was and hire them. 
• In the 1950s, there was no concept of software being a sellable item. It was bundled in for free in order to sell hardware. When IBM de-paired hardware and software, the software industry was created.
• We all agreed companies tend to pay people for seniority or for being good guys. Ed Oates (fellow oracle co-founder said). They also thought that the people making the significant contributions to products rarely get rewarded very well. 
• In the past most packaged software programs had been written with specific operating systems in mind. Without really setting out to do so, Oracle ended up creating something remarkable: software that could run on more than one kind of computer.
• Ellison has leadership, drive, imagination, determination. The attitude that we can win. That we will win 
• When buying from startups: “we were buying a Wright flyer with the expectation that we would probably have an airline in a few years
• Ellison created an atmosphere where the limits of what you can do are your own 
• Ellison employed “management by ridicule” – he hated mediocrity and a lack of effort
• Kennedy, Vp of sales, established what he called “a commitment culture” at oracle 
• Kennedy cam up with the slogan for competitors “cut off the oxygen”
• Larry’s a pretty alone, cold guy… I’m not sure he could ever get real close to anyone 

Technology

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

• The more our hands could do because we can walk upright, the more concentrated our nerves became in our brains. 
• What makes us different from the apes is the “glue” that holds groups of more than 150 individuals together

The Second Machine Age by Andrew Mcafee

-progress doesn’t run out, it accumulates

-innovation as a building block. Facebook to Instagram

-more minds in the problem will solve better than less. Argument for higher populations

-gdp is not full indicator of economic growth and wellbeing – Wikipedia , internet free but doesn’t show up in GDP report 

-advances in digital technology are driving unprecedented reallocation of wealth and income. They replicate valuable ideas and insights at very low costs. This creates bounty for innovators but diminishes demand for previously important types of labor

-routine cognitive and manual work decreased while non routine cognitive and manual work grew

-winner take all markets are more common these days because with digital goods capacity restraints become increasingly irrelevant 

-quote: the goal of labor is complete unemployment so we can play (leisure)

-quote: you’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots 

Digital Sense by Travis Wright

• Customer experience is the one metric that matters in today’s economy
• Humanity will change more in the next twenty years than in the past 300 because of the exponential rate of technology 
• In a software world, your product is your focus group. 

Civic-Minded

Hunger in Paradise by Rasmuss Ankersen

1. Three cognitive biases weigh heavily on the decisions of successful corporations 
   1. Outcome bias: tendency to evaluate the quality of a decision and the outcome of the decision is already known
   2. Escalation of commitment: when groups of people continue to rationalize their decisions l, actions, and investments when faced with increasingly negative outcomes rather than alter their course.
   3. The end-of-history illusion: belief you have experience significant personal growth upnto present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future

Principles:

#1: Never Trust Success

#2: if it Ain’t Broke, Consider Breaking It

#3: Burn Your Trophies

Locking up our own by James forman jr

• by 1995, a nation with only 5 percent of the world population held almost 25 percent of its prisoners. And an ever-growing proportion of these prisoners were black. 
• African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police offficerd or street criminals. 
• That DC’s police force would dramatically increase marijuana arrests at a time when the national momentum was moving towards lesser penalties was, in a word, infuriating. 
• Since America had never cared for its black poor, it was up th DC’s honest, law-abiding black residents to protect their community, to “take care of” the race Traitors in their midst by calling Hassan’s anonymous hotline.
• As the one major city in the usa with a majority black population and an elected government with a black majority… what happens on DC is watched by all US blacks and non-blacks alike.
• Jackson’s rhetoric however, obscured one fact about gun crime: it wasn’t equally distributed throughout black America. Rather, it was concentrated among the poorest blacks, who were forced into living conditions that generated violence. 
• Nothing has more eroded confidence in the criminal justice system than the long history of willful refusals to punish white anti black vigilantes.

Entrepreneurship for Human Flourishing by Chris Horst and peter Greer

• If you care about helping the poor, you simply must care about business and entrepreneurship
• Business is not secondary in helping the poor; it is primary
• If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart
• Charity is at its best when it compliments the private sector, when it temporarily assist those who are unable to participate in productive employment and take care of themselves and their families
• Business is the engine of human flourishing 
• When we are deprived of the opportunity to work – willfully or not – we lose part of what makes us exhibit the image of the Divine

White Awake by Daniel Hill

• The Imago Dei states that all humans are valuable and of infinite worth. God is the one who declares this and no human can challenge it
• americans played God and got rid of the Imago Dei by establishing “racial difference” – assigning value based on race 
• white trauma
• nicodemus as a story of awakening for racial equality
• denial: we must stare right at the trauma in order to be healed. Numbers 21, the serpent in the desert 

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich

• It cost roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any of 20 US cities lives in the same range and sometimes it’s favorable to the poor.

The Economics of Neighborly Love by Tom Nelson

Soul of an Entrepreneur by David Sax

• If the Silicon Valley entrepreneur is driven to start up, the immigrant entrepreneur is driven to start over.
• When ronald Reagan was in office, two out of ten Americans worked for themselves at some capacity. Today that number is one in ten
• Silicon Valley tradecraft is labeled as technology but really it’s about growing really really fast 
• Companies owned by immigrant entrepreneurs accounted for a quarter of all net new private sector jobs even though they represented just 17% of firms.
• Immigrant entrepreneurs represent the fundamental hope that all entrepreneurs experience deep in their souls that they can Build a new life and identity through a business regardless of their past. That the entrepreneur can always start over.
• According to a report by the feeeeal reserve board, the share of businesses that startups occupied in America went from 14% in 1979 to 8 percent by 2016.
• Since 1989, employment in the largest segment of companies (with more than ten thousand workers) has grown the most, while those with four employees or fewer has shrunk the most. -New York times study. David Leonhardt.

Classics

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

• On elderliness: “he had been a sailor and a harpooned in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shown certain mild gleams of a newly developed bloom- the spring verdure peeing forth even beneath February’s snow”
• On repentance: “Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord our of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”
• On travel and maps: “ queequeg was a native of kokovo, an island far away to west and south. It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
• In leadership: “and once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody food captain than a laughing bar one.”

Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross

• The soul, after it has been definitely converted to the service of God, is spiritually nurtured and caressed by God. (Like a mother, eventually the baby has to move off the breast away from comfort)
• Pride: the devil himself actually helps people pray and contemplate because it develops their pride 
• Beginners get really down on themselves for falling (this a form of imperfection) thinking themselves to already have arrived. 
• “Beginners” suffer from spiritual gluttony. They know so little of their own unworthiness and misery, and have thrust so far from them the loving fear and reverence which they owe to the greatness of God. 
• The journey of perfection: that of the denial of their own will and pleasure for the sake of God.
• For, to such a depth doth the base was of our appetite reach, that it makes us long after our miserable trifles, and loathe the incommutable treasure of heaven. 
• State of contemplation: when the soul goes forth from all mental activity and speculation of her own, to the state of the progressives, it is God who now works upon her; in such a way that, it seems as if He bound up the interior powers
• And to this is added the memory of former prosperity; for these souls, when they enter into this night, have, as a rule, been accustomed to have many delights in God and to do Him great service, and this grieves then more, to see that they are become strangers to this grace, and that they can no longer enter therein. 
• For, softened [the soul] and humiliated by these aridness and difficulties and other temptations and trials wherein God proves her in many other ways than by this night, she becomes gentle in regard to God and in regard to herself, and also as regards her neighbor. So that she no longer waxes passionately wrathful against herself for her own faults,  or against her neighbors for theirs, nor does she harbour insolent discontent and displeasure against God, because He does not make her righteous all at once. 
• Four passions of the soul: joy, grief, hope, and fear

Family

That artists way for parents by Julia Cameron

• Our job as parents isn’t to always hang out with our kids but to cultivate safety
• Plan weekly solo artist dates and then one with your kids
• What are some things that make you happy that you no longer have time to do?
• The definition of creation-making something from nothing-is an ability that we all have, but young children may be the most in touch with it. 
• Don’t get toys, have them invent things blocks, music, paper
• Give them a melody and find it on the piano

For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macauly

• Home is the base educational environment
• Galatians 6:9: don’t weary in doing good. Everything should be done for the “children’s sake”
• A child’s strength is in who he is not in who he will become. Don’t try and prune them but get to know them 
• Look at the child on your knee and look with reverence 
• We cannot own him. He is not ours 
• Charlotte Mason saw child’s minds as capable as her own
• Delight in good things you love with your children rather than looking down on them

The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

• In Dewey’s dream, the school ceased to be an instrument supporting parents and became instead a substitute for parents. 
• By 2025, we estimate that knowledge work automation tools and systems could take on tasks that would be equal to the output of 110 million to 140 million full-time workers. McKinsey study
• Pg. 30: yet just as the economy is laying the demand for a society of truly lifelong learners at our collective national feet, we have decided to orphan the rising generation of the American idea of universal dignity and the possibility of resilience, innovation, and renewal. 
• In the late 1890s, less than 10% of 14-17 year olds attended school 
• European children of the middle classes were being treated as precious objects or solicitude, needing careful protection. American children, by contrast, even those who later became presidents, doctors, writers, and reformers were exposed to demanding adult work and responsibility as an intentional part of their upbringing. 
• 5 million Americans- more than the combined populations of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, whyoming, and Montana – consume forty-five hours of video games per week

A Dad Is For Spending Time With by Dr Charlie Shedd

• One date per month with each of your children 
• Are we interruptible enough?

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