Above all else

I heard an interesting viewpoint this weekend. A family is not inherently a team. Hmm.  Sometimes at work, often in church, and most of the time at home, you hear people say to each other that we are family. And often, we really are. We care for each other above and beyond transactional matters.  It matters to me when my colleagues and cell group members (and of course my actual family members) go through illnesses or family issues or work challenges. I root for their success at presentations and projects and relationships. I care about what they care about, even if it has little direct impact on my own life. In a way, a family is sort of an amalgam of people who support each other in pursuit of each member's personal goals. For example, as a father, I support my children in their academic, career and ministry goals. But where they go to school, the grades they get, and the careers and ministries they build - they're really their goals, not mine.  Ditto for my role as a c...

Happy New Year!  Here we stand in the doorway of 2024. Even through the mist of uncertainty, I'm sure that, like me, you can sense the many challenges ahead, in the workplace, in our families and in our spiritual walk. In his book "Essentialism", Greg McKeown suggests that the productive life is facilitated by what he calls (surprise, surprise) essentialism. Instead of "the unfulfilling experience of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions", we should seek "significant progress [only] in the things that matter most". McKeown echoes what many others have observed.  Harvard Business School's Michael Porter famously taught that "the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do". Steve Jobs observed that "... people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are... [Succeeding at] innovatio...