day 1260: Layering (Redux)

I'll be traveling and taking some vacation time through November 15th, so Purposed worKING will be revisiting some earlier posts until then...

"In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God's promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge." 


No one gets to be good at what they do without layering one skill and experience on top of another until they come to a place where they are really good, or even a master of what they have been working towards. As much as it would be great to get good by just showing up, we have to layer and layer until we finally have built up enough to draw upon so we really know what we are doing. There are many people who are not willing to spend the time and energy to build the layers. Either they don't believe that they should have to put in the time and efforts, or they are just too lazy to put in the hard work. Layering takes time. Layering takes patience. Layering takes an attitude of not believing that we don't need any more experience, any more practice, any more coaching, or any more discipline. Those that do layer and understand the importance of this are the ones who are able to have a few layers peeled back or punctured and still have much to work with going forward. We must learn to layer and learn to do so with each and every opportunity given to us.

Peter tells us this as well when he writes; "In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God's promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge." Peter is saying that we must layer our faith with our moral excellence, but even that is not enough. He says that we then must add the layer of knowledge. Peter wants us to continue to grow and grow through adding these layers into our life. Today, think about whether or not you are layering as you should.

Reference: 2 Peter 1:5 (New Living Testament)

day 1185: Bye Bye Anonymity, Part 2 - The Amplifiers!

May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.

I just finished Marina Gorbis' book; "The Nature of the Future".  It is a great read and lays out a very plausible path to the future and how our social structures, influenced by technology will make the future a very exciting place to be.  She brings forward the idea of "Socialstructing", which means that we need to consider that the transparency and openness of data and who we are by both passive and active deposits into the large data scheme collection of the internet, changes everything going forward. Gorbis unpacks the power of access of information about others (friends, influencers, and aggregated unknowns) into buying transactions, reputation interactions, recommendation engines, advice, and even lending and investment practices.  She says, "We are moving away from the dominance of the depersonalized world of institutional production and creating a new economy around social connections and social rewards."  To her, this is "socialstructing". She goes on to say that this shift leads us away from anonymous participants to active "amplified individuals" who will make the difference.  Do we know who the amplifiers are of our business?  They are armed with technology, their social network, and an audience of curious minds who with a nudge of momentum jump onto the bandwagon. Now is the time to take heed and understand the buttons of our business amplifiers.

And here we sit with the gifts of technology and an openness to the world like never before, with the world now telling us to become what God has asked us to be from the beginning, His "Amplified Individuals".  We received the Great Commission.  We are to be the spreaders of His Word!  We are to amplify His love, grace and message to others.  Are we His amplifiers or are we still thinking that being anonymous in the Kingdom is good enough?  It's time to start exploring how God wants us to use our tools, talents and resources to become His army of amplifiers!

Reference: 2 Peter 1:2 (New Living Translation)

day 1184: Bye Bye Anonymity, Part 1

"May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord."

It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have a clue who bought and used our products and services.  Think about it for a second; in walks a person to a convenience store.  She buys a single serve diet Pepsi and a bag of Lay's Baked potato chips.  And then she is gone. PepsiCo has no idea who she is and neither did the 7-11, where she bought both of them.  She had come and gone and both PepsiCo and 7-11 counted her as a positive sale.  All good, right?  Well, maybe not so good because while driving away from the store she opened the diet Pepsi only to find that it was flat and date expired.  She had already opened the chips and started to eat them, which were fine, but she was so upset with the Pepsi being flat that recognizing that Frito-Lay and Pepsi are the same company, she started finding problems with the chips to support her anger.  They were too salty, broken and the bag was not filled, or so she had made up in her mind. A few minutes later when she gets to her house, she takes a picture of both the bottle and the bag (in an unflattering pose) and posts the pictures with some not so kind of words about both of them and about 7-11 as the retailer.  This young woman happens to be a good and creative writer so her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts blow up and within the next 12 hours over a hundred thousand people are piling on with their complaints with the two companies. And to think, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, 7-11 never even knew her.  This is not a farfetched scenario. It happens every day, all day long. If the first time we are going to get to know a customer is through a complaint, the shoe is already on the wrong foot.  Consider that we can get ahead of this type of introduction by finding ways to engage and lose the anonymity by inviting our customers into a relationship earlier and then keeping it alive with positive dialogue.  More tomorrow on this...

Are we not blessed that our God is not one of anonymity or secrets of who He is?  Sure, there are a lot of unexplainable aspects to the Holy Trinity and how Jesus is God and Son at the same time, but those are different mysteries than being able to know and have a personal relationship with Jesus, which we can do. God sent Jesus to the earth to be like us, so we could know Him as both God and man. Man like us.  He gave us His Word so that we can gain more and more knowledge about who He is. And, as we know, He knows us beyond intimately.  He knows each thought, intention and action. There is no anonymity with God.  So, why do we try to act like there is?  We somehow think that He and others don't see our failings and that we can "get away with it."  As we do our best to bring glory to God in our purposed worKING, we must consider that nothing we do allows us to be anonymous in the eyes of God.  Let's today consider and be sure that we are aligning all aspects of who we are so to always be ready to be known for our Lord.

Reference: 2 Peter 1:2 (New Living Translation)

day 1130: Growth Hackers

 "Rather, you must grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. All glory to him, both now and forever! Amen."

In the early days of technology offerings from a business to a consumer, investors didn’t want to see money spent on marketing. Instead they wanted the engineering of the product to be responsible for spreading the word and making the product popular. So software engineers came up with clever ideas on how to connect and create cohorts and community.  Over time these morphed into terms like, “Friend” and “Follow”.  And with sophistication and a little slight of keyboarding, services and products would grow almost magically. In today’s age it’s a little harder as lots of people have peaked behind the curtain and learned the early secrets, but every day someone unlocks some way to build on the current to make growth happen.  Today, these people like to call themselves, “Growth Hackers”.  We will see how long the term exists and who really gets to keep the title legitimately but one thing is for sure; if you have a real growth hacker on your team, you can make magic happen!

God was the first growth hacker, not surprisingly really.  When He created us He gave us the instinctual desire to procreate and create our own interpretations of life and the things we need to better our lives.  The movie "The Matrix" had us all as just part of an algorithm, each one of us factoring into the program running, or not. It's not exactly that way. God wants us to be vehicles of growth in the world that He created for us.  He wants us to expand our minds, test our bodies and make the most of all that we are.  But more importantly, He wants us to be "Growth Hackers" for His Kingdom. If we are not expanding His Kingdom, we won’t see growth in our own lives and because He has left this growth up to us, the Kingdom of God could be limited if we don’t do as we are called. When you think about the impact you are having in the office or in life, can you say that you are growth hacking for Christ?

Reference:  2 Peter 3:18 (New Living Translation)

day 529: Layering

No one gets to be good at what they do without layering one skill and experience on top of another until they come to a place where they are really good, or even a master of what they have been working towards. As much as it would be great to get good by just showing up, we have to layer and layer until we finally have built up enough to draw upon so we really know what we are doing. There are many people who are not willing to spend the time and energy to build the layers. Either they don't believe that they should have to put in the time and efforts, or they are just too lazy to put in the hard work. Layering takes time. Layering takes patience. Layering takes an attitude of not believing that we don't need any more experience, any more practice, any more coaching, or any more discipline. Those that do layer and understand the importance of this are the ones who are able to have a few layers peeled back or punctured and still have much to work with going forward. We must learn to layer and learn to do so with each and every opportunity given to us. Peter tells us this as well when he writes; "In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God's promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge." Peter is saying that we must layer our faith with our moral excellence, but even that is not enough. He says that we then must add the layer of knowledge. Peter wants us to continue to grow and grow through adding these layers into our life. Today, think about whether or not you are layering as you should.

Reference: 2 Peter 1:5 (New Living Testament)

day 497: Controls

Every business has a set of controls that keeps an organization running. These controls can be what sets the tolerances on a product or a standard for service. They also can be controls that are set on the culture and people to ensure that people behave and act in a certain way. Controls go by many names; policies, procedures, standards, specifications, values, norms, principles, etc. But at the end of the day, they are a set of words and numbers that ensure we stay within a zone of tolerance. Controls are not bad, but they are to be recognized and actively managed. What we tend to do in business is "over-control". We set up policies that while seemingly are good for everyone, are actually only being written and deployed to control a very small group of people who can't control themselves without the policy. What can happen is that everyone else rounds themselves down to the same policy and before long the standard of deviation becomes tighter and tighter and everyone becomes the same and no one wants to test the limits and push themselves beyond what others prescribe for them. This is a fast way to stifle creativity and individuality. In our own lives the same can happen and we must be careful to not let ourselves become controlled by influences that are not good for us. 2 Peter 2:19 reads; "...For you are a slave to whatever controls you". We get held back and enslaved to those things that control us. Today, take a look around yourself and see if you can see what is controlling you. Do you have the right controls on yourself or are you being controlled by others, or even self-imposed influences, thoughts, and emotions that you know are not good? The only way to break the cycle is to remove the controls. But, first we have to be honest enough with ourselves to recognize and know what the controls are and where they are coming from.

Reference: 2 Peter 2:19 (New Living Testament)

day 280: Godly At Work (redux)

While I am completing my vacation time this week, I will be running some repeats of post from the last year that seem to have resonated with many of you. Thanks and look for new posts beginning on Monday November 16

Thursday, December 4, 2008
day 45: Godly At Work?
I hear it all the time, “it’s so hard to be ‘Godly” at work”. When I hear it from others, I reflect upon my own work life and cringe at the memories of how I handled myself on many occasions and the poor example that I many times set. I also lament that my example might have hurt the cause of someone else who was trying harder than me to be more Godly and then they would see me and feel let down. When we are so emotionally and physically intertwined with other people for the hours we are when we are working we can easily slip into the ways and the words of others. I always marveled when someone senior would come into the company and before long, the words that person used became the words of their subordinates and before long their peers. I once worked with a person whose favorite phrase was, “I don’t disagree” and before long everyone said the same thing. There was nothing outwardly wrong about that phrase (other than it sneaked in a passive aggressiveness into the culture and before long no one ever disagreed outright) but it was a great example of how we become chameleons at work and can find ourselves sharing the words and behaviors that wouldn’t normally be ours. I also know that those words and behaviors from work then creep into home. So, what are we to do? What if we try and try but still can’t seem to keep ourselves above the temptations and the fray? What we have to do is quit trying to go it alone and instead ask God to do His work on us as we go to work. If we allow ourselves to receive the power that God has covered us with then we can find enough of that power to keep ourselves Godly when we are working. In 2 Peter 1:3, we are told just this: "By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life...". Today, think through how you can let God give you that power so that today, day by day, you can find yourself living a Godly life…at work!

Reference: 2 Peter 1:3 (New Living Testament)

day 45: Godly At Work?

I hear it all the time, “it’s so hard to be ‘Godly” at work”. When I hear it from others, I reflect upon my own work life and cringe at the memories of how I handled myself on many occasions and the poor example that I many times set. I also lament that my example might have hurt the cause of someone else who was trying harder than me to be more Godly and then they would see me and feel let down. When we are so emotionally and physically intertwined with other people for the hours we are when we are working we can easily slip into the ways and the words of others. I always marveled when someone senior would come into the company and before long, the words that person used became the words of their subordinates and before long their peers. I once worked with a person whose favorite phrase was, “I don’t disagree” and before long everyone said the same thing. There was nothing outwardly wrong about that phrase (other than it sneaked in a passive aggressiveness into the culture and before long no one ever disagreed outright) but it was a great example of how we become chameleons at work and can find ourselves sharing the words and behaviors that wouldn’t normally be ours. I also know that those words and behaviors from work then creep into home. So, what are we to do? What if we try and try but still can’t seem to keep ourselves above the temptations and the fray? What we have to do is quit trying to go it alone and instead ask God to do His work on us as we go to work. If we allow ourselves to receive the power that God has covered us with then we can find enough of that power to keep ourselves Godly when we are working. In 2 Peter 1:3, we are told just this: "By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life...". Today, think through how you can let God give you that power so that today, day by day, you can find yourself living a Godly life…at work!

Reference: 2 Peter 1:3 (New Living Testament)