“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” (C.S. Lewis)
There is a proverb in the Bible that goes like this: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”
We all survive and thrive on the comfort of those who know us best, who get us back on our feet and help us to carry on when the going gets tough.
Recently, I’ve been challenged to take my ability to be a friend to another level. My wife and I have made some strategic decisions lately and are laying out goals for our personal development. Often, in my desire to offer comfort I sabotage her by offering a way out of difficulty rather than challenge in the pursuit of her goals and dreams. She’s told me, “I really need you to be a friend to me and not let me out of these goals when things are not easy.”
I have to admit, it’s far easier for me to soothe when I should be urging her on to the mark with affection and encouragement.
How about you?
As a friend, you are able to speak in love to those in your orbit and help them become the best they can be. In fact, it’s your love and commitment that makes such direct challenges palatable.
Here’s some starters to help be a better friend:
Being a friend surely means offering solace and empathy. But it also has the character of a good coach—you help those you love to win. Be that friend.
Martin Niemöller was a Protestant pastor in Nazi Germany. Harrowing times call for unprecedented courage and social responsibility. After the war, he spoke about his own failure to speak out against the madness of the Third Reich.
“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”
Francis Schaeffer once warned that personal peace and affluence—and lust for these things—would be the undoing of the West. It is the easiest thing known to man not to get involved with messy things. That response led to the murder of the six million in Hitler’s death camps, virtually the liquidation of European Jewry.
We cannot afford to be silent in the face of the things that are destroying us here in America. Our values have been undermined, often by our own apathy and secret agreements with darkness.
You have a voice. Pick an area to get involved in, for there are many. Lives and values are at stake.
And speak up!
“You will always pay the full price for excellence. It is never discounted.” (Christopher Parkening)
In a month I will be playing guitars in the pit band for a local production of the musical “Little Shop of Horrors.” It is a comedy with music and lyrics written by the Grammy Award winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Musically it is a combination of Sha-Na-Na meets Billy Joel meets Funk-A-Delic meets The Knack. It is a hilarious story.
Playing in these shows is always a challenge. I read music and that has helped me get these roles, which are a privilege. I get to work with outstanding musicians.
Today I spent hours going through the score—a piano reduction—and the guitar lead sheets, learning parts and rhythms. It puts one through the paces to be sure.
This music is challenging and multi-faceted. Most Broadway music is. It calls for focus and discipline, something I have to work at every day. As I read through the musical today, I thought a lot about guitarist Steve Vai and his unbelievable work ethic regarding his art.
Steve used to divide his days up into twelve hours for guitar practice. He may still be doing so. Three hours for scales and modes, three hours for other things, and so forth. If you’ve ever seen or heard Steve play, he is an extreme guitarist. He does things most guitarists wouldn’t dare attempt. His chops are precise, fluid and varied. His execution of musical passages flawless. His tones exotic, to say the least.
Vai’s genius, like Mozart and Tiger Woods, is rooted in deliberate practice. Focus. Distractions eliminated strategically.
He’s a graduate of the Berklee School of Music, so he knows music. When he was breaking into the business over thirty years ago, he would transcribe the music and guitar solos of Frank Zappa—a musical genius in his own right. And these transcriptions, of all parts in the songs, were written not as tablature (tabs) but as music proper. That is an incredible feat in itself. He eventually gave them to Zappa and worked with him. The video below shows Steve playing and sharing about focus and practice.
Once again we are reminded that the key to mastery of any thing to which we aspire is time, focus and discipline. Christopher Parkening, classical guitar virtuoso, once said, “You will always pay the full price for excellence. It is never discounted.”
What things are you good and gifted at? What kinds of changes can you make in their practice to take your skills to the level of virtuosity? Are you up to the challenge?
I bet you are.
Living in the soup of a stagnant economy presents many challenges one might not otherwise face in a time of prosperity. Navigating a volatile employment market takes ingenuity, drive, and out-of-the box thinking. And not a little personal sacrifice.
Depending on where you reside, the unemployment rate currently hovers between 7-10%. It is an employer’s market, even in the armed forces. One career Army sergeant told me a few summers ago that the job security of being able to reenlist is a thing of the past. Those who wish to do so are carefully scrutinized. A record of poor performance, apathy, dust-ups with the law (read bar fights), etc., and your chances of being rehired are remote indeed. Even the US Army can now pick and choose.
As well, many highly educated veterans in banking, IT, retail, and other markets, having been downsized, are now taking the simplest jobs, with high mortgages and school bills coming due without fail.
What to do?
I believe that job security is best stewarded in one’s own hands. Labor unions can only go so far. Those who keep their skills current, their work ethic stellar, their thinking creative, and their drive unimpaired stand the best chance of finding and maintaining gainful, even satisfying, employment in this competitive economy.
Here are some things you can do to hone your edge and increase your staying power:
Remember, you may have to train on your own time and dime. Make the sacrifice. Your sense of self-accomplishment as well as potential marketability are worth the effort!
“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” (Peter F. Drucker)
I grew up in the country, working and playing on farms. There’s scarcely anything more adventurous for a kid than the things he can find to do on a large dairy farm. Some of it was permitted. A lot of it was not and we got yelled at from time to time. But it was great fun.
When you are young, you don’t always use your head. One of the things we did was to jump out of hay mows and walk on really high beams above cattle, mangers and bales of hay and straw.
The key to doing these things—which were quite scary for a boy—was simply doing it. If you sat at the edge of the mow or straddled a beam and thought about it, your courage would flag and you wouldn’t take the chance. (A victory for brains; a defeat for derring-do.)
In 1988, a book appeared with the provocative title Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway.
FTFADIA.
Jack Canfield has referred to this book and the principle it highlights. I’ve adopted the idea with good results.
We all face fears and anxieties over different things. For some it’s flying. For others, public speaking. Most of us shy away from difficult conversations, whether in sales or conflict resolution. The key is to own the fact that you feel the emotion of fear but decide to do the thing you fear anyway. And then do it. Fear is, after all, a feeling. It may have validity. I have a good friend, a career Army guy who’s jumped out of a lot of planes. There is real fear launching out of a C-130. Good sense for a paratrooper is to make sure his parachute has been properly prepared.
Most of us will not be leaping out of moving aircraft or tackling pythons. But we can all grow by feeling it. Then doing it. It’s really simple.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” has become a very popular mantra these days. Just ask Richard Carlson, whose bestselling book championed the cause. I read the book and found a lot of practical tips for chilling out and getting past the anxiety curve over stuff that is genuinely not a big deal.
It’s just the “and it’s all small stuff” part that I can’t subscribe to.
Disclosure: I am a retentive. Ask anyone who knows me. My pastoral office was always kept so organized that one of my bosses quipped, “This is so well organized, it’s sin.” Our secretary and her children used to go into my space when I was away and put things out of order and balance just to mess with me. (This was long before Feng Shui became the rage.) My IT desk suffers from the same affliction though a tad more relaxed.
All kidding aside, I’ve learned that more often than not, details—and attention to them—make all the difference in the world. The key is learning that not all details are created equal.
In my daily work in the Information Sciences, I interact with very complex relational databases. Spreadsheets, SQL queries and CAD drawings are where I make my living. Anybody who’s worked for any length of time with these kinds of programs and applications knows that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of points of failure if the details are not cared for. Spreadsheet searches return nothing if you add an extra space or character that doesn’t belong. Code and query strings will fail to execute successfully if the syntax (the precise arrangement of parts) is not exact.
Little things mean a lot.
I’m reminded of the Bible story of Moses. When he led the children of Israel out of Egypt, they stopped at Mount Sinai. It was there that Moses went up into the mountain to speak with God. And there God gave him the Torah—His law. Not just the Ten Commandments, but numerous other laws covering everything from the treatment of foreigners to dietary restrictions and allowances.
Moses was also given technical information. Specifically, God gave him a blueprint to construct a tent for worship. God told Moses to build it exactly as he’d been shown it on the mountain. Failure to follow precise details—curtain lengths, incense recipes, etc.—would cause God to reject the whole project. And Moses would’ve risked his life to improve on God’s design.
I’ve always been struck by this reality. God cares about details.
Here’s the challenge: Weigh the import of the details of every thing you do. Some details are liquid. But others need to be maintained. Here are some:
Attention to detail will distinguish you. It is usually what sets apart the excellent from the mediocre. Make the effort.
“Wit is a fighting thing and a working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain’s wit. Not a few dishonest people felt it.” (G.K. Chesterton)
