⏱️ Will you like what you look like?

I. When you’re a baby, you look like your parents.

When you’re old, you look like your decisions.

Will your older self appreciate the way you are going to make them look?

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II. Learning, research, and strategizing are helpful to get started and to improve what you are already doing.

But research and planning stop being helpful if they take the place of doing.

It is great to learn, talk about, and figure out how to take the next step, but not if you count research as actually taking a step.

Learning is useful until it becomes a form of procrastination, at which point it can be worse than doing nothing at all.

When you are doing nothing, at least you know it. But we can trick ourselves into thinking that researching is the same thing as doing.

Don’t let research lead to procrastination.

I. Isabel Allende on how to succeed in life:

“Figure out what you’re good at without trying, then try.”

II. Donella Meadows on what you really need:

“People don’t need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don’t need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty.

People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth.

Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings.

A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.”

A House For My Name by Peter J. Leithart

An intriguing and helpful survey of the Old Testament, how all of its various stories fit together, and how it ultimately points to and is fulfilled in Jesus.

To track with this book, you do need to have some familiarity with the Old Testament (as the author notes). While there were still a few occasions when I got a little confused, the book does an excellent job pointing out how the various stories we read are intentional. And not just in their message, but also in the form and structure of how they were written.

The author does a great job showing how the typical Sunday School reading of Bible stories that often merely moralizes the characters and stories misses the actual point of what’s going on.

The book was rather dry at times. The general flow was: "this happened, it was written this way, and it shows this and points to that,” repeated throughout. I’m not sure how a book like this could be made more engaging, but it definitely took effort to stay focused while reading at points.

Overall, if you want a resource to better understand the Old Testament and how it all works together, this is a great choice. Just know that, because it’s rather dry at times, it may take some work to finish.

7/10

Want to do more by doing less?

This week I talk about a surprising path to real productivity, share an unlikely conversion story, and how we can fix the man crisis in today’s world.

🔗 Watch it on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

P.S. I have a very small sense of humor…