September 22, 2024
Here is the best thing I heard (What?), saw (Eye.), and read (Read.) this week, as well as the best idea (
) I developed.
What?
- â[President Ballard] says, like the small flecks of gold that accumulate over time into a large treasure, our small and simple acts, and this is it, this is the action for us, acts of kindness and service, our small and simple acts of kindness and service will accumulate into a life filled with love for Heavenly Father, devotion to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a sense of peace and joy each time we reach out to one another. Think about that for a minute.
âFor me, what this amounts to is an invitation to look outward and to look upward. âŠ
âI heard President Ballard, and Iâve heard the Brethren, teach this many times, many ways. But these small and simple acts of kindness and service do accumulate into a life filled with love for Heavenly Father, devotion to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a sense of peace and joy. And goodness knows, thatâs what weâre all looking for.
âSo please think about this. Please pray about this and how you can apply this simple invitation every day to bless you as you bless others and as you turn upwards to our Father in heaven and our Savior Jesus Christ. âŠ
âFrom your hard won and, yes, privileged vantage point, I have an invitation for you. Itâs this: that as you come to a deeper understanding of where those flecks of gold come from, as you look out, as you look up, itâs that you become flecks of gold to an often troubled world. âŠ
âThat you rejoice in being flecks of gold, that you build yourselves while youâre here, that you practice these simple principles of reaching out in kindness and love each day.â
Eye.
âThe NEW Worldâs Highest Basketball Shotâ â Dude Perfect (YouTube):
- âThis is the worldâs highest basketball shot. Come on. Come on! Yes! Yes! WE did it!â
Read.
âThe Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overloadâ by Daniel J. Levitin:
- âI found something in my intellectual junk drawer the other day while trying to keep it as ordered as I can. It is from a post on Reddit â a font of information and opinion in the age of information overload â and it is about mathematics, the queen of the sciences and emperor of abstract organization.
ââSometimes, in your mathematics career, you find that your slow progress, and careful accumulation of tools and ideas, has suddenly allowed you to do a bunch of new things that you couldnât possibly do before. Even though you were learning things that were useless by themselves, when theyâve all become second nature, a whole new world of possibility appears. You have âleveled up,â if you will. Something clicks, but now there are new challenges, and now, things you were barely able to think about before suddenly become critically important.
ââItâs usually obvious when youâre talking to somebody a level above you, because they see lots of things instantly when those things take considerable work for you to figure out. These are good people to learn from, because they remember what itâs like to struggle in the place where youâre struggling, but the things they do still make sense from your perspective (you just couldnât do them yourself).
ââTalking to somebody two or more levels above you is a different story. Theyâre barely speaking the same language, and itâs almost impossible to imagine that you could ever know what they know. You can still learn from them, if you donât get discouraged, but the things they want to teach you seem really philosophical, and you donât think theyâll help you â but for some reason, they do.
ââSomebody three levels above is actually speaking a different language. They probably seem less impressive to you than the person two levels above, because most of what theyâre thinking about is completely invisible to you. From where you are, it is not possible to imagine what they think about, or why. You might think you can, but this is only because they know how to tell entertaining stories. Any one of these stories probably contains enough wisdom to get you halfway to your next level if you put in enough time thinking about it.â
âGetting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives.â - The next time a member of the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles teaches something that perhaps you donât agree with or donât understand, consider that they just might be two or three levels above you spiritually.
Commit to a daily Holy Hour. In that hour, everything I do and think is focused on answering my one question for the day. Frequently, my one question for the day will be: âHow do I best take action on this invitation from this general conference address?â
- The Book of Mormon â Master Class: Class 36 â Helaman 7-12: Stillness in Christ: [John Hilton III] âIâll be honest, I wasnât used to hearing quiet for that long, and it was a remarkable experience. Later, as I talked with some of the students who were preparing to be priests, I heard several of them talk about what they refer to as a holy hour, which was a time to devote 60 minutes each morning to scripture study, prayer, and silent meditation. Iâll be honest, sometimes Iâm lucky if I get a holy 15 minutes, but seeing their dedication made me want to experiment with having a holy hour of my own, to see if I could really do it and what difference it might make in my life.â (General Conference Applied S3 E27)
- âThe Gap and The Gain: The High Achieversâ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Successâ by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan: âIn a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin [author of âThe Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performanceâ] explains the importance of having a âproactive day architecture vs. a reactive day architecture.â
âWhat he means by this is: your day can be designed proactivelyâmeaning by youârather than designed reactivelyâwhere youâre bounced around by distractions.
âYour day can be set up so you can live within that day in a free and proactive manner, rather than constantly being reactively tossed to and fro by random inputs or external agendas.
âIn the hour before bed, Josh gives himself time to think about the most important question heâs trying to answer or problem heâs trying to solve. He then sleeps on it, and the next morning, âpre-input,â he meditates and journals about the same question or problem he was thinking about the night before.
âResearch shows that creativity is primed just following sleep, especially after REM-based quality sleep.
âWhile Waitzkin journals in the morning, he gets flashes of insight and creative breakthroughs.
âHeâs able to tap into the subconscious integration and connections his brain processed and developed while he was sleeping.
âAs Thomas Edison said, âNever go to bed without a request to your subconscious.'â (General Conference Applied S3 E27)
Additional Content
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