Last updated on January 5th, 2025 at 10:53 pm
December 29, 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?
followHim Podcast – Christmas – President Alvin F. Meredith III and Sister Jennifer Meredith:
- [President Meredith] “Years ago when I was serving as an Area Seventy in Tennessee, I had multiple weekends in a row where I had church assignments that kept me away from my home ward and finally I had an assigned home weekend. I was at church with my family. We showed up at 8:45 a.m. for a 9:00 a.m. sacrament meeting because that’s what time Jennifer thinks is on time for 9:00 a.m. church.
“As we got the kids settled, I noticed that there was a lady seated in the first row of the overflow, those hard chairs back behind the chapel, that I had never seen before. And I asked Jen if she knew who that was and she didn’t know either, and so I went back and I introduced myself. The lady told me her name was Jackie. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve been away for a few weeks.’ I said, ‘Are you new here?’ And she said, ‘Well, this is my first time visiting your church.’ When she used the phrase your church, it caught my attention and I said, ‘That’s wonderful.’ I said, ‘We love to have visitors. We’re so grateful that you’re here. What brought you here?’
“And she said, ‘Well, there’s a little bit of a story.’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s 15 minutes. Please tell me a story.’ She proceeds to tell me that 20 years ago she was working for a small newspaper right outside of Nashville. One of her responsibilities was to edit the religion section of the paper. A group of men had written an article about the church. They brought it to her and asked her to publish it. She, like a good editor, asked what their sources were and they admitted that they had not talked to anyone from the church and she said, ‘Well, don’t you think we should talk to someone from the church before we publish an article about the church?’
“She took it upon herself to reach out to the church, so she went to the phone book, looked up The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She dialed the number. A man who she described as having a nice voice answered. She described her plight to him. He said, ‘I’m really busy right now, but I’ll be at the church on Wednesday and if you come back, then I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.’ She begins to tell me about this meeting that she has on this Wednesday night at what was – she didn’t realize it – but it was the stake center. She said, ‘This man was so kind and so gracious.’ And then she used this phrase, ‘He must have been the most Christlike person I have ever met.’ Well, she left that interview. You know how sometimes life gets in the way? Not the bad things of life but the busyness of life.
“She didn’t do anything about those feelings that she had until the week before we had met in our church building. She was walking through a business park in Brentwood, Tennessee, walked by a door that had a nameplate that said The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Tennessee Nashville Mission. She said that same feeling that she had had two decades ago came back and she felt compelled to walk into what was the mission office. She tells the sweet senior sister missionary seated at the receptionist desk this story. And this senior missionary, I don’t know exactly what words she used, but I imagine in my mind she said, ‘Jackie, surely you know the Lord has brought you here. You’ve got to come and see why you felt that way then and why you felt that way today.’ She gave Jackie the address for our church building and the time that Sacrament meeting started. There she was in our overflow.
“I’ve grown up in Tennessee and those are my people and I was curious about the story and I said, ‘Do you by chance remember the name of the man that you talked to 20 years ago on that Wednesday night?’ And she said, ‘I’ll never forget him. His name was Todd Christofferson.’ Six weeks after that Jackie was dressed in white. I was privileged to be dressed in white with her. After her baptism, with her hair still dripping, the bishop asked her to speak at her own baptism. He asked her to share her testimony, but if you’re a new convert, you don’t know any different. She stood up in front of what she referred to as her new church family. She thanked everyone for being there and then she said, ‘Brothers and sisters, I hope that you know that your lives may be the only Book of Mormon that anyone will ever read.'”
Eye.
10 Things That I Wanted Out Of Myself In Life | Matthew McConaughey | Instagram:
- “So in 1992, I wrote down a list of 10 things that I wanted out of myself in life that I did not have at the time. I never looked at that list again. I thought I lost it, until I found it just a few years ago. When I read the list, I said, ‘son of a gun, Matthew, you’ve actually achieved all of those things that you wrote down.’
“So now that we’re in the holiday spirit and coming across Christmas and holiday times … write yourself a list of 10 things you want from yourself. You don’t have to look at it every day, or you can. You can wrap it up and never open it. You can wrap it up and open it next year. But one day it’ll find you, or you find it, opening it up down the line.
“See if you accomplish some of those things, if you got some of those things that you wanted, that you wrote down. I bet you will have. It’s kind of a magic trick to write things down like that. [They] stick somewhere in the back of our mind in a place we don’t even know, but somehow remember.”
Read.
“So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love” | Cal Newport:
- “It took [Steve] Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It’s clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame. ‘[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,’ Martin explained. ‘I think it’s something the audience smells.’
“Be so good they can’t ignore you. …
“As my graduate student career had been winding down, I had become obsessed with my research strategy – an obsession that was manifested in the chronic working and reworking of the description of my work on my website. This was a frustrating process: I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared. Martin’s axiom gave me a reprieve from this self-promotion. ‘Stop focusing on these little details,’ it told me. ‘Focus instead on becoming better.’ Inspired, I turned my attention from my website to a habit that continues to this day: I track the hours spent each month dedicated to thinking hard about research problems (in the month in which I first wrote this chapter, for example, I dedicated forty-two hours to these core tasks).
“This hour-tracking strategy helped turn my attention back above all else to the quality of what I produce. At the same time, however, it also felt incremental, as if I hadn’t yet grasped the full implications of Martin’s radical idea. …
“If you spend time around Mike [Jackson, a venture capitalist], you quickly realize how serious he is about doing what he does well. It’s true that he now loves his work, but he’s still quick to turn the conversation back to how he approaches it. … Mike literally tracks every hour of his day, down to quarter-hour increments, on a spreadsheet. He wants to ensure that his attention is focused on the activities that matter. ‘It’s so easy to just come in and spend your whole day on e-mail,’ he warned. On the sample spreadsheet he sent me, he allots himself only ninety minutes per day for e-mail. The day before we last spoke he had only spent forty-five. this is a man who is serious about doing what he does really well.”
💡
Make a list of 10 things I want out of life that I don’t yet have (see the “Eye” section above). Then, look at this list every morning, and every time life gets hard or I feel like giving up.
- For bonus points, share this list with your spouse or your accountability partner, or both.