March 16, 2025
Here is the best thing I heard (What?), saw (Eye.), and read (Read.) this week, as well as the best idea (💡) I developed.
What?
“Discovering God’s Plan for You” by Kalani Sitake, Head Football Coach at BYU, March 11, 2025:
- “So here it is. You’re going to experience adversity in difficult times. You’re in it. Congratulations. You’re seeking the divine design set for you.
“If you get your heart broken, good for you. That means you’re a step closer to finding true love, right?
“If you’re struggling in school, awesome. That means you’re pushing yourself through some discomfort and learning new skills.
“If you’re struggling financially, that’s okay. It means you’re learning how to budget, and you’ll be thankful and humble when more compensation arrives.
“And if you didn’t get the job, that only means there’s something better waiting for you. God knows good times are ahead. Your highlights are coming.” - This entire address was PHENOMENAL! If you’re looking for something to listen to this week, check it out. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Eye.
Snowfall on a freshly fertilized lawn:
- My wife, Morgan, determined that it was time to put down step one of the IFA 4Plus Lawn Care Program on Thursday, March 13th. She found a break in the rainfall to put the fertilizer down. We woke up Friday morning to a blanket of snow on the grass. You know you’re an adult when you give your spouse a high five for fertilizing at the perfect time! Way to go, Babe!
Read.
“The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz:
- “Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This ‘peak-end’ rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt. The summaries in turn influence our decisions about whether to have that experience again, and factors such as the proportion of pleasure to displeasure during the course of the experience or how long the experience lasted, have almost no influence on our memory of it. …
“We evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end. Thus, you might, in retrospect, remember a one-week vacation that had some great moments and finished with a bang as more pleasurable than a three-week vacation that also had some great moments, but finished only with a whimper. The two extra weeks of relaxing in the sun or seeing the sights or eating great food make little difference, because they recede from awareness over time.”
💡
For podcast show notes, we could pull in the whole address, and then have bullet points for things that we would like to say and focus on. We could also color code and put in brackets what each part of the address is: directives, invitations, promises, etc. Then there would be a section at the end of the show notes for our applications.
- See how this turned out with General Conference Applied season 4 episode 30.
Additional Content
Next Newsletter (March 23, 2025 – Newsletter Subtitle)