What? Eye. Read. 💡: Experiment upon primary questions, we are the gospel message, and read ten pages of a good book every day

Last updated on September 1st, 2024 at 11:27 pm

August 25, 2024

Here is the best thing I heard (What?), saw (Eye.), and read (Read.) this week, as well as the best idea (💡) I developed.

[Julie Hillyard]: “Our job as teachers is … to really set up good primary questions that we’re working to answer together to come up with a hypothesis. … Doing some background research is also part of that discussion, and figuring out, maybe even designing potential experiments. But the actual experimenting, collecting data, noticing what’s happening, and drawing conclusions is going to happen outside of the classroom. And so we are setting up and encouraging people to conduct those experiments. …

“In class, we should never tackle leading everyone through some kind of an experiment about a secondary question. As we’re approaching studying the Doctrine and Covenants again, I think that sometimes we’re tempted to conduct an experiment upon something related to church history. … Are we leading people through a discussion and an experiment based on the right question or not?”
To learn more about “primary questions” and “secondary questions,” see Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge’s January 22, 2019, BYU devotional entitled “Stand Forever“.

“Flooding the Earth with Christ’s Message“, Elder David A. Bednar, August 18, 2024, YouTube:

“I think as we focus on the work of proclaiming the gospel, we emphasize ‘just be normal and natural’. If an individual or a family would consider just their normal routine, what’s something that they would be interested in posting? It doesn’t have to be a gospel message – we are the gospel message. I think it could help people to understand that what we do is much more important than what we may write or say.”
I shared additional thoughts about this YouTube video in General Conference Applied season 3 episode 19.

“Here’s a slight edge action guaranteed to change your life: read just ten pages of a good book, a book aimed at improving your life, every day. If you read ten pages of a good book today, will your life change? Of course not. If you don’t read ten pages of a good book today, will your life fall apart? Obviously not.

“I could tell you that if you would agree to read ten pages of one of these good books every single day, over time, you could not help but accumulate all the knowledge you’d ever need to be as successful as you could ever want to be. Like a penny over time, reading ten pages a day would compound, just like that, and create inside you a ten-million-dollar bank of knowledge. If you kept this up for a year, you would have read 3,650 pages – the equivalent of one or two dozen books of life-transforming material. Would your life have changed? Absolutely. No question.”

Starting Sunday, September 1, 2024, each day I don’t read 10 pages of a good book, I will pay each of my sons $1.

This was prompted by my 9-year-old son saying that I don’t read books, I just listen to them.
This was also prompted by a concept I revisited in “The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness” by Jeff Olson (see the ‘Read’ section above).