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?
Recent Speeches | BYU Speeches – “‘Flecks of Gold'” – Elder Patrick Kearon – September 17, 2024:
- “[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.
“For me, what this amounts to is an invitation to look outward and to look upward. …
“I heard President Ballard, and I’ve 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, that’s what we’re all looking for.
“So 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. …
“From your hard won and, yes, privileged vantage point, I have an invitation for you. It’s 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, it’s that you become flecks of gold to an often troubled world. …
“That you rejoice in being flecks of gold, that you build yourselves while you’re here, that you practice these simple principles of reaching out in kindness and love each day.”
Eye.
“The NEW World’s Highest Basketball Shot” – Dude Perfect (YouTube):
- “This is the world’s highest basketball shot. Come on. Come on! Yes! Yes! WE did it!”
Read.
“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin:
- “I 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 – a font of information and opinion in the age of information overload – and it is about mathematics, the queen of the sciences and emperor of abstract organization.
“‘Sometimes, 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 couldn’t possibly do before. Even though you were learning things that were useless by themselves, when they’ve all become second nature, a whole new world of possibility appears. You have ‘leveled up,’ 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.
“‘It’s usually obvious when you’re 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 it’s like to struggle in the place where you’re struggling, but the things they do still make sense from your perspective (you just couldn’t do them yourself).
“‘Talking to somebody two or more levels above you is a different story. They’re barely speaking the same language, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that you could ever know what they know. You can still learn from them, if you don’t get discouraged, but the things they want to teach you seem really philosophical, and you don’t think they’ll help you – but for some reason, they do.
“‘Somebody 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 they’re 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.’
“Getting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives.” - The next time a member of the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles teaches something that perhaps you don’t agree with or don’t 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: ‘How do I best take action on this invitation from this general conference address?’
- The Book of Mormon – Master Class: Class 36 – Helaman 7-12: Stillness in Christ: [John Hilton III] “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t 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. I’ll be honest, sometimes I’m 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.” (General Conference Applied S3 E27)
- “The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success” by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan: “In a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin [author of ‘The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance‘] explains the importance of having a ‘proactive day architecture vs. a reactive day architecture.’
“What he means by this is: your day can be designed proactively—meaning by you—rather than designed reactively—where you’re bounced around by distractions.
“Your 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.
“In the hour before bed, Josh gives himself time to think about the most important question he’s trying to answer or problem he’s trying to solve. He then sleeps on it, and the next morning, ‘pre-input,’ he meditates and journals about the same question or problem he was thinking about the night before.
“Research shows that creativity is primed just following sleep, especially after REM-based quality sleep.
“While Waitzkin journals in the morning, he gets flashes of insight and creative breakthroughs.
“He’s able to tap into the subconscious integration and connections his brain processed and developed while he was sleeping.
“As Thomas Edison said, ‘Never go to bed without a request to your subconscious.'” (General Conference Applied S3 E27)
Additional Content
Next Newsletter (September 29, 2024 – Newsletter Subtitle)