A friend of mine once told me that he believed that the biggest return on an activity usually comes from the last 5% of effort. Being diligent to the end produces a great reward. It’s like digging a well. You dig and dig until you want to give up, but if you diligently continue you eventually hit the spring of ...
As a young boy I saw a baseball glove in a catalog that I desperately desired. But I didn’t have any money. Then I learned I could earn the same baseball glove if I sold boxes of Christmas cards. The number of boxes I needed to sell seemed attainable in the beginning, but it became much harder than I thought ...
One Saturday, as a teenager, my grandfather instructed me to remove the front tires on a car he was repairing so that he could replace the brakes. One tire had a lug nut that wouldn’t budge. After many attempts, I finally told my grandfather that the lug nut was impossible to remove. He sprayed some WD-40 on the lug nut ...
As a Polish Jew, Sonia Warshawski survived six years of beatings and murders in the Auschwitz death camp, even though most of her family didn’t. The day the British liberated the camp a Nazi soldier shot Sonia, yet, she survived. For the last 30 years Sonia has flourished as a tailor in a dying shopping mall. While all the other ...
Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales, had a dream that died when Veggie Tales was forced into bankruptcy. As Phil’s dreams disintegrated, the story of the Shunamite woman in 2 Kings provided Phil some answers. The prophet Elisha repaid a Shunamite woman’s kindness by asking God to give her a son. Later the son died, as did the woman’s dream ...
Cary Summers, President of the Museum of the Bible located in Washington D.C., shared about the remarkable journey his team had in taking a 430,000 square foot refrigerated warehouse and converting it into the 3rd largest museum in the city. Rather than use standard protocols with a hired contractor, they asked the contractor to assemble crews to work 24 hours ...
When my friend, Steve, was a police officer, he once received a dispatch call to head for the morgue. When he arrived, there was a scared violent man inside the morgue. Steve fought with the man until he subdued and calmed him. Steve learned that this man had been pronounced dead at the scene of an accident! When this dead ...
During the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, the Tanzania marathon representative, John Akwhari, fell and suffered serious leg injuries after running only 30 kilometers. The race officials urged him to quit, but he refused. More than an hour after the winner of the race had finished, Akwhari, in tremendous pain, collapsed on the finish line. Later when he was asked ...
As a teenager, one of the jobs I despised most while working on my uncle’s farm was cutting thistles. It was hard work that seemed unnecessary. Then I learned if you didn’t eliminate the entire weed’s root it would just grow back, putting the sheep and cattle at risk of dying if they ate too much of this toxic weed. ...
This week we’re discussing 5 Ps of the importance of our work. Today’s focus is on Productivity. In the 19th century it would have seemed impossible that the earth could ever produce enough food to feed 7 billion people. Then God provided divine insight to several inventors that ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Their inventions took productivity to a level ...
Equipping Others to Do Work Differently
