Blog Posts

The Essential Question: How You Can Make a Difference for God

As we consider The Question of the Ages this month, Whitney T. Kuniholm—President of Scripture Union/USA and former executive vice president of Prison Fellowship Ministries—pushes us to consider The Essential Question: How You Can Make a Difference for God.

Most people want to make a positive impact with their lives—through education, career, family, service to the community or through accomplishing some notable goal or achievement.

Human beings seem to have a built-in longing to make their lives count for something more. The philosopher Plato reportedly described the human as “a being in search of meaning.” And in more recent times, Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and author of the classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote, “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). That’s our mission statement.

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How Successful People Think

As noted in The Question of the Ages (link to blog post), Solomon’s quest for meaning in life starts with intellectualism.  This reminded me of John Maxwell’s book How Successful People Think.  I received this book from fellow John Maxwell Team member Randy Stroman in August 2014 when I attended the John Maxwell certification event in Orlando.

As John Maxwell puts it, “A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.” 

Consider these six steps to become a better thinker:

  1. Expose yourself to good input. Read books, review trade magazines, listen to tapes, and spend time with good thinkers. 
  2. Expose yourself to good thinkers. Spend time with the right people. 
  3. Choose to think good thoughts. Dan Cathy, Prsident of Chick-Fil-A, has a “thinking schedule”. He sets aside time just to think for half a day every two weeks, for one whole day every month, and for 2-3 full days every year. Dan explains, “This helps me ‘keep the main thing, the main thing’ since I am so easily distracted.”
  4. Act on your good thoughts. Ideas have a short shelf life. 
  5. Allow your emotions to create another good thought. In Failing Forward, I wrote that you can act your way into feeling long before you can feel your way into action. 
  6. Repeat the process. 

Henri-Louis Bergson, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, asserted that a person should “think like a man of action—act like a man of thought.”

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