It is What You Make of It: Justin McRoberts

“We dishonor our creator when we give in to “it is what it is” thinking (pg xi).

“Time never healed a single wound without the loving, attentive way people have spent that time after hurting one another” (pg xii).

“When I give in to ‘it is what it is’ thinking, I dishonor the creative, redemptive, and loving God who made me and holds me together” (pb 4).

“Human history is shaped by the ideas, the dreams, and ultimately the will and work of the women and men who actively create, tear down, reimagine, and rebuild” (pg 6).

May we have friends who are “people who believe in who you are becoming, long-term - who believe it enough to invest and stay and celebrate along the way” (pg 21, 22).

“We are being shaped into people who make things that look as though God was involved rather than people who sit around expecting things to fall out of the sky, untouched by human hands” (pg 32).

“What are you going to do with the time, talent, resources, and relationships you have on hand?” (pg 33).

“How many projects or dreams or relationships are lying around your life in some form of disarray because you never took a moment to let yourself actually be disappointed and then, after a spell, got back up to see what you ahve on hand and started to tinker . . .

and build

and laugh

and disassemble

and talk

and plan

and tinker again

and build . . .

and eventually become the kind of person who makes the things you want to make - the kinds of things God created you to make?” (pg 34).

Peter “wasn’t just an accumulation of his mistakes; he wasn’t defined by his wrongdoings” (pg 43).

“Nobody was thinking about whether or not I’d done a good job - not even Jeff. Nobody in the room was thinking about me at all. I really liked that feeling. I might have even loved that feeling. The feeling of having been part of something beautiful” (pg 99).

“If Seth Godin is right that art is anything you and I make that helps forge a connection between people, then love is the primary characteristic of good art. Is it interesting? That’s good. Is it well done? That’s excellent. Are people loved by you in and through it? That’s art” (pg 121).

“Do I love it enough to learn to do it differently (maybe for the hundredth time)?
Do I love the people I do it with or for enough to take my injury seriously but not take it personally so that I don’t become resentful?” (pg 132).

I hadn’t felt capable of making something ‘better’ out of my circumstances. So I changed my circumstances and made something smaller. Turns out I made something more human” (pg 158).

“Like it or not, you are the gift you are always giving in and through the things you make and do. That will forever be true, and there is nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, there is plenty you can do about who you are and who you’d like to become. So, when things go sideways (because they will, beloved; over and over, things will fall apart), you’ll get the change to find out who you really are. I pray you fall in love with that person and believe you’re worth passing on. And may that, more than any set of circumstances or glorious setup, grant you confidence and assurance to adapt and create and reinvent and rethink and tear down and build back up” (pg 162).

Questions to Consider:

1. What hopes and dreams do you have for someone? Would you consider telling them the potential you see in them, and the person you can imagine them becoming?

2. What plan has gone sideways or maybe not even made if off the ground, and how can allowing disappointment, sadness, and frustration actually help you move on?

3. Once the dust settles and you’ve been able to grieve, what needs to happen next before you are able to take a realistic and thankful look at what you have on hand and start working from there?

4. What plans need to change, or what dreams might have to die (at least in part), in order for you to change and become completely a person God designed you to be?

5. What can you honestly say you love doing? Not just what makes you feel good, but what makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself?

6. When have your strengths and gifts and talents drowned out the voices of others in the places you’ve worked or served? In the future, which of your gifts and talents could you add to (not take over) a project that isn’t yours?

7. Maybe you’ve been quiet too often when you should have spoke up about something you love doing. What is worth standing up for and being louder about? And how can you work with egotistical loudmouths?

8. What does it look like for your work to be an act of love - not sentimental feeling, but service and care and attention toward other humans?

9. What work have you done that did not communicate love? Why did that happen?

10. Where and when have you felt cared for because of the way someone did their job? What made you feel that way? How did it motivate you to do your work?

11. What would it look like for you to take interpersonal or professional injuries seriously while not taking them personally?

The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd

“I had nothing to offer her but my willingness to sit there while she endured her pain. ‘I’m here,’ I murmured” (pg 71).

“It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger” (pg 72).

“Grief and anger streamed from my fingers. The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure” (pg 73).

“Could we know the ways of God or not? Did he possess an intention for us, his people, as our religion believed, or was it up to us to invent meaning for ourselves. Perhaps nothing was as I’d thought” (pg 84).

“I’m not like other women - you’ve said so yourself. I have ambitions as men do. I’m racked with longings. I’m selfish and willful and sometimes deceitful. I rebel. I’m easy to anger. I doubt the ways of God. I’m an outsider everywhere I go. People look at me with derision” (pg 135).

“I wondered if he knew who he was, or if God had yet to break the terrible news to him” (pg 214).

I’m not sure I would recommend this book to many, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reading. There is something great yet difficult about reading something that is so contrary to my evangelical upbringing, which is precisely why I think I need to read them. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth spreading around:)

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, by Adam Grant

The “I’m not biased” bias is when “people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking” (pg. 25).

“The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs” (pg 26).

“Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt . . . if knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom” (pg. 28) and “The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know” (pg 31).

Dunning-Kruger effect: “those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t . . . the less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain . . .the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club” (pg 40).

“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of” (pg 45).

“If we care about accuracy, we can’t afford to have blind spots. To get an accurate picture of our knowledge and skills, it can help to assess ourselves like scientists looking through a microscope. But one of my newly formed beliefs is that we’re sometimes better off underestimating ourselves” (pg 48).

“If we never worry about letting other people down, we’re more likely to actually do so. When we feel like impostors, we think we have something to prove. Impostors may be the last to jump in, but they may also be the last to bail out” (pg 52).

“We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals” (pg 53).

“Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re imposters. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improve their sight. They don’t boast about how much they know, they marvel at how little they understand . . .arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses” (pg 54).

Ideas survive not because they’re true, but because they’re interesting (pg 59).

Givers have higher rates of failure than takers and matchers - but higher rates of success too (pg 61).

“Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything” (pg 62).

“The best performers are the ones who started their jobs believe their work would have a positive impact on others . . . givers would (therefore) be more successful than takers, because they would be energized by the difference their actions made in others’ lives” (pg 62).

“Even positive changes can lead to negative emotions; evolving your identity can leave you feeling derailed and disconnected” (pg 63).

“If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year” (pg. 63).

“It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart” (pg 68).

“If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves” (pg 72).

“The apathy of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy” (pg 80).

“Dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed and supported - and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their colleagues” (pg 84).

“Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. He does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man” (pg 108).

“A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught” (pg 111).

“It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear” (pg 143).

“Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem. Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories” (pg 165).

“Perspective-taking consistently fails because we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing . . . What works is not perspective-guessing but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their vies” (pg 178).

“It turns out that even if we disagree strong with someone on a social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about an issue, we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind it” (pg 179).

“If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life” (pg 193).

“Every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we would all start rethinking together” (pg 195).

“Good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of teaching” (pg 203).

“Education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning” (pg 203).

“It takes confident humility to admit that we are a work in progress” (pg 215).

“In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices” (pg 216).

“A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions” (pg 217).

“The more people value happiness, the less happy they often become with their lives” (pg 237).

“When we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it . . . we spend too much time striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity . . . when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose” (pg 238).

People who are happy don’t focus on being happy, they look for contribution and connection (pg 240).

Grade: A

Adam Grant is one of my favorites.

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Paddle Your Own Canoe, by Nick Offerman

“Damn it all, you have been given a life on this beautiful planet! Get off your ass and do something!” (pg 50).

“Loyalty. Honor. Have a set of rules, a code of ethics, that you will do your best to uphold and defend, whether you’re on horseback in Cuba in 1898, or at a school board meeting next week., or merely at the water cooler with your coworkers. Pursue decency in all dealings with your fellow man and woman. Simply put? Don’t be an asshole” (pg. 51).

Another “meh” book. Again, there’s some nuggets of worth-while truths, but nothing too ground breaking or original. There are other books worth your time, and mine.

Grade: C

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