leadership

I believe this speaks to the importance of character for church leaders.

Steve Jobs, in Make Something Wonderful.

“The most important lesson I ever learned was that you have to hire people better than you are. […] In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely. So the difference between an average meal in downtown Palo Alto tonight and the best one—maybe it’s two to one. Flight home, if you’re going home for the holidays: 50 percent difference. Rental cars, breakfast cereals. I don’t know, pick one.

But I saw that Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak]—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first.

Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice. Because you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re really hard to find. And everyone says they are all prima donnas. But it turns out that when they work with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really like it. The first time I tried to build that organization—that was the[…]”

Excerpt From

Make Something Wonderful

Steve Jobs

https://books.apple.com/us/book/make-something-wonderful/id6446905902

This material may be protected by copyright.

The great joke is that the next time is never like the last time, and yet we can't help readying ourselves for it anyway.

This all reminds me of the Mayan conception of the universe.

In Mayan mythology the universe was destroyed four times, and every time the Mayans learned a sad lesson and vowed to be better protected - but it was always for the previous menace. First there was a flood, and the survivors remembered it and moved to higher ground into the woods, built dikes and retaining walls, and put their houses in the trees. Their efforts went for naught because the next time around the world was destroyed by fire.

After that, the survivors of the fire came down out of the trees and ran as far away from woods as possible. They built new houses out of stone, particularly along a craggy fissure.

Soon enough, the world was destroyed by an earthquake. 1 don't remember the fourth bad thing that happened - maybe a recession -but whatever it was, the Mayans were going to miss it. They were too busy building shelters for the next earthquake.

Two thousand years later we're still looking backward for signs of the upcoming menace, but that's only if we can decide what the upcoming menace is. Not long ago, people were worried that oil prices would drop to $5 a barrel and we'd have a depression. Two years before that, those same people were worried that oil prices would rise to $100 a barrel and we'd have a depression. Once they were scared that the money supply was growing too slow. Now they're scared that it's growing too fast. The last time we prepared for inflation we got a recession, and then at the end of the recession we prepared for more recession and we got inflation.

Someday there will be another recession, which will be very bad for the stock market, as opposed to the inflation that is also very bad for the stock market. Maybe there will already have been a recession between now and the time this is pub-lished. You're asking me?

All growth begins as a weakness.

Piercing question:

“If someone came as a disciple of your life, and lived the way you live for a week, what would be the fruit of that for them?”

—John Eldredge

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

Bullet number two is interesting.