My wife and I met our first child a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a crazy ride full of ups and downs and little lessons.
Not long after my wife got pregnant, I started keeping a list called,
“Lessons From Living With A Pregnant Wife.”
While I kind of forgot about the list at times over the last 9 months, I still did a pretty good job of capturing things as they came.
Here you go, 15 lessons from living with a pregnant wife…
Less can be more
You only get 140 characters
Like in twitter, sometimes less is more. I’ve learned this lesson in many conversations I’ve had recently. You see, I like to talk. I’m learning, though, that sometimes I can learn more by saying less. Just listening can go a long way in us learning and others understanding that we care.
I’ve been a Dad for about a week.
It’s an amazing feeling.
I was supposed to become a Daddy on May 17 according to doctors, but God had a little different plan. Instead, our son was born April 8 about 6 weeks early. As I look back over a whirlwind week, I’m reminded of these 3 things about love.
My first book releases in just a couple of months. It’s a project that I have to be honest in saying that I didn’t want. I didn’t want to spend hours and months writing a book… not with all that I have going on and all of the things I have my hands in on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, after some prodding from a publisher and the Holy Spirit, I agreed to begin working on a leadership book for younger leaders. Being a pretty organized person, one of the first things I knew I had to do was organize all of the ideas and content in a way that made sense to me. Writing Next Up took plenty of time… I didn’t want to have an unorganized mess to work through while I was writing.
Below I’m going to outline how I organized all of my content, notes, outlines, and ideas in Evernote. I’m an Evernote believer (I was before this) even more so now. Evernote made writing my first book a less frustrating experience.
Social media is here to stay.
If you were one of the ones that was reluctant to admit it, you need to come to the place where you’re willing to admit that social media is sticking around. Sure, it will change and evolve, but it will be here in some form for any foreseeable future.
As leaders (young leaders especially) we have to learn to embrace how social media can help us accomplish our vision and goals. In reality, it’s a great tool for us to utilize in so many ways.
What I too often see are people and leaders that greatly reduce their influence and others’ perception of them by the things they put on social media. Sometimes, it’s like they aren’t using social media but allowing themselves to be used by social media because they feel like they have to post everything they think of.
Here are 3 things to remembers as you utilize social media. They’re pretty basic, but some important parameters…
The Benjaminite answered, “Israel ran away from the Philistines, and the Israelite army has lost many soldiers. Your two sons are both dead, and the Philistines have taken the Ark of God.” When he mentioned the Ark of God, Eli fell backward off his chair… (1 Samuel 4:17, 18 NCV)
I’ve read this passage before.
I read it again a couple of weeks ago.
The thing that always surprises me?
Eli’s responses to the 2 reports he received.
A few weeks ago I was watching TV and saw an interesting program title on National Geographic. Having found nothing particularly great on before, I stopped to watch a little while.
The show was about some of the wild’s most dangerous animals. One of the animals they mentioned was the tiger.
As the show continued, they told us that the tiger can run at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. 30! That’s pretty stinking fast. The catch is, though, that they have very low stamina. In fact, they showed a chase between a tiger and another animal that ended in the tiger running out of energy and missing out on a meal.
No one likes to be told lies.
No one likes to be mislead or believe something about someone or something that just isn’t true.
The truth is, though, is that we live in a society and a world that is constantly telling us lies. The worst part, many times we tell ourselves lies. As a result, we’ve mislead ourselves by allowing culture to form what we believe about ourselves and our life.
Here are 4 lies we often tell ourselves…
He is the one you should praise; he is your God, who has done great and wonderful things for you, which you have seen with your own eyes. (Deuteronomy 10:21 NCV)
1. God deserves our praise.
We give our attention and admiration to a lot of different things. With a culture that is focused so much on self and self image, we even tend to resort to praising ourselves. The truth? Only God deserves praise. Sure, we should appreciate people and the things that we have, but nothing else deserves our praise… our admiration… our life.
“You’ll never know if you don’t ask.”
How many times have we heard that or even said that statement? A bunch. There’s a good reason for that, though. That statement is true. We never know what we’re unwilling to ask or find an answer to.
As young leaders, one of the greatest practices we can learn is to ask good questions. Asking good questions to ourselves and others helps us grow, mature, and learn.
Here are 3 questions great young leaders ask…