Methodology

Leading overseas is exactly like leading in your home country. Except you don’t speak the language, know the customs or feel emotionally stable. After living in Slovenia for the last 6 months and leading a team of incredible friends as we trust God for a student-led movement following Jesus, I’ve learned a few things. This is the advice I’d give if I could give a pep-talk to my pre-departure self. 1. Acknowledge that you are under-qualified. Two weeks of training and one year of vocational ministry experience before moving to a country where you don’t speak the language is not enough to be qualified. My team of recent college grads were all as qualified as I was to lead a team. Unfortunately, everyone was completely perplexed about what it would take to build a movement of college students making disciples of Jesus. Embrace all of your inadequacies. You can’t lead on your own, but God can lead through you. ...

Subscriptions are the future of sustainable, growing businesses. They can also change your life. It’s obvious by the success of Spotify ($10 a month for all the ad-free music you want, wherever you want), crazy ideas like The Dollar Shave Club ($6 per month and you never have to think about buying razors again) and specialty products like Tonx coffee ($24 per month and you have the freshest, tastiest coffee delivered to your doorstep) that subscriptions are catching on and they aren’t disappearing soon. Businesses love subscriptions because they generate recurring income with no added costs. While they are beautiful for business, costs compound quickly for consumers.  We all have a finite amount of subscriptions we can support based on our income, but we can transpose the subscription-model idea to our time as well. **I call it subscription limitation. ...

Budgeting is like a magic trick: everyone is impressed when they see it done but few have the guts to try it for themselves. Prepare for the tricks of budgeting to be demystified as we pull back the curtain to enable you to make your own cash-flow plan with ease. There are a lot of tasks here, but they all fall under three main steps (via The Prestige)–the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige.  The Pledge **Committing to changing your financial reality. ...

I haven’t been bored since 2007. That was my freshman year of college when I thought taking 12 credit hours was exhausting and I took three naps each afternoon. I’ve fallen in love with learning over the last few years. I always have something new on my radar to learn. Coding. A new language. A skill to refine. Learning prevents me from accruing multi-nap days and it helps make my life matter. Below, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite ways to destroy boredom. **...

You may be prone to missing deadlines for work or school projects. You may leave your friends waiting so often that they have to tell you an earlier time than everyone else when you are meeting somewhere. You may be the person no one wants in their group because you’re just not dependable. or You could be the person who always finishes projects on time, arrives 5 minutes early to everything and wears a cape and spandex when it comes to group projects. If you’re in the first group, you don’t intend to be. Some disconnect happens between when an expectation is communicated and the result that you produce. Personally, I’m more than a little OCD. I hate being late, missing a deadline or not carrying my weight. I haven’t always been that way, though. One principle changed that all for me. Are you ready for the reason some of us (maybe you) can’t help but drop the ball? ...

If you think learning stops when your formal education ends, you’re wrong. It’s a lifelong process, especially if you want to have a meaningful life that makes an impact on the world. Over the last six months as we’ve lived abroad in Ljubljana, Slovenia, we’ve stumbled through a few hours of Slovene language class each week with a tutor. It’s not our primary focus while we’re here, but it’s been helpful in understanding the world around us and connecting with students. Practically everyone in Ljubljana speaks English. Only 2 million people in the world speak Slovene, so it means the world to Slovenes when they discover we’re actually attempting to learn the language. They’re honored that we’d invest time to learn their language–especially since it’s not essential to life here.  In fact, that’s the most difficult thing about learning the language: you don’t have to learn Slovene in order to survive. It’s inconvenient not knowing what everything means at the store or when you suspect people are talking about you on the bus once they hear your North American accent, but it’s equal to the frustration of not being able to find the remote control and having to get off the couch to turn up the TV volume. It’s a rare exception when I have to push my Slovene language to the limits to communicate something (in which case I string 12 nouns together and make hand motions to communicate). Since everyone speaks English, once I make a mistake using Slovene, people automatically switch to English to help out the gringos. But that doesn’t actually help. It keeps me from using the language. It keeps me from actually learning. That’s how I realized the first step to learning anything. [ ...

Crafting beautiful designs and compositions will get you far in life. It will get you extra far on the Internet. I never took a true design course in college. I took one Art History class where I learned worthless crap (artist names from the 15th century) and important CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which is more helpful than memorizing 15th century artists) and that’s about it. Everything I’ve learned has been from the Internet, conversations with friends and examining quality design. I love designing invitations, advertisements, t-shirts, thank-you cards and documents.It’s a skill that anyone can develop and it’s one that will pay serious dividends in the way of cost savings from doing your own work instead of hiring it out and could bring in some cash if you’re good enough to do some freelance work on your own.  There are unemployed designers people who have doctorates in Art Hisotry who may disagree with what I say below. They’re totally entitled to their opinions that they paid someone else too much to develop for them. This stuff works, trust me. **Without further ado, practically everything I know about design that will carry you down the road of being a self-made designer. ...

Feedback is one of our greatest assets in life. Unfortunately, we don’t always get it as often as we’d like or sometimes at all. Instead of waiting for someone to give me insight, I crafted 30 questions to ask myself to see how I’m doing from my perspective. Hopefully these questions will help you become more self-aware and more effective in the work you’re doing.  ...

When I was leading a Bible Study for leaders in our movement at Ohio University, I wanted to spend time affirming the guys in my group and helping them encourage one another. Just before we started our Bible Study, I scrapped our plan for that evening and the Encouragement Hot Seat_ _was born. Here’s how it works. Everyone sits in a circle, and we randomly start with one member of the group. It’s great if the group leader (or the one who has arranged for the The Seat_ _to happen) selects a person to start with and then sets the tone for the time.  Say we start with Charlie. I, as the leader, spend 20-60 seconds or so telling Charlie what I admire about him, appreciate about him, and how I have seen him growing and developing. Each other person in the circle takes their turn sharing about what they see in Charlie until everyone in the group has spent time encouraging him. Then we move on to another person and the process repeats. None of this has to have a clear flow or direction–just let people start speaking as they feel led. People will naturally know when it’s their turn to encourage. The Encouragement Hot Seat has become one of my favorite activities for uplifting a team or group (especially in winter months). It’s incredibly simple, and I love it for four huge reasons. ...

Reading books is helpful, but remembering and putting into practice what you’ve learned are equally important. There’s no sense in learning something but not applying it (especially true when it comes to the Bible, see Luke 11:28). I’ve struggled for a long time to figure out the best way to track things I’ve read and store the life-changing pieces of text to reference later and continue to apply. I love what John Piper says about sentences. What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this:It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%. Well-written sentences that deliver a thought in a new way can change the trajectory of your life. Here’s my process of maximizing a book’s impact, making sure I remember (and apply) the 1% of the book that was most significant (and any percent beyond that is just gravy). ...