Discipline

The Law of the Nail

by Andy Wood on March 19, 2010

in Executing Your Plan, Five LV Laws, LV Cycle, Principle of Increase

Ever hear of the Law of the Hammer?  Also called The Law of the Instrument, it has been attributed to both Abraham Maslow and Abraham Kaplan (neither of whom were carpenters, I don’t think).

The Law of the Hammer is based on the idea that people tend to look for cure-alls or over-use familiar tools, especially in dealing with people.  It says, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

Wise.  In other words, diversify your toolbox.

I’m not a carpenter either, and six months of bending nails in 1979-80 can attest to that.  But I’ve spent a lot of my life building, working with, leading, and being an instrument of healing to people.  And I have observed a corollary to the Law of the Hammer that is important to remember in dealing with people.  I call it The Law of the Nail:

If you are a nail, and especially if you’ve been pounded a time or two, everything (and everybody) looks like a hammer.

I’ve been on all sides of that.  I’ve been the nail.  Banged the nail.  Straightened out bent nails.  Sat in on more than my share of Nails Anonymous meetings (including pastors’ prayer meetings).  I’ve hired nails to go to work for me without realizing how pounded they had been.  And I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that living in a broken world means working with and leading broken or bruised people.  So at the risk of pounding the metaphor too much (sorry), here are some ideas for finding healing if you are the nail, or in the next post, working with and leading the nails in your organization or workplace. [click to continue…]

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God, the Goose, and the Golden Egg

by Andy Wood on May 1, 2009

in Allocating Your Resources, Five LV Laws, Hoarders, LV Alter-egos, LV Cycle, Principle of Abundance, Protecting Your Investment, Waiting

goose-golden-eggRemember the story Aesop told about the goose and the golden egg?  The implications and applications are powerful, so let’s take another look.

The fable is about a poor farmer who one day discovered in the nest of his pet goose a glittering golden egg.  At first, he thought it must be some kind of trick.  But as he started to throw the egg aside, he had second thoughts and took it in to be appraised instead.

The egg was pure gold!  The farmer couldn’t believe his good fortune.  He became even more incredulous the following day when the experience was repeated.  Day after day, he awakened to rush to the nest and find another golden egg.  He became fabulously wealthy; it all seemed too good to be true.

But with his increasing wealth came greed and impatience.  [click to continue…]

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The Day of Small Things (and People)

by Andy Wood on October 20, 2008

in Ability, Enlarging Your Capacity, Five LV Laws, Life Currency, LV Cycle, Principle of Increase, Uncategorized

You were born little, with bigness in your DNA.

You were born naked, longing to be warmed and dressed.

You were born penniless, and learned fairly quickly that this was not good.

Even of you’re a twin or other multiple, you were born completely alone, but wired to be relational.

You were born on purpose.  And your purpose may still lie in front of you.  (What DO you want to be when you grow up?)

To get from here to there, you will most likely pass through a series of completely lame, boring, and maddeningly time-consuming stages.  Yes, you’ll experience a few leaps.  For the rest, you’d better get used to celebrating some baby steps.

God called it the Day of Small Things.

The Day of Small Things is the crawl that comes before the walk.  The work that comes before the reward.  The doing-something-anything that comes before doing something awesome.  It’s boot camp and kindergarten, school and internships, and progress-before-perfection. [click to continue…]

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The Popcorn Tree

by Andy Wood on September 5, 2008

in Enlarging Your Capacity, LV Cycle, Turning Points

The LifeVesting Cycle

1. Allocate your resources.
2. Explore the possibilities.
3. Follow your passion
4. Execute your plan.
5. Protect your investment.

6. Enlarge your capacity

When I was still a kid, my dad built a flower box for my mom. We got some nice, rich soil from a place behind our house where we had a lot of mulch and trees. She planted some flowers in the box, and we were excited to see what would come out.

What came out was something that at first looked like a weed. But this was no weed. It was a tree. A popcorn tree, my dad said.

I was entranced. It was my first sense of fatherhood and stewardship, all rolled into one.

If you aren’t familiar with them, popcorn trees, or Chinese tallows, grow in moist climates. They grow rapidly, and can get pretty big. They make great shade and ornamental trees, and in the fall, their seeds split open to appear like popcorn.

I watched this little tree take off, and soon we transplanted it from the flower box to the front yard. We got more and more into trees, and soon found four more popcorn trees – then some redbuds and dogwoods. I had this sense of pride and ownership in all of them, but none more than the original – the queen of the yard – as she quickly grew taller than the eaves of our house.

Then one day the unthinkable happened. I came up the street to my house, and found the most horrific sight. Someone (my dad) had taken shears and whacked my tree off at about six feet. The queen of the yard now had a crew cut.

It was ugly.

Shameful.

Hideous.

“Pruning,” he called it.

“Disaster” was what I called it.

Of course, my dad knew a whole lot more about trees and all things agricultural than I ever will. (I once asked him, “How’d you get so smart?” He said, “I keep my ears open and my mouth shut.”)

Anyway, the queen began to reshape. To spread. To grow, not just taller, but shapelier, even more beautiful.

This life lesson became even more applicable to me as I grew spiritually. [click to continue…]

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Go Pull Some Weeds or Something

by Andy Wood on September 4, 2008

in LV Cycle, Protecting Your Investment

The LifeVesting Cycle

Stage 1:  Allocate your resources.
Stage 2:  Explore the possibilities
Stage 3:  Follow your passion
Stage 4:  Execute your plan

Stage 5:  Protect Your Investment

Years ago, a Detroit homeowner went to check on his five-bedroom house.

It was gone.

As in, completely removed down to a vacant lot, gone.

Completely baffled, he asked the Detroit Free Press to help him find out what was going on.  A reporter learned that not only was the house gone, but the deed to the empty lot was in someone else’s name.  What had happened?

For starters, several years had passed since the homeowner had left the city without providing a forwarding address.  Moreover, he had failed to make arrangements for someone to keep the property in repair.  So the house was torn down because a city ordinance called for the removal of neighborhood eyesores.

Gives a whole new meaning to “Snooze, you lose,” doesn’t it?

Want to see a farmer laugh?  Tell him you’re going to plant corn or tomatoes or something, take a three-month vacation, and come back to pick your harvest.  Sorry, Mr. Douglas.  It doesn’t work that way, in Hooterville or anywhere else.  Investments of any type require care and cultivation.  Jesus’ story of the sower and the four types of ground show just how rare a harvest really is. The seed that fell on the hard path became birdseed.  The seed that fell on stony ground sprang up rootless.  And the seed that fell among the thorns choked.

Investments – seeds of all types and the environment they’re planted in – require nourishing.  That means breaking up the hard, resistant places, deepening the shallow places, and pulling the weeds.  Did I mention that this was work?  Where every day hurls new surprises and challenges?  But if the harvest is worth it (and you will wonder at times), then the cultivating is worthwhile.

In order to experience the return you want, your investments require your attention, diligence, and adjustments.  Mind if I switch metaphors?  Hebrews 12 talks about the same idea, only it uses the imagery of a marathon race, and you’re the runner.  Based on the imagery in this chapter, here are four ways to protect your investment: [click to continue…]

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You Can’t Plant if You Don’t Have Any Seeds

by Andy Wood on August 30, 2008

in Allocating Your Resources, LV Alter-egos, LV Cycle

I live in an area in which cotton farming is a multi-million-dollar enterprise.  Care to hazard a guess about how much time the farmers here spend stripping or picking cotton?

About two weeks.

Everything that determines their futures for another year comes down to a two-week process.  And yet, it’s what they do during the other 50 weeks of the year that will make or break the success of their harvest.

It’s all about the cycle, and where they are on it.

You may not be a farmer, but you were created to be a harvester of sorts.  God created you with the capacity to envision a better future and a rewarding eternal state. But in most worthwhile pursuits, you don’t have the luxury of microwaving your results in a matter of minutes.  While his medals were earned in a matter of seconds, Michael Phelps didn’t jump into a pool for the first time in June.  His victories were the crowning achievement of his training cycle.

We, too, experience life in a variety of cycles.  The seasons, economic cycles, and generational cycles come to mind.  LifeVesting is no different.  Each of the Laws of LifeVesting operate on cycles of continuous movement.

Don’t think of these as a locked-in sequence of steps; life is wonderfully much messier than that.  Instead, think of the LifeVesting cycle as a flow of activity, moving from one stage to another.  Over the next few days, I’d like to explore these with you. [click to continue…]

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Connecting the Dots

by Andy Wood on July 22, 2008

in Enlarging Your Capacity, LV Cycle

Connect the Dots 2Yesterday God played “connect the dots” with me.  He used a series of apparently random or loosely-connected ideas to form a whole – a picture of what He’s up to or what He wants to communicate.  I’d like to share what I learned in the process.  So here are the “dots”:

Be Ready
Tim Challies told an amazing story about a crash landing that took place at the Toronto airport in August 2005 during a horrific storm.  The plane overshot the runway and came to a crashing halt.

Some fifteen to twenty seconds had elapsed from the time the aircraft left the runway. Amazingly, the fuselage was largely intact. But as the plane had crossed Convair Drive, fuel had begun to leak and had immediately caught fire. As the plane came to a halt the fire began to spread and to intensify.

Keep in mind that it had been 27 years since a similar incident had happened in Toronto.

For twenty-seven years the firefighters had trained to deal with a situation like this one. An entire generation of firefighters had come and gone without seeing a single incident. They could almost be excused for being under-prepared, slow to respond, slow to act.

They weren’t.  By the time the tower controller activated the airport’s crash alarm, 26 seconds after the flight left the runway, the firefighters were already in route.  They arrived only 52 seconds after the plain left the runway.

Despite twenty seven years without an incident, those firefighters were ready and they responded well in advance of the parameters dictated by safety regulations. In less than a minute they were on the scene and were assisting the passengers. It took less time for them to get to the crash site than it did for fully half of the passengers to leave it.

Fifty-two seconds!  After not having an incident in 27 years.  The key was training.  They had disciplined, trained, and practiced so much that when the crash occurred, they were ready.

[click to continue…]

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Fix My Leaning, But Not Too Much

by Andy Wood on April 14, 2008

in Enlarging Your Capacity, LV Cycle

PisaThe people in Pisa needed professional help.  Seems their most famous landmark was, well, leaning.

Well, duh!

Actually, a few years ago someone discovered that the Tower was very slowly beginning to lean too much.  So the city fathers had an emergency meeting and decided there was only one thing to do.  They would bring in architects and professional builders who would make sure the tower didn’t topple over.  One mandate, however:  keep the tower from falling over, but don’t correct the tilt!  In other words, make sure it stays like it is.  After all, who would travel to see the standing Tower of Pisa?

It’s amazing the time and effort – sometimes even large amounts of money – we will invest in order to remain the same.  And that in a world where the constant is change.

If you’re reading this, regardless of who you are, change is the one thing that is required of you, as well.  It’s the one thing you and I have in common.  It’s also the one thing we have a tendency to resist.  Leo Tolstoy once said, “Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one wants to change himself.”

Jesus once told a story about a farmer, some seed, and four types of ground.  The seed, He said was the “word of the Kingdom.”  Only one kind of ground (a type of heart) received the seed to the degree that it made lasting change.  Something would have to change about the ground to experience the maximum effect (change) of the seed.

There are four types of life change, based on the Parable of the Sower.  You are somewhere on this list right now:

[click to continue…]

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