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“The future is bi-vocational”

This post is my reflection and notes on the book “The Future is Bi-vocational” by Andrew Hamilton (Hamo), a Perth pastor and small business owner / reticulation guy arguing that churches should start shifting away from assuming “full time pastors” is the right way to lead a church community, and arguing that people who can lead churches might have a lot to benefit from having a different non-church job as well. It’s an easy read, well written, full of stories from his decades of experience. The target audience seems to be existing full-time pastors, or students studying to work in church, but if like me you already have a different career but sense a pull to contribute to your church community in a way that’s slightly more than just volunteering… it’s still a great read – convincing and inspiring. Available on Amazon, or probably local Christian bookstores if you’re in Australia.

Before I share my notes and takeaways, here’s a reflection on where I’m at, and what I had in mind as I started reading.

I was only five or six years old the first time I had a sense that when I was a grown up I’d likely do pastoral work, serving and leading a church community.

That sense stayed with me all through school, and into university. Though I chose to study Multimedia Design rather than go to a bible college or seminary, I still kind of assumed that ultimately it was just filling in time until some kind of a church role. By the time I was in uni I was volunteering a lot, leading groups the size of a small church, sometimes even preaching. And when I was doing those things there was a grace to it: things flowed, there was wind in the sails, there was energy in the room.

Of course part of it was some natural talent, some hard work, some early-adulthood energy. But there was also something more than that, beyond what you would expect from natural talent or effort… something undeserved. A grace.

I was so sure I’d end up working in church that I almost turned down my first software engineering job. I’m glad I didn’t.

I was newly married and Anna was sick, I’d become the sole income earner, and I didn’t want to take the job because I thought I was likely to get one at church within a few months. But I felt a sense that God was saying to me: “this is me taking care of you”. So I took the job. Software jobs pay a lot better than church jobs, which helped. A few months later the church had layoffs… it turns out I wouldn’t have gotten that role anyway.

Over in the software industry I found there was a grace that followed me around there too. Yes I had skills, yes I worked hard, but there were also opportunities I wouldn’t and couldn’t have orchestrated. Whether it’s cultural privilege or being blessed or something else, I’m not sure, but it was beyond what I felt I deserved. Again – grace.

And then, 15-ish years into this career, some thoughts start bubbling up, something is stirring, and I start thinking about the church stuff again. About using my skills, and finding that grace, in a church context. Don’t get me wrong, I love my work and career, and don’t plan on leaving… but there’s an internal pull to explore the grace of serving a church community, again.

Both to traditional church – using my skills in leading groups and public speaking to help people connect with each other and with God. But also in less traditional forms of community – facilitating community meetups, speaking at tech conferences. Being friends with people in the community so you’re available to help them find their way in key life moments – births, deaths, sickness and hospital stays, marriages and breakups. Helping kids and teenagers feel a sense of community they can belong to beyond their family and school friends.

It’s all stirring together into something. In amongst still enjoying my career and intending to continue it.

So when my mum mentioned her friend was writing a book called “The Future is Bi-vocational”, my interest was piqued.

Now that I’ve shared part of the story of my vocations – I’ll share what I learned from Andrew Hamilton’s book.

The future is bi-vocational

In the opening chapter Hamo remembers a conversation when he was about to start a new church, and he was given advice that “a viable church had 100 members and that I needed to grow my congregation to that point as soon as possible”. And so begins the unwinding of a bunch of assumptions about how to run a church: do you need to pay the salary of someone full time for the community to be viable?

For most of Christianity’s 2000 year history, we’ve had full time pastors who hold a privileged position in the community. But as society becomes both more secular, and also more religiously diverse at the same time, the assumption that a pastor can work in a church building, and the community will come to them, is not holding up anymore. That’s the mission problem we’re facing – it’s hard to care for a community if you’re in a building and the community doesn’t come to your building anymore. Also our suburban western culture often is suspicious of interactions with strangers, and so just leaving the building and starting up a conversation without a shared reason is also not an effective way to build relationships.

Then there’s the financial problem – as market pressures squeeze small churches in the same way big supermarkets squeeze small corner-stores, we’ll see increasing trends of there not being enough people in the small local churches to sustain a full time role through members giving part of their pay-cheque to the church. Bigger churches get better “economies of scale” for the surface level things people consider when church shopping: the quality of the Sunday preaching, music, and kids programs. A megachurch might be more financially efficient and effective in putting on a good Sunday service, but putting on a good Sunday service was never what church was supposed to be about. So the big churches start to attract people because of their more efficient and higher quality Sunday services, but then they need to spend their staff time on those services. The small churches can’t afford a full time pastor anymore, especially as they keep seeing their people switch to the bigger churches with the better weekend programs.

This feels like an existential problem for Christian churches… but in it Hamo sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Once in a lifetime is probably actually too common: it feels like this might be one of the ~500 year moments in church history that Phyllis Tickle talks about. The shift is coming, the cultural forces behind are probably unstoppable, and what church looks like on the other side won’t be what it looks like now. And therein lies the opportunity which he makes the case for.

He’d started his career assuming if a pastor needed two jobs, it was a sad interim state to pay the bills. But his experience has been that the setup is rewarding for a variety of reasons, and in this he sees the opportunity for the church to transform itself and be more true to its values, more effective in serving the community, and closer to the vision of a “priesthood of all believers” that Jesus intended for us.

Here’s my notes on some of the things that stood out to me in the book.

No spectators

Remember the board game Pictionary, where people played in pairs, with one person sketching and another trying to guess what they were drawing, while everyone else watched? Often church is a bit like this. However, it ought to be more like the “all play” moments in Pictionary, where everyone is involved in drawing and guessing and no one is spectating.

One of the significant benefits that can come from a shift into the bi-vocational mode is that a sometimes-dormant church, with minimal congregational engagement, is challenged to step up and function as a cohesive unit. The body metaphor Paul uses in 1 Corinthians to describe the church community means simply ‘attending’ a church should never be an option. Everyone has a role to play, and a job to do, in order to keep the body healthy. Anyone can ‘turn up’. It’s another thing altogether to discover your own unique gifts, and then to serve alongside the others in your community.

I loved this line of thinking. In the same chapter he proposes a hypothetical situation: what if a church got up on Sunday and announced that all the paid staff halved their hours, and would be taking other jobs. How would the wider community respond? Would it do less? Is there work or programs that staff are keeping alive that aren’t really worth it? Or would the rest of the community pitch in and do more? Spreading the load among a wider group, and including a more diverse range of skills, gifts and experience.

Take this example: a church pays someone to coordinate crisis care for homeless and vulnerable people. Does the existence of this role mean people in the community think “that is someone’s job, I can leave it to them?” What happens if that job disappears, or is halved? Does the community step in and fill the gap?

Views of work

I love the way Hamo unpacked some of the prevailing views of work in the church:

  • Work as cursed: we only work because this is a broken world. We didn’t work in the Garden of Eden, we won’t work in Heaven… we have to do it now, but that’s a shame.From a bible perspective, humans were working even back in the paradise of the Garden of Eden – work was part of the perfect plan, not part of the fallen broken version of reality. Work often is broken and feels cursed now, but fundamentally it’s supposed to be a good, creative, and meaningful pursuit.
  • Work as income: we only work because we need the money. You also see this in technology-optimist or anti-capitalist thinking: if we just had enough technological automation or free clean energy, we could eliminate all toil. If we just had strong welfare, or universal basic income, we wouldn’t need to work. Another take is that work is about wealth accumulation, the harder you work the more money you get, and more is good.He reminds us that the Christian view is clear that a good day of work deserves good pay, but it’s also clear that toiling your life to earn wealth isn’t worth it. Yes we work to earn money, but making it just about the money strips us of the bigger meaning, and the dignity, in the value we provide.
  • Work as service: Reminding ourselves that it’s not just about doing the tasks or getting the pay check, but the work we do provides value for someone, and doing it in a way that shows that person honour and respect and love, doing our work to serve them (and of course, still get paid), is a higher view of work.
  • Work as worship: There’s a Christian work ethic spelled out by Paul in his letter to Colossians: work hard, as if you’re working for God and not just your boss. Hamo pointed out that the link between work and worship actually goes deeper, with a single Hebrew word being used in each of these places:
    • Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest (Exodus 34)
    • Let me people go, so they may worship me (Exodus 8)
    • But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24)
    All 3 of these verses, the word in italics is the Hebrew ʿāḇaḏ (עָבַד). The same word covers meaning from labour to tilling the ground to service to others to worship of God. I love moments like this, where you realise the language and culture you grew up in had a whole bunch of assumptions, but another language and culture uses words completely differently, and it shifts your world-view. The everyday labour we do can be an act of sacred worship.

Advantages of bi-vocational model

Often Christian ministers call the idea of a second job “tentmaking”, a reference to the second job held by the apostle Paul, who was the most prolific writer in the Christian scriptures. His other job, which helped pay the bills, was making tents. In the chapter “Tentmaking – it’s not about the tents”, Hamo fleshes out some of the reasons why having a role outside the church is actually beneficial even for the work you do in the church context:

  • Credibility: demonstrating you’re a hard working person with decent values, and you’re not just here to ask for money or to enjoy the status that comes with a leadership role.
  • Positioning: you’re more likely to interact day-to-day with the kind of people that you’re hoping to serve. If you work in a church your connection with the wider community can be pretty limited because you don’t have natural places to interact with the community around you.
  • Visibility: people will see how you work, and how your values hold up “in the real world”. It’s a chance to demonstrate the different values we preach about, in a visible way so people know it’s real for you.
  • Freedom: as a church leader sometimes you need to challenge the community, rather than give them what they want. If you’re relying on them for donations, then you might be afraid to say the hard truths. You see a similar dynamic with politicians and their donors.
  • Funding: relying on people giving from their income is always going to be limited. If you can sustain an income in a different way, it gives you more options for how you can do the church-based work without being limited by the bank balance.
  • Flexibility: some roles allow you to move more freely. Either because the skills are in demand in different areas, or because they open the door for visas and migration, or because they allow “work from anywhere”. Some roles also allow flexibility in hours, either at a week-to-week or a seasonal level, which might match the flexibility you need for your work in the church community.
  • Example: you want the whole church community to treat their work as worship, and a chance to bless the people around them. You can set the example. No one can say “it’s easy for you to say, you’re paid to do this”, when you do it in amongst your other work too.
  • Generosity: we say “it is more blessed to give than to receive”, and having an independent financial income allows you to live more generously than if you are reliant on receiving other people’s gifts to make your way.

In later chapters he outlines more personal reasons why a bi-vocational approach might suit, or not suit, depending on your particular personality. But these reasons I’ve listed are the competitive advantages he outlines for if someone chooses to do their church work with a bi-vocational approach.

“How do people become like Jesus around here?”

This was one of the reflection questions in the book that stopped and made me think the longest. What does that look like at my church? Do I think the way we operate is effective in helping people live like Jesus?

I particularly appreciated this push towards pastors, as the ones leading the community, leading with the example of their own life:

What is certain is that for your leadership to have credibility, and to form people into Christ, it has to come from lived experience deep in the gut, rather than clever theories of the head. It must echo a genuine encounter with Jesus. If it doesn’t, your people will know, and it just won’t fly. Any competent leader can run a church, organise meetings, and develop strategies, but what is most needed from a pastor is the ongoing experience of knowing and following Jesus, as well as the ability to help others have these transformative encounters.

As a bi-vocational pastor, it will always be tempting to skip the disciplines and practices that form us, and to get on with the various tasks that demand your time. But a pastor who isn’t ministering from a centred life is worse than no pastor at all.

There are countless books that can help you engage in practices that form you and allow you to encounter Jesus, but the bottom line is that it must happen and it has to be real. You cannot rely on your organisational skills, or preaching skills, to get you by. Your energy must come from a life earthed in a relationship with Jesus.

A useful, challenging reminder for me.

Some of the reflection questions at the end of this chapter were also great:

  • “How do people become like Jesus around here?” How would you answer that question for your own church?
  • The way a ‘centred life’ looks will depend on your current life stage. How does it look for you at present?
  • If you aren’t living a life centred on Jesus, then what can you change to put this key element in place?
  • Describe the culture of the church you hope for. If this is different from the church culture you currently experience, how can you help the church change directions?

Nuts and bolts of leading a team that’s structured like this

There’s a chapter where he maps out some of the pragmatic realities of trying to lead a church without a single full time pastor. First of these is about how you build a team to cover all the bases. Building a wider team of people who are not full time means you get a wider diversity of skills, experience and gifting. This is a good thing! You will have the things you are exceptionally good at, and also things you’re terrible at. Sharing the load means you can focus on your strengths, and find people whose strengths complement yours.

He leans on the work of Alan Hirsch who uses some archetypal roles from Ephesians 4 to think about different skill sets in a diverse church leadership team:

  • Apostle: the pioneer. Seeing new opportunities and having the drive and initiative to make them happen and lead a group towards them.
  • Prophet: the truth teller. Questioning the status quo, and calling people back when they’re on a dangerous path.
  • Evangelist – the recruiter. Drawing in other people to the mission, often focused outside the church community.
  • Shepherd – the nurturer. Caring and protecting people, helping them grow to maturity.
  • Teacher – the communicator. Able to teach people things about life and faith in a way that helps them grow.

The other part of the nuts and bolts is the prioritisation – you simply can’t get everything done. This is very familiar to me from a software engineering career: there is always more work that could be done. There’s never a true “finish” point.

He suggests one of the tools we use at work too: a simple Urgency/Important matrix, with these kinds of examples:

  • Not important, not urgent: organising your desk, archiving emails, useless meetings.
  • Not important, but urgent: phone calls, texts, some meetings.
  • Not urgent, but important: forward planning, relationship development, values clarification, strategic teaching prep.
  • Important, urgent: crisis response, sermon preparation, pressing team or culture problems.

As a part timer, you probably need to accept that the amount you get done will never feel like enough compared to all the things you could do. So you need to focus, and be okay with saying no. You need the things in both “important” quadrants. And you probably need to get used to saying “no” to some things that are urgent, but not that important. Whether you hand it off to someone else, or just accept that it’s okay for it to not get done – that is okay.

Other audiences for the same message

So I found this book really helpful. As someone with a full time career that’s not related to church at all, and as someone who grew up with both parents in full time careers that are about serving the church, having a clear and compelling case made for “why not both” was super helpful.

As I neared the end of the book the degree to which the practical advice in the book was geared towards those who default to full time church work, but are considering bi-vocational, struck me. I’m coming from the other direction, and similarly practical advice would be useful there. If the future really is bi-vocational, we need to not only convince some pastors to take on other jobs, we need to convince a whole lot of people with full time careers to dial back their ambitions there to make some space for a church-serving vocation as well.

The day I bought this book was actually when Hamo came to speak at my church, and I didn’t put together that he was the author of the book mum had mentioned until the end, but I loved his message. It was targeted more at those with existing careers, but from an angle of seeing your work as an opportunity for service and worship, rather than carving out space for explicit work in and for the church.

The sermon is online and well worth a listen. The opening story was so cringe-worthy and I was definitely expecting it to have some corny redeeming plot-twist, and the fact that it didn’t, the story ending without any resolution to the awkwardness, immediately helped me respect where this guy was coming from: no bullshit.

If you’re interested in a 40 minute talk rather than a 200 page book, this is a great place to start:

So, is my future bi-vocational too?

Yep, I think so.

Categories
Faith Personal Reading & Inspiration

Reading Notes: “Christianity After Religion” by Diana Butler Bass

(Still some TODOs in here, but I’m posting anyway and hope to get back to them) I first came across Diana Butler Bass on her Twitter account. I can’t remember how I came across her, but I’ve appreciated her voice, her tweet-thread-sermons, her perspective on current affairs and more. So when a family member gave me a book voucher to a local Christian bookstore that didn’t seem likely to stock much I was interested in, I was stoked to see they could order in one of her books. And that’s how I ended up reading “Christianity After Religion”. When it arrived and I read the praise on the cover from Richard Rohr and Rob Bell, I hoped I was in for something good.

The main point

Since the 1960s the USA (and other western nations) have seen a massive change in how they’d describe their religious/faith life. A common line has been “I’m spiritual, not religious” and rather than being a thoughtless throwaway line, this actually captures a big part of what this shift is about. Rather than viewing it purely as a move toward secularism, DBB argues this is an awakening – in the spirit of America’s past great awakenings. This is faith evolving, not faith disappearing. By changing the way kinds of questions we ask when we approach a life of faith, and by changing the order in which we ask them, we can participate in this new awakening – an exciting evolution in what it means to be Christian, or even what it means to be human – and some would argue, an exciting movement of God.

Overview

The “spiritual vs religious” dichotomy isn’t describing two opposites, rather it’s a lense to understand how our people’s experience of their faith is changing. We can broadly break experience of religion of spiritual life into three categories:
  • Belief – how we understand the world and it’s meaning
  • Behaviour – how we choose to live, and the habits which make up our life
  • Belonging – the sense of community and shared purpose
For each of these categories, DBB looks at how Christianity (and American Protestantism in particular) has approached this category, and the questions it has deemed most important to ask. These are the “religious” questions. She then offers alternative “spiritual” questions: ways of revisiting the same category with a different approach, focused on lived experience.

Belief

Often when we think of “belief” in the context of religion we think of doctrine. Belief in a god. Belief in the Christian bible as an authoritative text about God. Belief in the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or the 7-day creation. Some things are easy to believe in – we’re pretty sure a person called Jesus of Nazareth existed – but many are increasingly hard to take literally. TODO: copy the questions asked This chapter concluded with some amazing examples of Christian communities writing their own creeds. Creeds were written by communities at points in time – a point DBB made in this twitter thread that I found memorable. After reading this section of the book, I journal led and wrote out, for the first time in a long time, not a description of what I no longer believed, but a description of what I still believe.

Behaviour

When we think of “behaviour” in the context of religion, we often think of moral guidelines. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t drink, don’t look at porn, don’t charge interest on loans… Do look after the needy, do love your neighbour, do attend a religious service etc. Beyond this though, a lively faith usually consists of habits, or spiritual practices, that make up the day-to-day of our life. When the purpose of such habits isn’t understood, they lose meaning, they become meaningless rituals. But when learned carefully, many habits and practices have a transformative impact on your life. DBB uses floristry as an analogy. Her family were florists for generations, and she learned the craft by sitting in the workshop with her dad, gradually gaining the skills herself. This kind of gradual exposure, where an experienced practitioner shows you, guides you, and gives you increasingly challenging work until you are fully competent – is similar to many spiritual practices. Another thing we can learn from this analogy, is that people are less like to simply do what their parents did. Where successive generations in her family had all been florists, she has chosen a different career, because these days, you have options. When it comes to our spiritual habits and practices and rituals… this is even more true. TODO: copy the questions asked

Belonging

For a long time, belonging meant having an identity tightly linked to the religious community you are part of (and probably grew up in). “I am baptist” or “I am catholic” or “I’m part of Riverview Church”. There was an assumed stasis in this model: you’ve always been one of us, you are one of us, you will always be one of us. You’ve always been here, you are here, you will always be here. But most stories of faith are journey stories: Abraham leaving the land he grew up in, Moses leaving Egypt, the fishermen leaving their nets to follow Jesus. We need to craft a different identity that respects this journeying nature of faith. And a way of belonging that allows growth, change, pilgrimage and exile, and still offers community, acceptance and love. A traditional approach to identity asks “who am I?”, and Christianity has encourage you to ask “who am I in God?” One of my favourite moments in this section was reframing the question: “who is God in me?” Where and how does God act in the world through my life? How can people I interact with experience God through my actions? TODO: copy the questions asked

Reversal

After examining these three categories and asking how we can revisit them through a “spiritual” lense, DBB did my favourite thing in the book: she suggested we reverse the order we tackle these questions in the faith journey. Rather than beginning with “belief” (you must believe in the trinity, and creation, and the resurrection, and the virgin birth, and whatever other doctrine is hard to literally believe), then progressing to behaviour (follow these moral guidelines and adopt these habits) and then being able to experience belonging, DBB suggests we approach it the other way. Begin with belonging: unconditional acceptance, loving community. From there learn the way of life: the habits and the choices that shape your faith (behaviour). And from here, you will begin to find your beliefs changing. You might find you believe in the resurrection after all: but it is coming from having experienced yourself countless ways where life overturns death. By reversing the order we no longer have as our starting point adherence to a religious doctrine. Rather, we have as our starting point an experience of love and community, and the entire faith journey now takes that approach. And when people say “I’m spiritual, not religious” – this is part of the distinction. The starting place is experience, and the whole journey is lived experience.

Awakening

The book ended on a real message of hope. DBB looks back at the three great awakenings of the past, and in the debate about if there was/is a fourth great awakening, she joins the group who sees the social and religious change beginning in the 1960s constitutes a new great awakening. People began exploring new ways of experiencing faith, experiencing God, and this came out of, and fed back into, massive cultural changes. She describes her college campus in the late 1970s having multiple thriving communities and chapters of people taking their faith and discipleship seriously, resulting in a bold vision for what could be in the world. It certainly felt like a religious awakening. Something new and bold and exciting was happening, and it felt like God was very active in it. But then she returned to the campus in the 1980s, this time as faculty, and the life was gone, the diversity was gone, the experimentation and bold visions for change were gone. Replacing it where some standard Christian groups pushing a standard political/conservative agenda. DBB paints the growing political power of the “religious right”, the “moral majority”, Ronald Reagan and co, as a pushback against the awakening – and describes how similar pushbacks have happened in past awakenings. This time however, something that began in the 1960s is continuing over half a century later… the pushback was significant, and so the change is drawn out. In describing past push-backs, she seems to describe the rise of Donald Trump. (The book was written while Obama was still president, but the rise of tea party conservatism was evident). It’s interesting to frame the success of conservative evangelicalism – in political power, in megachurch attendance, in mindshare – not as the awakening, but as the pushback on the real awakening. Though it uses the language of revival, and the metaphors and service structures of past awakenings, this is actually by now the old thing, and the comfortable thing, and the thing some are trying to protect from change. But as she describes this tension between the “old lights” and the “new lights”, she describes the new light in ways that I completely identify with: for all of the struggle I’ve had with the church and structure and faith I’ve grown up in, she describes exactly the bits that I’m still holding onto, the values I hold most dear, and the hope and vision I have for what a renewed world might look like. In reading this, I suddenly felt less like I (and those like me) are stepping away from our faith, and more like the steps we’re taking are part of a journey of renewal. It does feel like upheaval and uncertainty, but it’s not an abandoning of faith, it’s faith finding a new form to match the world we now live in. And the world we now live in is globally connected, and past modes of tribalism over religious dogma no longer make sense when we can see the other tribes, and see that they too are human, and we can see that despite our differences the fruit is good, and so we’re learning that our religion isn’t the only way to meet God, our tree isn’t the only tree that produces good fruit – we can learn from each other, and perhaps we can discover that God has been showing up to all people in all cultures and religions. And perhaps this acknowledgement that God can show up to anyone in any culture or religion should have been more obvious to us from the beginning:
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Acts 17
And so every religion worldwide seems to have up-shoots of renewal at the moment. We’re seeing up close people who we’d used to consider “other”, and discovering they’re not so different. And there’s a tribalistic pushback, but in many ways, this renewal is underway and somewhat unstoppable. Any way of faith which defines at the outset that only some experiences are “valid” and “true” is brushing up against our lived reality that we’re finding God in all aspects of life, on many different and intersecting paths. And this is where we can join in. By joining (or forming) communities. By embracing spiritual practices that lead us to experience God, to love others, and to grow in maturity, and by allowing our beliefs to be formed by the experience of God among us – we can be part of this renewal. It won’t be the last time humanity’s relationship with the divine God needs to adapt and evolve. It’s not the last awakening. It’s not necessarily the greatest awakening. But it’s our generation’s awakening, and our chance to be part of it.
Categories
Personal Reading & Inspiration Work Habits

What I learned from “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky (Book Review)

Making Ideas Happen Book Cover

On Sunday I finished reading “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky (founder of Behance).

7696135I’m the sort of person that has ideas.  So many ideas.  Some are ideas for apps or products, side projects or start-ups, cool programming libraries or fun creative projects.  When I look back at my work history, I am proud of the things that I have “shipped” and finished, or if not finished, at least gotten it “finished enough” that other people could start using it.

But there is definitely a graveyard of good ideas that I was very excited about at one point in time, that I even thought were game-changing, and maybe even started work on, but never managed to finish or get out there.

Gravestone reading "RIP: A Great Idea"As I was wrapping up 2016 and planning for 2017, I realised that I have several ideas that I actually want to see become reality.  Two ideas in particular (tentatively named Enthraler and Model School) I’ve wanted to do for at least 5 years, and have kept not doing.

When we finally launched Today We Learned I found out the pain of launching a good idea too late, and seeing someone else carry a very similar idea to success.  If I wanted 2017 to be different, and if I wanted to be part of these 2 ideas becoming reality, I had to get better at executing on ideas, pushing them forward and getting them out there.  And all of this while having a full-time job that I really love and am already feeling stretched in.

So when my my sister Clare and her husband Zac gave me a book for Christmas that promised to help me “Overcome The Obstacles Between Vision And Reality”, I was eager to get stuck into it.

Disclaimer and caveat: It’s worth pointing out that I’m viewing this book as advice on creative projects, which I’m viewing as distinct to start-ups. Both of them involve ideas, innovation and execution, but there’s a crucial difference.  If you want a start-up to succeed, you should probably not start with an idea.  You should start with a problem that real people hate so much they’ll pay someone to solve it for them.  Find a gnarly problem first, then let your ideas develop around that.  Creative projects on the other hand, start with your idea.  It’s a work of art, as if inspiration has visited and requested that you make an idea real, and it’s your job to make it.  It’s as much about self-expression and creative fulfilment as it is about business development.

Overview

The first half of the book (“Organisation and Execution”) is all about getting it done.  It’s full of practical tips to stay organised, stay focused, and keep pushing ideas forward until they’re ready.  These have made a massive difference for me so far.  The second half (“The Forces of Community” and “Leadership Capability”) focus on the relational aspects of ideas.  Ideas feel their most exciting, and most pure, when they’re in your head.  The moment you start sharing them, and inviting other people in to participate, things change.  This might feel like your idea is losing potency as it gets diluted by others, but it’s only with their help (and with the new aspects they bring to the project), that your idea is going to be successful.  How well you utilise these forces has a massive impact on your ability to consistently bring ideas into reality.

Organisation and Execution

  • The competitive advantage of organisation
  • The action method: work and life with a bias towards action
  • Prioritisation: managing your energy across life’s projects
  • Execution: always moving the ball forward
  • Mental loyalty: maintaining attention and resolve

I was really surprised by how prescriptive Scott is in this first section.  His basic argument is that they key to creative success is actually finishing your projects and getting them out the door, and doing that as often as possible.  The trouble is that ideas are exciting at the start, boring in the middle, a hard slog near the end, and then only get exciting again right before you launch.

A graph depicting energy levels for an idea decreasing during the middle, and new ideas starting and seeming more appealing during the low-energy plateau.
Ideas are exciting at the start, then get boring and hard in the middle, for a long time until you’re ready to ship – and only then does it get exciting again. Beware the temptation to start a new (and exciting!) idea during the project plateau.

So the key to all of Scott’s advice is to just keep you moving forward, one small step at a time, to get you through the trough and out the other side where your idea is finally a reality.  To do this, it takes dozens of small actions.  Focusing on these actions is the key principal in “The Action Method” – Scott’s big idea on how to do this.

Most other productivity books I’ve read have talked about the motivation and less about the mechanics of getting it done, but Scott is quite prescriptive. For example:

  • Organise your whole life into “Projects”.  Not just work projects. Not just side projects. Even mundane things like “grocery shopping” and “remember to call mum” go into a project. He isn’t prescriptive about where to store your projects, but I’ve used Trello.  I have one Trello board for my whole life.  The lists I use are “Home Admin”, “Personal and Social”, “myEd”, “Enthraler”, and “Model School”.
  • Each project has 3 types of things you can store:
    • Action Steps – literally, a specific action you can take to move the project forward.  The first word should be a verb: “Create nice styling for multi-choice component and upload to Github”.  Or “Read through things Cassie sent me and send through feedback”. My friend Stephen had an interesting take on this, going one step further and having a super specific first step in the action.  “Open gmail, read through the docs Frank sent me…”.  The trick here is to make it so obvious what the next step looks like, so whenever you have half an hour to work on something, you can easily pick an action step, start it, and push a project forward.
    • Back-burner Items – these is where you keep possible future action steps that you’re not ready to commit to yet.  Maybe they are ideas for much later in a project, or maybe they need some more thought before you commit to starting them.  Keeping them in a separate place, where you can come back to them, but where they’re not confusing you as to what the next steps should be, helps hugely.In my “Enthraler” project I have 8 ready-to-go Action Steps, and 29 items in the Back-burner.  That goes to show that when I start a new project, I’m excited about the possibilities and I keep thinking them up.  But I know if I want to keep moving the project forward, I just pick one of the Action Steps I’ve already committed to, and all of the exciting future ideas are in the “Backburner” list where they won’t distract me.
    • References – this is for things which you want to remember but they’re not actionable.  An example is finding a colour scheme I really liked for a project.  In the past, I may have taken a screenshot of the colour scheme and added it to a task.  But it’s not really an action I can take!  It’s just something I want to store so I can look back if I need to.  Now I keep things like this in references.  Also helpful: meeting notes, contact details, etc.  Keeping all these things in one separate spot helps keep the clutter down so you can focus on your next action steps.
  • Have a regular “review” session, say once a fortnight or once a month, where you go over your projects, see if the actions are still relevant and clearly defined, check what’s in your back-burner and references, and update things as necessary.  He recommends doing this some place nice, like your favourite coffee shop.  This is a part I haven’t had much practice with yet!

Screenshot of Trello
A screenshot of my projects in Trello. Each list is a project, each card is an action. (There is also a References and a Back-burner card in each list).

The Forces of Community

  • Harnessing the forces around you
  • Pushing ideas out to your community

One of the headings in this section is “Seldom is anything accomplished alone”,  and I find it a perfect reminder.  Some ideas are small enough that they can be accomplished alone, but even something like writing a song will benefit from collaboration.  Not to mention the help you would need in producing, mixing, mastering, distribution and release strategy.  And every project is like this – if you want it to become more than a hobby, you are going to have to bring other people into it.

A key part of this is overcoming the fear of people judging and criticising your work.  Overcome the fear, then get feedback early, and get it often. You don’t have to listen to what people say, if you want you can hold on to the exact vision you have.  But if you overcome the fear, and get the feedback, you will probably hear things that will make your project better, so it’s worth putting yourself out there.

There was a beautiful story in here about a story-telling course Scott went to, where people practised sharing a story, but the audience were not allowed to give “constructive criticism”.  Instead, they were only allowed to share what they really appreciated, what made the story come alive for them.  He found that as people iterated on their stories, this approach helped the “alive” pieces of the story shine even more, and somehow, the weak parts of the story began self-correcting with each iteration, but without losing the strength of the parts that really shone.  I loved that!

One of the things that challenged me the most in the section was to actively self-promote what you’re working on, and to build an audience of people who care about what you’re working on.  If you’ve ever read case studies on a site like “Indie Hackers”, you realise that a common story in side-project success or start-up success is that the person starting had an audience who really cared about what they were working on, so when they launched a new project, they had someone to launch it to.  So don’t be afraid to self-promote and build an audience, and show them what you’re working on regularly.  The fear you have shouldn’t be that you’re inflating yourself in front of others, it should be that you’re not giving your idea any air, and it might die in your mind without ever becoming a reality.

The way Scott consistently reinforced this was a wake-up call for me.

Leadership Capability

  1. The rewards overhaul
  2. The chemistry of the creative team
  3. Managing the creative team
  4. Self leadership

I’d been reading the book thinking primarily about my side projects, which are solo-shows for now.  Scott offered distilled wisdom and advice from his experience and from the research conversations he conducted, and while it’s not immediately applicable to the projects I’d been thinking about, I can definitely see how it ties into my work at myEd, and how it will be important to attract more contributors for any project I do going forward.  It identified a weakness in my approach to executing so far – the tendency to do it all myself.

Much of the advice given in this section was focused on character.  So not so much “how to run a meeting”, but “when in a meeting, let other people talk first and make sure you actually listen”.  Things like that.  I really do believe that humble leaders attract talented collaborators, but more importantly, their humility and strength of character breeds loyalty – which you just don’t see as clearly when it is obvious the leader isn’t paying attention to your input and your ideas.

The difference it has made for me

Reading this book came at the perfect time for me.  After closing down Today We Learned last year I began working full-time at myEd, but found I was still swimming with ideas for outside projects. By the time the new year rolled around, I had multiple projects I really wanted to run with, but was just not convinced I could push them all forward while still being effective at work 5 days a week.

This book, especially the focus on the action method, has helped me dramatically – and people have noticed.  Most significantly my wife Anna – who keeps commenting that she can’t believe the change in how I work and in my energy levels, and in my ability to keep things moving – not to mention staying on top of things at home more effectively.

On a practical level, it has meant that I’m staying focused and effective at work, not getting stressed out by home administration (keeping track of finances, bills, investments etc) because I know I have everything tracked, and if I sit down at work, or sit down to do some home admin, or to give time to a side project, the next actions are right there for me to continue with.

Because of the stage of life we’re in – we moved across the country to focus on our work and our creative pursuits, and we don’t have young kids to care for and hang out with – we have a fair amount of spare time.  I try to give 1 hour each weeknight to push a side project forward, and then a few hours of blocked out time on either Saturday or Sunday.  With this rhythm I’ve been able to push forward my two main side projects to the point where both are almost at MVP (minimum viable product) level.  And this has been during one of the most incredibly busy and stressful periods at work – coming home and having a different project that I can get into has in many ways helped me maintain my energy and positivity during some of the more stressful moments at work.

The challenge to think about how the community around me has also been incredibly helpful.  As well as the two side-projects I’ve been pushing forward, there were another two ideas that I couldn’t shake, and that I wanted to help become reality – but you can only stretch yourself so thin before you stop being effective.  By reaching out and sharing these ideas with friends, I’ve actually found other people working on similar things, and have been able to support them rather than carry it forward myself, and I’ve found this incredibly rewarding, while at the same time satisfying the creative urge that demands I be part of making that particular idea happen.

It’s been an incredibly timely book to read (thanks Clare and Zac!) and has helped me hugely so far.  To anyone who has ideas but can’t seem to get them off the ground, I recommend it highly.  I’m excited to see how the rest of my year pans out as I continue pushing things forward one action step at a time.

More Info

To follow Scott Belsky: website, twitter
To buy Making Ideas Happen: amazon, goodreads

 

 

Categories
Faith Personal Reading & Inspiration

I’m not lapsed. I am a Catholic in waiting — waiting for my church to remember the Gospels, to be a justice and peace-seeking community, to be fully inclusive of women and to be welcoming to people who are not hetero-normative.

Read more: What should church look like

Categories
Faith Personal Reading & Inspiration

An old article, but a sad one

This post left me sad:

Pastor supporter of gay marriage out in the cold.

After affirming same sex marriage in an online post, his church met together (without telling him) and decided they didn’t want him any more.  They didn’t even give him the chance to talk over his view point.  Because his house was tied to the job with the church, him and his family were faced with having to find new accommodation on such short notice.

Rodney Croome, whose Australian Marriage Equality website ran Mr Glover’s statement affirming same-sex marriage, said two gay groups would try to provide financial support.

When a church can’t love their own, and the community they condemn as “sinful” steps in with love… I get sad at what the church is supposed to be and the ugly reality of what it sometimes is instead.

Note to self: act the way I think the church should.  If our love isn’t the most extravagant going around, we’re not doing enough.  If we’re too concerned about the purity of our doctrine, and forget to love, we’re not so different from those Jesus was so infuriated by.  I wonder what would have happened if he rocked up at this impromptu meeting.

Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.  He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.

Sad…

 

Categories
Edtech Personal Reading & Inspiration

Optimize for Happiness (Tom Preston-Werner of Github)

Optimize for Happiness (Tom Preston-Werner of Github)