0:00:00 - 0:00:22 So I excuse me, I just got an email from um a viewer and I wanted to reply to it via video. I think it touches on some ideas that might be useful for others to hear. Of course, you could be the judge of that and I'm going to anonymize this just so I don't share things. I don't have permission to share 0:00:21 - 0:00:44 . Um Thank you for the series or short videos you did on life plans. They've been valued to me valuable to me and to my son who's in his twenties, he's in that important but sometimes overwhelming stage of planning and creating the life he desires. And he goes on to say that that he had shared some tools 0:00:43 - 0:01:07 with him, but maybe this framework has helped him expand beyond those, those tools. And so that's really nice to hear. Um I think that those tools are pretty useful myself. Um They've given me a lot to work on and I'm in the process of trying to share those with my own Children who, who are mostly too 0:01:07 - 0:00:00 young for that, but we're just sort of sliding them into it little by little anyway, he goes on to say that he's kind of in the stage of life where he has a little bit more time than he used to. And he says, I've been thinking a lot about what's most important to me. What is my transcendent purpose? 0:00:00 - 0:01:46 I feel like it was answered in the video in which you discussed the definition of glorify. I've thought about that many, many times as I understand it, to glorify means to reveal the goodness of something to a greater degree and to a greater extent than before. Yes, that's right. And so to glorify God 0:01:46 - 0:02:10 would mean that any time anyone including me gains a greater understanding or appreciation of how good He is or recognizes or orients their lives to Him, the greatest value in any degree or capacity he is glorified. Yes, 100%. You, you've got it spot on. He continues, I can't think of anything that would 0:02:10 - 0:02:32 mean more to me than to glorify God. Hey, that's a great purpose. That's a great purpose. He says my goals all fall under this purpose. This directs my personal self improvement, my relationship with my wife, interactions with my family, friends, business associates, et cetera as I make any improvement 0:02:32 - 0:02:57 in my life. And if I'm able even the smallest way to lift, teach, encourage or demonstrate a better path to God for others, I can in some small way increase his glory. Asking what can I do to glorify God today is inspiring it keeps me focused. I'm not sure there's anything better. Hey, man, you got me 0:02:57 - 0:03:19 convinced. That's beautiful. And I really appreciate you sharing that with me. Uh It obviously took you time to write this and, uh, these are deep things. So I really appreciate it. I wanted to hop on here and make a video because as I was reading this, what I was thinking of was actually some things 0:03:19 - 0:03:51 that I was focusing on writing today. And so in my current process, uh what I've shifted to focus on now, I, I've, I've spent a lot of time shifting ideas around and formulating um formulating the arrangement of content that will become books. There's a whole lot of text, a whole lot of notes, uh thousands 0:03:50 - 0:04:15 of pages. I I I'll, I'll have, you know, 25 documents open as I'm doing this and, and trying to remember hundreds of proto chapters in my mind of, oh, this goes here. Oh, this is like this, these need to be blended together. I've been doing that for quite some time now and now I've shifted to focus on 0:04:15 - 0:04:45 what I think will be the first book we'll see. I'm not in charge, I'm just doing the work. Um But this book, it, it does focus a lot on life plan and there's a reason for that and I'm sorry, that's long winded. Um But it dovetails right into this email so often when we think in terms of there's a better 0:04:45 - 0:05:09 phrase for this but explicit God when we think in, in religious terms, which usually I, I use as, as a, with a negative connotation, but I'm not doing that right now. When you think of religious terms, it's really good from the sense that we understand or to the extent that we understand the magnitude 0:05:08 - 0:05:39 of what we're saying to glorify God using the definition this gentleman used, which is a, a rehash of what I said. Uh He probably said it better. That's a really big idea. And it's possible to talk about God without aiming towards such big ideas and most people do. But when we take that and make it our 0:05:39 - 0:06:04 purpose to help others to see more of his goodness, what, what I want to highlight here is that we can start with the most feathered edge. So when I, when I talk about that, I, I think of all kinds of home improvement situations where you have to taper something down to an imperceptible thickness. So 0:06:04 - 0:06:25 if you're finishing drywall, for instance, the, the name of the game is to take the joint with the tape on it and to use mud to feather that edge down so that it's so gradual and tapered down that you can't even see it. It's imperceptible. And even if you run your hand along the wall, maybe you can't 0:06:25 - 0:06:54 even feel it. And here's what's interesting about that. Let's see. How can I present this when, when I was a teacher, a computer science teacher um for, for various nefarious reasons, I was tasked with the least popular classes. There was, there was an overt and long standing agenda to set me up for 0:06:54 - 0:07:16 failure. But what happened was every time they threw me into uh into some trap, I just made it better, right? God blessed me to be able to, to, to overcome it and turn it around into a success story. And so I just kept backfiring on them. But um I would get assigned these, these classes that just had 0:07:16 - 0:07:40 a track record of tearing down the average teacher evaluations because everyone that got saddled with this class, it just would continuously bomb and students hated it. And so then they assign all those classes to me to try to get my teacher evaluations down and it didn't work. Um But what I learned 0:07:39 - 0:08:07 in those challenges is that most computer science teachers, what they do is they'll rush through the beginning, easy part and then they'll get mired down in the really hard stuff. And it's this double whammy because what should be confidence building and an on ramp, a natural on ramp into harder material 0:08:06 - 0:08:34 becomes just as difficult as the deep dive, things that have to come later on. And so I figured out that we have this trigger in our minds, this fight or flight mechanism. And when we get introduced to something that's that we feel is outside of our comfort zone. It, it switches everything over into 0:08:34 - 0:08:59 an emotive state. And when we're not calm and confident, it's really hard to think clearly. And so what I would do in these classes and it became quite an established pattern once I figured it out is that I'd spend extra time on the easy things in the beginning because what I found was, well, a lot of 0:08:59 - 0:09:21 other teachers would sort of dismiss this as beneath them. I found that by taking an extra time, we can make a really solid foundation and, and with my strange experience in construction and other weird things that, you know, I just, my life has been this, this ball of random clay stuck together things 0:09:21 - 0:09:41 that, that people don't normally do in one lifetime. And so in the construction field, it, it's pretty obvious when you're building something that the more solid, the foundation, the more weight you can put on it and the thing won't fall over. And so building this solid foundation, we could avoid the 0:09:41 - 0:10:03 fight or flight mechanism and you could do other things like tell jokes and a lot about how you structure the assignments. There's all kinds of tricks that you can do to help students come out difficult material in the best possible way in, in a way that that is most likely to lead to success and the 0:10:03 - 0:10:31 students enjoyed it. And I got really good teacher evaluations, surprise. So with these books. It's really interesting because the way I think about these topics, the way the Lord has taught them to me is absolutely not the way that I need to share them with other people. And it's a blessing to be able 0:10:31 - 0:10:54 to do the transformation. But it is really hard. It is really hard. And I, I'll give you an example just uh out of the blue example that I was looking at today, I have a whole chapter written up on constraints. And if, if you've done any kind of, oh boy, there are a lot of fields where, where you would 0:10:54 - 0:11:19 hit this. But problem solving uh machine learning data mining, there are a lot of fields where you have constraints. It, it's a generic function of just problems in general. And in my mind, I group all of that information under a heading that says constraints and that's the most concise clear way for 0:11:19 - 0:11:44 me to represent it to myself. But in reading that all these signals go off in my brain as I imagine other people reading this. And I say to myself, this is not the easiest way to present this information to generic person 578, right? And so if I were writing the books for myself, I would write them in 0:11:44 - 0:12:11 a certain way. OK? What? But, but in presenting them to other people, I have to completely present it in a different way. What does this have anything to do with this gentleman's email as you glorify God. Don't forget the gift that we have. I'm starting to lose my voice. The gift that we have to transform 0:12:10 - 0:12:40 information into a more accessible representation than how we received it. Make the feathered edge. Now, especially when you have time. You see there are a lot of interactions that it's make or break. You know, you, you, you if you cold call someone, you got one shot. If you're riding a random bus and 0:12:40 - 0:13:04 you sit next to somebody, you got one shot with your family and friends, you have the space and time to make a feathered edge and that makes all the difference in the world. Here's, here's a thought experiment to walk through if you're a parent or a child and hopefully you're at least one imagine your 0:13:04 - 0:13:29 family members as random people. And now contrast what you can get away with in what you do and say for, for good, not for evil. But hey, you can take it that way too. It'll illustrate the point just as well. There are, there are amazing tolerances allowances that are given because of the relationships 0:13:28 - 0:13:57 that we have with people. You know, uh from time to time, I can say the craziest things to my wife or my mom, even my dad and certainly my kids because they know me better than a stranger and whatever I say, they have to mix that with everything they've seen. About me and if I said or did the same thing 0:13:57 - 0:14:23 with a stranger, they might think this guy is the biggest jerk in the world and many people do. But because they know me, they can't think that or it's a lot harder to believe it. And so in that reconciliation, you, you have a, a bigger truth window that you can use so you could take advantage of that 0:14:23 - 0:14:43 and, and you have to be cognizant of this to be an effective teacher. Because when you're in those make or break situations, you know, you're writing a random comment on youtube, which by the way is a, is a wonderful just searching the web trying to find people who have questions that you happen to know 0:14:43 - 0:15:05 the answer to. That's a wonderful way to multiply the effectiveness of your reach. There are so many things that you already know. You know, I, I think a lot of times people think in terms of i if random people approached me with random problems, how effective would I be in helping them to solve them 0:15:05 - 0:15:24 ? Oh, that's a good thing to think about and to prepare for. But that's like, what would you do if someone dropped $300 million on you? Hopefully not literally on you, but in front of you, I mean, that's a great thing to think about. But a better question is what should you do with the money you already 0:15:24 - 0:15:49 have? And in this case, you have untold riches that you just have no idea. You have no idea the things that you already know and how valuable they are. It's insane. But you're sitting, you're sitting, you're sitting on a gold mine, right? You're sitting on a gold mine. You have no idea. If you think 0:15:49 - 0:16:11 about those things, you think in terms of, instead of what do I know? What questions has God already given me the answers to and then Google those questions because you're going to find people out on the web who are asking them and maybe it's on, what's that thing? The stack exchange hermeneutics or 0:16:11 - 0:16:36 whatever, you know, there are forums for people to ask questions, but nine times out of 10, it's, it's gonna be in sort of more common areas where it's less about disputation and argumentation and more just honest people looking for mentors and this gentleman that wrote me prime example, right? So some 0:16:35 - 0:17:00 of us are, are blessed that we have kids. Some, some people have grandkids. Look, the whole world is out there and they don't know you, but they might need what, you know, with a quick Google search and, and this doesn't have to be something you spend 50 hours on all at once. What if, like what if you 0:17:00 - 0:17:22 just said, hey, every Sunday, I'm gonna spend 10 minutes working on a list of things that, that I think I have a pretty good understanding of and in formulating questions for which I already know the answer and then searching those things and, and taking this template of a preform thing that I've written 0:17:21 - 0:17:44 and reading through it again, maybe polishing it up a little tweaking it a little bit and pasting it. So when I see somebody on youtube saying, I just wish there was someone who could explain to me why bad things happen to good people or whatever. You just plop it down there and, and give them a follow 0:17:44 - 0:18:06 up action that they can take. Here's a link to a book you might like or here's my email if you ever wanna chat about this, right? It takes some finesse to do this in a way that doesn't seem creepy. And I'm probably not the best guy to advise you on how to do that, but just this sort of weird thing. It's 0:18:05 - 0:18:31 like, do you realize all the ways that God has already empowered you to act as one of his angels? It's that big of a deal and we have these tools right at our fingertips and do we make use of them? Right. Anyway, so, so that's those things are not so much feathered edges, although you could turn them 0:18:31 - 0:18:58 into them as best you can. Uh if someone raises a signal to say this is what I need, this is what I'm looking for and you happen to have it, you can provide it and then a link to something even better or something in addition to that, the next thing. Right. And then it's on them, they've been given a 0:18:58 - 0:19:28 ladder, run what they do with it is up to them. But, you know, the mission of the end times is to fill in all the gaps so that every single person has to admit that everything was provided them to ascend as high as they were willing to go. And who fulfills the covenants of the Father angels. Angel just 0:19:27 - 0:20:04 means messenger. What's a messenger or who is a messenger? It's anyone that has a message, anyone that knows any part of the message, right? So if God has taught you things, you can go and teach them to others and help fulfill his covenants anyway. Well, I hope that some part of that um has inspired 0:20:03 - 0:20:31 you to, to do more or different than you would. Um I should probably just wrap this up now, but I sure do appreciate this email and it, it gives me uh a great deal of joy to hear that these things are coming together for you in your life and that you're finding ways to expand your impact at a time in 0:20:31 - 0:20:59 life where you were sort of finding fewer ways to do that. So that's quite a reversal. And it's, it's fun on, on my side to work through this puzzle. It's not fun, but it's fulfilling to work through this puzzle and, and make my own feathered edge with this. But um I guess God, God be with us all as 0:20:59 - 0:21:14 we're trying to navigate this. It's quite a challenge, but there's so much that can be done. And so II I encourage you to look for those opportunities and I, I truly wish you the best in, in your search for that and execution in it.