I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person.
Look, you guys are running around like monkeys trying to get people to clap, but people are fallen, they are separated from God, so they have no idea what is good or bad, worthy to be judged or set free, beautiful or ugly to begin with. Why not get your glory from God? Why not accept your feelings of redemption because of His pleasure in you, not the fickle and empty favor of man? And only then will you know who you are.
For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn’t a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.
But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk.
I know what life is about, but what if I don’t like it?
Create reciprocity. I’ve never worried about giving away too much free information. In fact, the more generous a brand is, the more reciprocity they create. All relationships are give-and-take, and the more you give to your customers, the more likely they will be to give something back in the future. Give freely.
At the curiosity stage we are really only making two large piles: keep and discard.
I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn’t perceived as cool.
Your Customers Are Not Curious About You, They Are Curious About How You Can Solve Their Problem.
Customers are not interested in your story. They are, rather, interested in being invited into a story that has them surviving and winning in the end.
There is no conflict man can endure that will not produce a blessing. And I smiled. I’m not saying I was happy, but for some reason I smiled. It hurts now, but I’ll love this memory, I thought to myself. And I do.
Alfred Hitchcock defined a good story as “life with the dull parts taken out.
A character is what he does.
Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting. I wonder how many people get tempted by the gains they can make by playing a role, only to pay for those temptations in public isolation.
She only knows what he says and what he does, not what he thinks and what he feels.
What’s the most important thing you can do today? If you can answer that question, morning after morning, you are in an elite group of professionals.
In business, if we don’t communicate clearly, we shrink.
A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.
I wanted it to be an easy story. But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.
I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.