thought exercise on Targets

Some years ago an army sharpshooter was visiting a small town. He was surprised to find bull’s-eyes with bullet holes in the exact center all throughout the village. “Someone or some one’s here must b...

If you were lucky enough to watch the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, you probably remember swimmer Michael Phelps bursting onto the international scene. Phelps won six medals in those ga...

The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

A man decided to skip church one Sunday and head to the hills to do some bear hunting. As he rounded the corner on a perilous twist in the trail, he and a bear collided, sending him and his rifle tumb...

The word perfect comes from the Latin perficere, per (complete) and ficere (do). Something considered perfect is that which is completely done; it exists in a state of completion, wholeness, perfectio...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares insights on the topic of rest from the poet David Whyte: [The] poet David Whyte opens our minds and hearts to rest when he writ...

Christian spiritual discipline is a repeated bodily practice, done over and over again in dependence on the Holy Spirit and under the direction of Jesus and other wise teachers in his Way, to enable o...

A young lady named Sally took a seminary class taught by Professor Smith, who was known for his elaborate object lessons. One day Sally walked into class to find a large target placed on the wall, wit...

Smartphones make it possible for the attention economy to target our little attention gaps as we transition between tasks and duties. Our attention may be slightly elastic enough to fill up every empt...

Again, human attention is a zero-sum game. At some point we must close all our screens and fall asleep—which makes sleep the enemy of digital spectacle makers (and sleep was named chief competitor by ...

The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to...

Companies in this era of apps and personal tracking devices have grown much smarter about surfacing milestones that were previously invisible. The app Pocket, which stores articles from the Internet o...

Success offers a hoped-for future goal. Excellence provides a striven-for present standard. Success bases our worth on a comparison with others. Excellence gauges our value by measuring us against ...

Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children....

As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...

In the most basic sense, managing your perfectionism looks like becoming aware of the core impulse all perfectionists reflexively experience: noticing room for improvement—Hmm, this could be better—an...

Martin Lindstrom observes: When people viewed images associated with the strong brands-the iPods, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others-their -their brains registered the exact same patterns of...

Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children....

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called Arrival . It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire ...

We should aim for rational confidence in these sorts of pursuits because certainty is a mere will-o’-the-wisp. Finite minds simply can’t pull it off. Though the distinction between aiming at certainty...

Whether playing baseball or basketball, one of the first sports lessons kids are taught is the counterintuitive truth that focusing too much on aiming where you want for the ball to go is likely to ba...

Our enemies are not our circumstances or our neighborhoods or our bosses. Our focus on the theater of Christ’s glory complements our earthly callings; it does not distract us from them. Christ’s glory...

Now today, with increased opportunity for personal-data collection via technology, target marketing has allowed sellers to become even more effective. No longer do they know just our age, gender, and...

Have you noticed the ever-increasing arm of advertising in our lives? According to a New York Times article, supermarket eggs have begun to be stamped by CBS television shows, turnstiles in subways ar...

In life, whenever someone achieves success, criticism usually follows—regardless of their skill or the effort they’ve invested. An old story illustrates this truth. A woman crafted artificial fruit so...

All kinds of competition are comparisons of the abilities or performance of one person or team to that of another. From elementary school spelling bees to professional sports, contestants compare thei...

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...

Success is a shining city, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We dream of it as children, we strive for it through our adult lives, and we suffer melancholy in old age if we have not reached it....