success on Destructive Behavior

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

Pride, and its more serious cousin, narcissism, really shouldn’t have any place in leadership circles in the church. When I became a serious follower of Jesus at a teenager, Philippians 2 became one o...

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...

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...

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

If a man is forever concerned first and foremost with his own interests then he is bound to collide with others. If for any man life is a competition…then he will always think of other human beings as...

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

The defining problem driving people out is …just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary American life simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is d...

It is a sprinting, squirting, shoving age.

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation...

Why did Moses strike the rock? He was a man of faith, whose life had been characterized by trust in God (see, for example, the description of Moses in (Heb 11:24-29). So why did he fall into unbelief ...

Studying your own failures as well can make them seem less earth-shattering. One researcher suggested in a 2010 article in Nature that people maintain a “CV of failures,” a written list of the things ...

My Aversion to Self-Help Books & Their Gurus but Why I Recommend This One! I am not one for “self-help” books. I know that I probably could use some more personal coaching advice, but… my habit ...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

All games involve score keeping. The rules of scoring in any game tell the players which achievements count; what to do in order to be a winner. Monopoly players keep score with money; football player...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.

Sometimes the best gain is to lose.

Ambition has no rest.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

While exploring an experience of deep guilt and shame with her spiritual director, the author of Madeleine L’Engle, wrote One time I was talking to Canon Tallis, who is my spiritual director as we...

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control o...

The following advice on success, written by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is extremely different from what we are used to (at least in the West,) where success is often seen as an absolute good. ...

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

The fruit of the Spirit is not push, drive, climb, grasp and trample. Life is more than a climb to the top of the heap.

The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought that takes success for its standards.

The pressure to succeed is greater than it has ever been—People feel that they must pursue that goal been…people feel that they must pursue that goal even if it means crawling over the bodies of cowor...