Bobby Gruenewald of Lifechurch.tv posted this on his blog today.
If I gave you $100,000, could you make your house or apartment excellent? I imagine that with some careful investments in furniture, paint, etc you could probably do it. If I then gave you another $500,000, could you make it more excellent? How about $5 million? You get the point.
Now, when was it excellent? After the $100k investment? The $500k? Somewhere in-between? Or is it already excellent?
The pursuit of excellence is just that…a pursuit for many and rarely a destination. In nearly every investment we make (our time, money, etc) we can generally always invest more to make something more excellent. The big question is “When is the investment enough?” The good news is that we do have a choice.
Read this post on the cost/excellence and then this one on cost/effectiveness.
When I studied Economics in High School one of the things we learned was the “law of diminishing returns”—there comes a point were the same amount of effort does not continue to bring the same results.
In grade school we were taught to “go over our work” so we could catch our mistakes. In college we learned the value of proof-reading because mispelling (or is that misspelling?) and typographical errors would effect (or is that affect?) our grades.
As teachers/leaders our learners deserve that we put due diligence into our preparation, but there is a point of diminishing return. There is a point where investing more time into editing the words we choose or editing the font of our study guide or cutting out the craft EXACTLY according to the pattern no longer contributes to our effectiveness of “making more and better followers of Jesus Christ.” There comes a point where effectiveness will be better achieved through personal investment in the individual life, than in more preparation of an excellent lesson.
Bobby’s thoughts quoted at the beginning of this post refer to cost. We easily relegate “cost” to the realm of finance. But cost also relates to time and energy. You most likely invest much more time & energy into your learners than you do money. Are you investing that time and energy toward excellence? toward effectiveness?
Can I encourage you today to work smarter, not necessarily work harder?
Somebody emailed this question "What exactly does that look like in real life...'personal investment in another's life'"
ReplyDeleteAnswer: That can be a phone call, a face-to-face conversation, sending a note, prayerful intercession, an encouraging email, etc.