Jesus refused to be a caffeinated octopus. Here’s how you can too.
Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come.” (John 7:6)
Most people underestimate what they can accomplish in the long term and overestimate what they can do in the short term.
This “Time Horizon Trap” can lead us to baptize our imaginations and wisely set big, God-glorifying goals for the next few years, but then foolishly apply that same grandiose thinking to the next few months.
Say you’ve set a goal to 10X your business in three years to fund 10 adoptions for your team. Beautiful! But if you’re not careful, your inspiration around it can turn you into a caffeinated octopus.
You hire two new sales reps, work on developing a new product, and start building a new website—all at the same time—ensuring you make “a millimeter of progress in a million different directions,” in the words of Greg McKeown.
Not only is this ineffective, it’s also out of line with Christ’s example. Jesus pursued the biggest long-term goal in history: the redemption of “all things” (Colossians 1:20). But he pursued that goal one small and ordered step at a time.
See John 7:1-9 as case in point.
Jesus’s brothers said to him, “Go to Judea [to the festival], so that your disciples there may see the works you do.”...But Jesus told them, “You go to the festival. I am not going…because my time has not yet fully come.”
Jesus eventually went to the festival—but only when the time was right. He had a sequential plan ordering his steps from the manger to the cross, and this festival wasn’t the next step. It wasn’t a bad thing. It just wasn’t the next right thing. It was out of order.
That brings us to our next principle in this series…
Principle #3: Order Your Steps — To redeem our goals in the model of our Redeemer, we will break our big long-term goals into a sequential plan of small steps pursued with singular focus.
Here’s something that has been helpful for me to that end
Practice #3: Ask the Leverage Point Question
Here it is: Which item on my list, if completed first, will make everything else easier or unnecessary?
A few weeks ago, I had three big things on my to-do list:
- Rehearse a keynote speech
- Review a proposal from my VP of Marketing
- Apologize to my VP of Marketing for being a bonehead
But because I’m a bonehead, I was honestly struggling to figure out how to order these steps. So I asked myself the Leverage Point Question and almost instantly got clarity.
I realized that if I didn’t first make peace with my VP of Marketing, there was no way my feedback on her proposal would be received well, and there was certainly no way I’d have the mental energy I needed to rehearse my talk. Apologizing to my VP of Marketing was the Leverage Point.
If you have a hard time seeing what’s essential on your to-do list, ask the Leverage Point Question today. I can almost guarantee it will bring clarity as you order your steps to your goals.
