Sermons (Page 141)

The leading cause of death in the United States in 2013 was heart disease. What’s interesting about heart disease is that many forms can be prevented or treated with healthy lifestyle choices. Sure, surgeons can re-do the plumbing of the heart, that’s easy. The harder part is getting patients to comply with lifestyle changes to quit smoking or eat differently. One statistic suggests that compliance rates are as low as 20% post-surgery. Why? Well, part of it is the difference between two types of change – technical change and adaptive change. Technical changes are easy solutions that often have apparent solutions, like a needed routine surgery. While adaptive change requires an alteration in beliefs, roles, relationships, or approaches, like a diet overhaul. In short, with technical change you do something different, and with adaptive change you think different…

“Why?” It’s a question that parents often get from their preschoolers. One study suggested that preschool children ask their parents and average of 100 questions a day. By middle school, however, they’ve basically stopped asking questions. Research indicates that around age 3, at just about the time reading and writing become prominent, questioning drops off. Why? Great question. One researcher suggests it’s because “in school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question…

An estimated 2.8 million graduates will hit the workforce this May.There’s one phrase that will make these graduates cringe when they hit the job market: “experience required.” Ugh. After years of studying along with a burning desire to make an impact in addition to mounds of debt these graduates will wonder, “does experience really matter?” Well, the emerging “experience economy” might argue that experience does matter, a lot. Economically speaking, we’ve seen the progression from undifferentiated commodities turned into goods, then into services, and now into staged experiences. If you have no idea what that means, basically it’s moving from, say, accessing coffee beans, to buying roasted or ground coffee, to purchasing brewed coffee from a store, to having a coffee “experience,” like at Starbucks or Intelligentsia. Sure, we could make coffee at home for pennies a day, but it’s an unparalleled experience to walk into a coffee shop with the smell in the air, the sight of mounds of coffee beans, all the while listening to the sounds of baristas preparing and delivering an encounter with coffee…