The topics of my readings today consist of two ideas that might at first seem unrelated. First is from Seven Habits, where I'm now in the final two chapters. Habit Seven is "Sharpen the Saw", which applies to all areas of our lives: physical, mental, spiritual, and social/emotional. Covey begins with a short story: imagine you come upon a man sweating as he tries to saw down a tree. You say to him, "You look exhausted!" to which he replies, "I've been at this for hours and I'm only half-way done!" You invite him to take a break and note that the saw looks rather dull and it might help to spend a few minutes sharpening it, but he responds, "I can't -- I'm too busy sawing!"
The point of course is that we often get so caught up in what we're doing that we can't be bothered to stop and examine our tools and equipment to see if they're all working properly. I read the first three aspects of sharpening the saw today (physical, spiritual, and mental), so let me share a short quote from each part that I liked.
Physical: "Most of us think we don't have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don't have time not to. We're talking about three to six hours a week -- or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162-165 hours of the week."
Spiritual: "Religious leader David O. McKay taught, 'The greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of the soul.' If you win the battles there, if you settle the issues that inwardly conflict, you feel a sense of peace, a sense of knowing what you're about. And you'll find that the public victories -- where you tend to think cooperatively, to promote the welfare and good of other people, and to be genuinely happy for other people's successes -- will follow naturally."
Mental: "There's no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. That's another high leverage Quadrant II activity. You can get into the best minds that are now or that have ever been in the world. I highly recommend starting with a goal of a book a month, then a book every two weeks, the a book a week. 'The person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.'"
Summing up the first three disciplines, Covey states, "Sharpening the saw in the first three dimensions -- the physical, the spiritual, and the mental -- is a practice I call the 'Daily Private Victory.' And I commend to you the simple practice of spending one hour a day every day doing it -- one hour a day for the rest of your life. There's no other way you could spend an hour that would begin to compare in terms of value and results. It will affect every decision, every relationship It will greatly improve the quality, the effectiveness, of every other hour of the day, including the depth and restfulness of your sleep. It will build the long-term physical, spiritual, and mental strength to enable you to handle difficult challenges in life."
Moving on to the spiritual side of my reading (though the above certainly has spiritual implications as well), today I read the talk from General Conference by Elder Dallin H. Oaks, Followers of Christ. In it, he focuses on passages of scripture from the Bible that help us to better understand what it means to follow Jesus Christ -- which is sharpening of the spiritual saw of the highest form in my book. While going through some of the various teachings of Christ, Elder Oaks encapsulates much of what I feel with the following:
"Jesus’s teachings were not meant to be theoretical. Always they were to be acted upon. Jesus taught, 'Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man' (Matthew 7:24; see also Luke 11:28) and 'Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing' (Matthew 24:46).
If we were to put it into modern slang, it would be something like, "If you're going to talk the talk, make sure to walk the walk." There are few things that bother me more than hypocrisy; hopefully none of what I've been writing on here comes across as hypocritical, as these are all things that I most definitely need to work on. Going back to Covey, he mentions the value of writing as well in the mental dimension of saw sharpening. I like that, as obviously I spend more than my fair share of time in front of a keyboard writing. If it can help some of you out there as well, so much the better. :-)
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