NowTHINK!AboutIt

Not All Inches Are Equal
Variety More Important
Than Number

Basically there are three kinds of people: routinely organized, obsessively organized and sufficiently organized. The differences are:

The Routinely Organized person can give you a list of things they will do on any given day.

They start each day with the list in hand. During the course of the day they will accomplish all or most of the things on their list. At the end of each day they will make another list for the next day. This person is comfortable with habit.

My grandmother was this kind of person. She made many hamburgers during the course of her life using her special recipe and every one tasted exactly the same. They were amazingly delicious like everything else she cooked.

The Obsessively Organized person can give you a list and a timetable for every item on the list.

They can tell you when each item will or should begin and they can give you an end time as well. They also have a contingency plan should things not go as expected. This person loves reaching short term goals.

The Sufficiently Organized person may or may not have a list each day.

This person takes the long view not the list view so the day to day grind bores them. Living in the moment – the opposite of routine – characterizes their life. They easily over schedule and over commit but contrary to popular opinion this persons knows there is an ultimate reason for everything and can eventually achieve significance.

All three approaches are important because each one represents a different kind of inch: routine, project and ultimate purpose. None alone is sufficient. It is true that routine is the bedrock of success but you need more than a bedrock to succeed.

What you do in any one day doesn’t represent a life purpose and you can’t always “goal” your way into that purpose. The many common things we routinely do are good examples: eat, sleep, brush teeth, bath, tend the garden, go to work, pay the bills, etc.

Those things give us a sense of personal control and continuity but none of them are all important.

What about cultures where people don’t brush their teeth. Would they gauge individual significance on how many teeth you have left or how many false ones you can afford at the end of life? To them a full set of teeth would seem weird. Fortunately, meaningful living is possible even for people who gum their food. That’s good because brushing your teeth regularly is no guarantee you won’t lose your teeth anyway.

All of that is to say that ultimate success isn’t determined by numbing routine or an endless list of goals achieved and there are many proofs of this in the Bible. Biblical characters with the most impact aren’t easy to emulate. There was nothing routine or repeatable in their path to significance as the following examples will show. [Read more…] about Inch By Inch Life’s A Cinch