I recently had lunch with a pastor from my old church and I asked him about how he teaches and preaches. I’ll never forget his answer, and I think about it every time I enter into a big project. “Kyle,” he started, “I’m not a dynamic speaker like a lot of other folks you’ve experienced. So instead I have to just get the text all over me before I teach or preach.”

What tremendous instruction, and I thought about it recently when I was reading Dream Golf about the making of Bandon Dunes. Mike Keiser, who started Bandon, tasked Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw with building his third golf course, and here’s how they went about it.

How it works for Bill and Ben is this: They get out on the site and start walking. Their entire design process depends on coming to know a site, every last inch of it. Their crew members sometimes move around a site on vehicles, but Bill and Ben have an unspoken rule that they will walk everywhere. They don’t want to miss a single thing. They walk and look, pause, mull over some detail, discuss it, and start walking again. When Mike was in Oregon, he walked with them, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with him and Bill and Ben. Neither rain nor sleet nor cold nor mud kept them from walking Bandon Trails from one end to the other, and I came to realize that this is what happens every day.

Dream Golf: The Making of Bandon Dunes by Stephen Goodwin

Obsession with craft, it seems, is the lone path to success. That can be (and often is) done in a healthy way, but it’s certainly a treacherous tightrope. As much as I don’t want this to be true — as much as I desire to dip my toe in many waters simultaneously — I’m afraid the true path to success on knowing every last inch of something, of getting it all over you.

I recently read David Foster Wallace’s piece on Roger Federer for the first time — which, shame on me — but this part of it stood out because it’s something that I feel in a lot of the pieces I write. I don’t know if it’s what comes out, but it’s what I feel in my soul as I write and think and mold something for folks to consume.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

DFW — NYT

I think we so rarely think about sports as “the expression of human beauty,” but when I do, it always makes me thankful for a God who made us in a way so intricate and measure that beauty could be seen in the way we run, jump, throw and swing. There is a kindness in that reality that I so often take for granted.

I recently stumbled upon this interview with former NFL star Bill Romanowski, and the ending both staggered me and also resonated with me. The article was a look back at his crazy career and the insane training and work that went into it. Here’s what he said when he was asked why he did it all.

Once, after knee surgery in the off season, he was back in the gym four hours later with anesthesia still drifting through his head.

What was driving him? “A fear of failure. The fear of not being good enough,” Romanowski says. “In professional football the competition is so intense. ‘Is he good enough? Is he fast enough? Does he hit people hard enough? Does he get hurt a lot?’ I didn’t want that to happen to me. I didn’t want to lose my job.”

Bill Romanowski

It’s easy to laugh this off as a Football Guy being a Football Guy, which is partially what it is. But I’ve had such similar thoughts in my own life and career. I pretend as if I’m driven by a desire for achievement or so I can create good stuff for other people. That I operate out of rest, peace and joy. But the reality is often closer to fear of failure and the terror of being found out as incompetent than I would ever care to admit.

This is really good — especially the ending about the gospels and how they are spectacularly binary.

This is excellent, and while I don’t agree with it 100%, I do agree with the idea of depth over breadth when it comes to friendship.

This is a good one to remember whenever it feels I’m losing focus.

I feel this way as well, and it is instructive for both how I pursue leadership and also develop as a leader.

This is staggering. Both the table and the commentary on it.

Gonna be thinking about this one for a while. That last sentence is spectacular.

“The puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs. Infamous criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash. Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.”

Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses