One thing that has been on my mind a lot over the last year amid the pandemic is the perceived importance of books. How meaningful, instructive and helpful a book is or is not has not changed, but my perception of how meaningful, instructive and helpful a book is has changed. Maybe I have more awareness of how much information is produced online on a daily basis, but I feel the gap between how I view books and articles growing.

Again, the articles I read could be 10x better than the books I read, but that doesn’t affect the ways in which that gap has grown for me. This has myriad effects on how I both consume and produce, and I’m convinced it’s 100 percent tied to the pandemic for reasons I’m not entirely sure I can explain.

I’m not sure if this is the reason for alternative schooling (whether in grade school or beyond), but it is most certainly a reason.

Economic utility almost always occurs when we’re good at things that aren’t easy to measure. And when the things we’re good at are additive, infinite and generous it can be something we embrace for the long haul. Because in those areas, it’s possible to be useful and skilled and make a contribution, every single time.

Seth Godin

I’ve been on a run of books recently and rolled through this one in a few days. Like most books about the early days of massive companies, it’s hard for it to be a bad read, and there were some good takeaways as I think about the future. It wasn’t a life-changer, but it was a great way to spend several hours.

Big Takeaway

Focus — insanely specific, concentrate focus — is monumental to success, whether institutionally or individually. It’s going to be difficult and emotional and you’re definitely going to pay a high cost. It’s worth it.

Favorite Quotes

• When you start a company, what you’re really doing is getting other people to latch on to an idea.

• Almost everything I ever learned about being a leader, I learned with a backpack on.

• Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly definted tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on th ebig picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. Loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

• I love negotiation, and I’m pretty good at it. In large part this is because it’s easy for me to identify with other people’s needs.

• The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

• Culture is a reflection of who you are and what you do — it doesn’t come from carefully worded mission statements. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

• A culture of freedom and responsibility, coupled with radical honesty, worked like a charm.

• Radical honesty is great until it’s aimed at you.

• When your dream becomes a reality, it doesn’t just belong to you. It belongs to the people who helped you — your family, your friends, and your co-workers. It belongs to the world.

• If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damn bit of difference.

• Nobody knows anything.

• As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.

• Canada Principle — We could expand into Canada, but doing so would require resources that could better and more efficiently be used elsewhere.

• When it comes to making your dream a reality, one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal is dogged, bullheaded insistence.

• My dream was building things. My dream was the process of making Netflix (not Netflix itself).

• The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.

• Everyone is aligned when the wind is blowing the right way. It’s when a storm comes up that all of a sudden it becomes apparent that people have different goals and objectives.

• You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

Been thinking about this one all day. It should (hopefully will!) affect everything.

Remember, we have the tools for intellectual construction whereas the world is only equipped for deconstruction. We should foster environments where the smart kids, the curious artists, the scientists, and the “freethinkers” feel welcome and—perhaps more than anywhere else in the world—inspired. Let the world be in the business of de-platforming, disinviting, and shutting down debate. Christianity should invite it. What are we afraid of? God’s truth is infinitely solid and can stand up to all the scrutiny we measly humans can muster. The more good faith, God-fearing questions (Prov. 9:10), the more opportunity we all have to excavate more layers—and unearth more treasures—of God’s truth.

Brett McCracken

I found this by Tish Harrison Warren to be true, convicting and yet another reason to sabbath and rest regularly.

With this newfound ability, we’re all at risk of collective altar burn. The transcendent and utterly overwhelming triune God becomes flattened to a sociological or theological abstraction. Many of us spend far more time on social media than in gathered worship, and that digital space often hinders true repentance, contemplation, or prayer.

We have to take up practices of solitude, fasting, gathered worship, and the sacraments—those embodied habits that resist being subsumed by technology. And we need whole topologies of spiritual terrain in our life that we never discuss online—parts of ourselves that we keep for God and our embodied communities alone.

Tish Harrison Warren

I have been reading a lot during my sabbatical, and one theme has served as the through line of what I’ve consumed. Covid has exacerbated this theme, and the theme is that place matters. Where you are, what (and who) is around you is important. It contextualizes everything. I’m not totally sure of the reasons the folks I’ve been reading — Eugene Peterson, Andrew Peterson and Ryan Holiday — believe this, but it is very apparent in the way they live their lives, and it’s something that I’ve been considering more deeply as the fog of the pandemic begins to dissipate.

I’m not sure any of us will ever view place the same way we used to. The belief that, if we really wanted to, we could live our entire lives online, digitally, has been extinguished. Place matters because presence matters and because we have been confronted with the reality that the opposite of being present in a specific place is not something we ever want to experience — whether in theory or in reality — for an extended period of time ever again. While we have become more reliant on our digital world over the last year, we have simultaneously become less enamored with it and less compelled by what it promises. This is a good thing, even if it will be difficult to reconcile at first.

Russell Moore wrote about John Stott today at TGC, and I found this particular piece of the article interesting.

But Stott often pointed out that, for him, “Anglican” was the adjective and not the noun. He was an Anglican Christian—and that meant his fidelity to Anglicanism was always subordinate to his fidelity to the mere Christianity of the gospel.

Russell Moore

Too often do I make adjectives nouns. Too rarely do I make nouns adjectives. May I pursue fewer nouns and accept more adjectives. Also, read the whole article. It is tremendous.

After watching In and of Itself on Hulu, I wanted a little more … backstory? history? something of Derek Delgaudio. Amoral man delivered that, although it was more autobiographical than I realized it would be.

It was not the intimate and vulnerable ride that In and of Itself was, but it was still a fun, good, quick read and the reveal at the end was fantastic.

Big Takeaway

Control is an illusion. It’s a lesson I have to learn daily in so many different ways. Few of them are as entertaining (or as low-stakes, considering I was reading about somebody else’s life) as this one.

Favorite Quotes

Here’s a sampling.

• My mother had taught me the value of truth, but she neglected to teach me the cost.

• And if studying sleight-of-hand had taught me anything, it was to appreciate the things I couldn’t see.

• Karl Germain, the celebrated conjuror, known to the masses as Germain the Wizard, famously said, “Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and then he does.”

• They were prisoners, trapped by an illusion, unable to escape because they believed they were already free.

Said differently …

Life is short. Now in my mid-50s I am increasingly conscious that time is limited and that as a Christian I need to be very careful about my personal and professional priorities. Private time with family and close friends means so much to me these days. An evening in the company of loved ones is a precious gift that I have too seldom appreciated in the past. And professional time has to be focused on things that count: the classroom, reading things that matter, writing articles and books on topics of serious moment.

I am amazed at how many Christians spend their days on Twitter and Facebook—too often platforms for ephemeral trivia and unpleasantness. I do not believe Jesus wants me to use my remaining years in exchanging insults with other Christians. I think he wants all his people to witness to the world by using the time and talents he has given them to edify the body of Christ and to help the rising generation think clearly about the challenges we all face.

Carl Trueman in TGC