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Lifelong learning
My love of teaching people how to learn.
By James Hayes
I personally believe that everyone has created within them amazing abilities that are just waiting to be discovered and utilized in order to better themselves and people around them. When we begin to make a search for these abilities within us, it is very important that the motivation for doing so is in order to honor and glorify God as well as to benefit people. If we have abilities that we have developed in our lives and choose not to help other people who are more disadvantaged than we are, then our life can very easily and very quickly become boring and unfulfilling.
Each person’s life contains many various areas of importance that are continuously interconnected in order to create and maintain a balance of skills and responsibilities. Within the pages of this book I have tried to address many areas of my life that I experienced at various times that helped me to develop a variety of skills in order to accomplish different kinds of tasks. And now, through my sharing of these various experiences with you I hope that you will see the complexity, the interconnectivity, and the balance that you also may need in order to further grow, learn, and develop as a mature individual. It is my hope that each, and every one of you reading this book search and discover ways in order to develop your God-given potential abilities within you and utilize them in order to make your life in the life of people around you as fulfilling as possible.
My love of teaching people how to learn has brought me to a point in my life where I love supporting people and encouraging them as well as guiding them in their personal and their professional development. I love to see people grow, learn, discover, mature, and continually work toward achieving their greatest God-given potential in their life.
There was a time in my teaching career when I was a substitute teacher with three different school districts. During three of my last five years of teaching I was engaging with approximately 18,000 to 24,000 students each year. And what I saw during those three specific years was absolutely amazing. I saw students who were mature, patient, respectful, filled with hope and enthusiasm, and eager to grow and learn. They only wanted to belong and to be treated with kindness, patience, enthusiasm, dignity, and respect. They were hungry to be taught, guided, and mentored in order to fulfill their greatest God-given potential within their lives.
Much of the enthusiasm that motivated me to write this book was directly because of my personal experiences with these students. They were actually no different than any other students. However, I had changed. And the change in me made a significant difference in how I engaged with them and then how they began to see themselves. They began to see that they had skills, value, and tremendous opportunity in their lives. They began to learn that they actually had various types of support systems that were continuously available to them so that they could grow and learn. I constantly tried to cultivate any kind of maturity that I could think of into their minds and hearts. In my personal opinion those truly were some of the greatest experiences of my entire life. I will never forget those wonderful young people who gave me the honor of working with them.
This book that I have created or organized for everyone is better seen as a personal journal which I also utilize as user manual for myself in my continued personal and professional development. And you can also utilize it for you and for everyone in your family in order to grow and mature in scientific academic knowledge. If you are interested, I also want to encourage you and those that you teach to focus as well on biblical knowledge, biblical laws, and biblical moral values, hopefully through the use of your newly found significantly improved reading ability that your will read about very soon in this book.
It is my profound hope for you that organizing your own personal reading skills, study skills, and computer generated research and presentation skills, that are unique to your own personal abilities, needs and goals, may help you to more clearly discover your own interests, as well as your own unique God-given gifts, abilities, or talents. They are truly treasures within you. I want for each and every one of you to learn how to grow, mature, and learn more quickly, more efficiently, and more effectively, so that you can ultimately achieve and utilize all of your own God-given potential in your life for your own benefit, as well as for the benefit of other people around you.
With the learning tools that I will share with all of you, may you rise up like a lion and conquer the world of the written word and all of the information worldwide that it provides for everyone who chooses to try to consume its content. And may those around you be blessed by your abilities as well as your desire to try to benefit yourself and others around you in your community and in your world.
Rise up child. Begin to try reading while standing up. See if it works for you as well. See if you can read like a rocket ship and comprehend what you are reading with significant clarity. See if there is a lion inside of you just waiting to come out. I think there is one inside of you just waiting to be awakened. And the world is waiting for you specifically, to benefit them because of your own individual, God-given personal talents and skills. May those that you come into contact with for the rest of your life be refreshed, invigorated, and encouraged with your knowledge and enthusiasm in life.
There is a very important concept that I personally believe many people take for granted. You must give yourself permission to reach the farthest obtainable boundaries of latent abilities that you possess in every area of your life. That is the only way that you will ultimately be able to utilize your fullest God-given potential within you in your life. You have the opportunity to grow beyond your wildest dreams and expectations. Therefore, I wholeheartedly encourage you to take this opportunity to explore the things that you never thought in your wildest imagination that you would ever have the time or the ability to explore. And teach and mentor others to do the same thing in their lives as well. I will be using a learning template or structure that I have gleaned from the Biblical book of Proverbs in the Bible. I will be using this template because the foundation of learning seems to build upon itself in a logically sequential set of steps. I like to think of the book of Proverbs as Biblical Life Lessons.
I have focused on five foundational steps of learning that are outlined in the biblical book of Proverbs within the pages of the Bible. These five learning steps or categories that you will utilize continually will help you to be able to develop “scientific academic knowledge,” “Biblical wisdom,” “understanding of overarching comprehensive or complex concepts,” personal “discernment” of God, the people around you, and the world around you, and finally, the utilization of “discretion” that is to be used by you in your speech and in your social and physical interactions with other people throughout your life as you grow, learn, and develop personally and professionally. And hopefully as you learn far more than you have ever expected to do so, may you also learn some leadership skills that I will share with you in this book as well.
I highly recommend to everyone to also read John Maxwell’s wonderful book on leadership entitled, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” The simple stories in his book will show you how to personally navigate through your life while at the same time steadily building leadership knowledge and skills. We all have those skills within us. And we all utilize those skills in small amounts every day of our life. John Maxwell has simply identified leadership laws or skills for us so that we can identify them also, organize them into small steps, and ultimately begin to utilize them more often and more efficiently and effectively.
The funny thing about Mr. Maxwell’s highly enlightening book that I personally have found is that almost everyone has and uses leadership skills almost every day of their life. They just aren’t aware that they are doing so. And so they take for granted their own personal leadership abilities within them simply because they don’t take the time to learn about them, identify them, examine them, clarify them with precision, and practice utilizing them in a systematic way.
In the book of Hebrews chapter 4 and verse 12, the Lord says, “The Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart.” The word of God is truly a sword with which we can destroy the works of the serpent. We can use it as a scalpel to surgically apply God’s word for the teaching and healing of the brethren as well as all of mankind. And we can use it as a laser that can divide with significant precision specific concepts of knowledge in order to utilize it in the most precise ways possible. As His sons and daughters, the Christian body of Christ has tremendous benefits to be gained by the knowledge that God gives to us. Chuck Missler said, “God always rewards the diligent student.” So let’s become diligent students of God’s Word, the Bible and learn from it the many truths that it has to offer us throughout our lifetime.
God always knows our thoughts and our intentions or motives for what we are thinking and doing. Trying to develop precise clarification of concepts is therefore the key to absolutely everything in our life because we use precise knowledge in order to try to understand about ourselves a little more closely the many things that God already understands about us.
Many people don’t see the opportunities that they have daily in order to isolate, identify, categorize, sequentialize, and prioritize the skills that God has placed within them, so that they can use them when and where they need to and actually have the ability to use them with precision and skill. Can you possibly imagine NASA sending off a rocket ship into outer space by just kind of aiming the rocket up into the air somewhere. No. That wouldn’t work at all. And neither will your God-given potential leadership skills work either if they are unfocused and vague at best. That’s just not going to work. No.
If you want your life to grow and mature significantly, you will just have to take a little bit of time every day and pay a little closer attention to the actual skills that you already possess by comparing yourself to the people in the stories in John Maxwell’s book. I guarantee you that you will most likely find some or even many similarities in the people in the stories in Mr. Maxwell’s book on leadership. Then you may begin to identify similarities in your own life that you can utilize as your very own personal leadership skills with your very own personal characteristics that are unique only to you. And that personal characteristic that is unique only to you is what actually makes the world go around, and go around successfully, as well as with variety and creativity. That is what makes life successful, varied, uniquely creative, and significantly interesting as well.
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By James Hayes
Unit One
I personally believe that life is all about growing, learning, and maturing
so we can honor and glorify God and serve Him and mankind.
Chapter 1
Discovering my new reading superpower.
I believe that I always had the potential ability to read with significant skill latent within me from the moment that I was conceived in my mother’s womb. I had been given a potentially excellent reading skill, however, I didn’t know where to look for it in order to find it and develop it. One day my life went from the indistinguishable dust of near reading illiteracy, to the starry heavens of excellent reading and comprehending with lightening speed. When I finally found my reading skill my hope and enthusiasm in my life immediately blasted off into the stratosphere. Absolutely every single thing in my life
changed significantly within one single day.
My early years with poor reading skills.
I personally had difficulty reading well when I was very young. If I was sitting down when I tried to read I would read slowly and often fall asleep and forget what I had just read. When I would wake up I would start to read the information all over again. Reading very slowly would also inhibit my comprehension of what I was reading. I would lose track of the content of my stories. My lack of reading skills made me lose enthusiasm for reading in general. l didn’t try to avoid reading because I was lazy. I tried to avoid reading because I wasn’t very successful at it. I just wasn’t able to stay alert and read rapidly with clear comprehension.
It wasn’t until I was 39 1/2 years old when I was trying to complete the last two classes of a business major at Biola University that I tried to stand up and read a homework assignment that was given in my class. I had been reading for two hours and had only completed one half of a page. I stood up to read in order to see if standing up while I was reading might improve my reading ability. It was about 10:00 at night at the time and I was already tired. I really didn’t think that standing up would keep me awake enough mentally in order to concentrate on my reading assignment. I thought that I would quickly get sleepy and leave my reading assignment incomplete once again. This poor encounter with reading was the story of most of my young life. When I tried standing up and reading I could read like a rocket ship and with almost crystal clear comprehension of the content of my business textbook. My amazing rapidness of reading along with my newly found clear comprehension of the content of what I was reading kept me focused as well as continually interested in what I was learning from my reading assignment.
My interest in the content that I was learning from my assignment was boosted significantly into an extremely high level of enthusiasm. Reading with a high degree of effectiveness had just become a brand new interest in my life. I felt like I had developed a superpower. Little did I know that standing up while reading was now a new and simple skill that I could utilize absolutely everywhere in my life. And I could apply this skill to absolutely everything that I did in my life. I had always wanted to read well but my mental fatigue while sitting down almost always kept me half asleep during almost any attempts to learn large amounts of new information from reading books with large amounts of content.
My new reading superpower was about to change my life beyond what I could have ever imagined. What I realized days or weeks later after my discovery was that when I stood up when I would read, I had to use many more of my body’s muscles in order to balance myself. Using almost all of my muscles to stand also contributed to my awakened state along with the extra oxygen that I was getting while breathing while I was standing up. Occasionally, I would slowly walk around the room as I read so that my muscles would not hurt from standing in one place for a long time. Standing and slowly walking around the room occasionally kept me so wide awake then when I would read with such speed I was able to immerse myself into the story far more fully. This immersion into the stories I was reading helped me to maintain extreme clarity of focus and more interest in my subjects.
I was not able to stand still for long periods of time because that would eventually cause too much pain in my leg muscles. So I would walk around the room for a half an hour or so and then I would still have to sit down because my legs would be in quite a bit of pain. I would then sit down and read and wouldn’t fall asleep because my legs hurt me too much to sleep. However, after a few minutes, when I began to get sleepy once again, I realized that my legs no longer hurt, so I would stand up once more and continue read. I followed this pattern late into the evenings for all of my homework assignments after I found this new successful skill.
I was glad to realize that when I stood up I would breath far more deeply and more consistently. Breathing more deeply constantly provided my brain with far more oxygen in order for it to work more efficiently and effectively. I was hyper-awake when I was standing up while reading. I had entered into a new epoch in my life academically and personally. Since I could read so well now, I wanted to learn absolutely everything that there was to know about everything. I could read so fast now that I was learning information at a speed faster than I would learn from talking to another person.
And now, in the pages of this book, I want to encourage you and also give you the same opportunity to try reading while standing up in order to see if standing up while reading
may also improve the rapidity and the comprehension of your reading as well. I am also including in this book a variety of other highly effective study skills as well as computer generated research and presentation skills.
Discovering my simple and easy new reading skill had completely changed my life in immeasurable ways. My attitude, hopes, and enthusiasm in absolutely everything in my life immediately changed to a more positive outlook. And it’s my hope that it just may change your reading ability or someone that you may know that has difficulty reading as well. And I hope also that your enthusiasm for learning through reading will increase significantly as well. I want your outlook on life to be improved as well. As soon as I could read more quickly I immediately began to read literally everything in sight every single day. I literally immediately began to consume every form of written material that I could get my hands on.
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By James Hayes
Chapter 2
Step 1: Basic life skill development for adults.
Action skills.
Military personal and professional or team development.
Basic life skill team development.
It is my personal belief that everyone needs to be taught individual personal basic life skills so that they can take care of themselves throughout their entire life as much and as successfully as they possibly can do so. Those basic life skills that they develop will in turn help them one day in the future to possibly help other people corporately in order to achieve more difficult tasks or more complex tasks together as a team. This is essentially how small groups of people may be able to develop into more complex micro-cultures and larger cultures. I will share with you two stories next. These stories are from some of my experiences in basic training in the U.S. Army.
In the first story that I will share with you I accomplish a task as an individual. In the second story the group that I was working with accomplished their goal corporately. And they accomplished the task far more quickly, safely, and effectively than if everyone had tried to accomplish the task as an individual only. It is literally one of the greatest success stories of cooperation that I have ever witnessed in my entire life. Absolutely everyone joined one another in helping every one to succeed at their task all of the way through to the full completion of every single person. Not one single person had to work by themselves by the time the assigned task was completed.
I personally believe that mankind has been
created with far more intellectual abilities
than any other animals on this planet.
I believe that mankind was actually created in the image of God.
Mankind’s physical adaptabilities,
complex thinking abilities,
and diverse varieties of communicating abilities
set him far apart from all other living animals on the planet.
I plan on reminding you about this thought a few more times throughout this book.
Man’s ability to think with advanced complexity and communicate his or her thoughts to others in order to interact with them precisely and harmoniously are the fundamental foundational set of tools that I personally believe places mankind far out in front of the rest of the animal kingdom on this planet. When we add mankind’s adaptable physical capabilities to their thinking and communicating tools, mankind is catapulted to the forefront of the entire animal kingdom. No other animal even comes close to the various high level communication abilities and physical and mental capabilities that mankind has. These three tools or abilities, mankind’s adaptive physical capabilities, complex thinking abilities, and and diverse varieties of communicating abilities verbally, in writing, as well as in countless other ways set mankind far apart from all other living animals on the planet.
And when we place the concept of mankind having the overall social ability to have an individual personal relationship with an everlasting and truthful creator God into the equation of mankind, we create a relationship which is fulfilling far beyond any other living animal on this planet. The Bible tells us constantly throughout its pages over and over again about the nature of God, the nature of mankind, and the nature of their relationship with one another. God’s nature overall is good and all encompassing. Man’s nature is limited mentally and physically. Mankind’s limited mental abilities ultimately require him to have an element of faith in their life simply because mankind cannot know everything that there is to know. Mankind has no way to know exactly what the future holds except for many of the promises that God has given to him. And mankind cannot do absolutely anything that he or she wants to do at any given time because of their limited physical ability. So although there is somewhat an imbalance of mankind’s relationship with an all powerful and all knowing God, mankind benefits tremendously from what God has to offer mankind in their personal relationship with one another.
The Bible essentially explains to mankind how to learn, mature, develop responsibilities, and behave with compassion and decency with other people. In essence, the Bible teaches man how to grow up and become a responsible and decent human being. The crowning jewel of the Bible is in what is called, The New Testament. It is about God’s Son, Jesus Christ and how He forgives mankind for his mistakes and imperfections. It talks about man’s personal relationship with God through His Son Jesus Christ. It shows mankind how to better live for God through the example and words that Jesus gave for us, in order to better understand what the actual desires of God’s heart are. Beyond the part in the Bible about Jesus Christ, the Bible basically encourages mankind to try to mature and become personally and corporately responsible in order to be the best that he can be while he is alive on this earth.
I want to share with you about two stories that I believe may represent this concept of man’s ability to adapt physically and socially. The second story shares one of the crowning concepts about the potentially highly effective skills of the nature of mankind regarding his social sharing and helping of one another, that you generally won’t see in the animal kingdom to the same extent mentally.
Stories of individual personal development and team cooperation development.
My U.S. Army basic training development.
Obstacle Number 1
The Hard Stuff
Personal Development Exercise
Completing an assignment or a task as an individual.
The triangular ladder climb and rope slide.
When I was in basic training in the military our unit had approximately 300 people. About 200 of those people dropped out of the program so we reduced to about 100 people. One day our basic training unit teamed with two other units of about 100 people each also, so we were back to having approximately 300 men once again. During that day, we all went through a giant series of obstacle courses. One of two obstacles I still remember with significant insecurity in my heart. It was a triangular ladder climb which was about fifty feet tall with a rope slide at the top of the ladder, The rope went down at an angle and then we would jump off in some soft dirt or sand.
The steps of the ladder were approximately two to three feet apart. We were supposed to climb up the ladder individually. It seemed easy for me to do at first. And then about twenty feet up the ladder I started to look around me in order to get an estimation of how high I had climbed. That’s when I got afraid of the height. I looked around me and could see how far in the air I had gone so far. I was about two thirds of the way to the top of the ladder or about 30 feet when I froze where I was climbing. I couldn’t take another step. Fear had gripped me.
I thought that I was going have to be thrown out of basic training because I couldn’t do what the drill sergeants wanted me to do. Even though I thought that I would be kicked out of boot camp, I still decided that I wasn’t going to even try to go any higher on the ladder. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I still couldn’t move because of my overwhelming emotions. Then I decided to look straight down below me in order to see exactly what I had to do in order to try to climb back down to the ground. However, to my complete surprise, climbing down looked even more difficult and scary than climbing up the rest of the way that I still had to go. When I looked back down the ladder each step looked like they were about three to five feet apart. I was still frozen where I was. And at this point I thought that it would be too embarrassing for me to ask or cry for people to help me.
So I just decided in my mind that today was the day that I might die, because I looked back up the ladder and tried with all of my might not to look at absolutely anything except each single step of the ladder that was directly in front of my eyes. I only looked at the step that I had to climb next. I absolutely refused to look anywhere else. Using that visual approach helped me to be able to climb the rest of the ladder. When I finally got to the top of the ladder I held onto the rope and slid down. I actually did survive that day. And I completed the task as an individual. That was my individual development assignment.
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But that’s not even the story that I wanted to tell you about for that adventurous day. That was just a story about an individual having success with a difficult task. The next part of the story of that day is the fun part that taught me a lesson about life that I hope I never forget.
Obstacle Number 2
The difficult personal development in life
may become easier when people work as a team.
Completing an assignment or a task as a corporate function.
The four platform tower climb with the rope slide.
Sometime before or after the ladder climb drill with the rope slide, the drill sergeants had all of the soldiers meet at another area of the obstacle course where there were four platforms attached to four telephone poles. The poles were about 30 feet tall. They were all standing almost straight up and were planted in a square configuration about seven feet apart. Four platforms were attached to them. The platforms were about four inches thick and were made from the same rough type of wood as the telephone poles. They were placed incrementally above each other. The first platform was about seven and a half feet above the ground. The second platform was about seven feet above the first platform. The third platform was about six and a half feet above the previous one. And the fourth and final platform was about six feet above the one before it. On the top platform there was a rope that was attached to a pole that was about four feet away from the platforms. When we reached the fourth platform we were supposed to reach out to the rope and slide back down to the ground.
For some reason, before we were told what to do, the drill sergeants just stood around talking with one another for about 30 minutes and didn’t tell any of us to do anything. The drill sergeants almost always had us doing something in the past. We were never in a hurry, but we were always occupied with physical tasks to do. After about thirty minutes, one of the drill sergeants just turned around and pointed to the platforms and said to all of us to climb up to the top and slide down.
Well at first, all 300 of us looked at the platforms and nobody did anything. As a matter of fact for the last 30 minutes, while we waited for the drill sergeants to tell us what to do, none of us actually said a word to one another. So two other soldiers and myself just decided we would walk over and start climbing by ourselves. So that’s what we did. The other soldiers just stood and watched us in order to see what would happen.
It took the three of us about seven minutes or so to climb up on the first platform because it was a little more difficult than we thought it would be. It took us about another seven minutes or so in order to climb up to the next platform. As we started climbing toward the third platform, all of the other soldiers just slowly walked over and started climbing also. After the three of us began to climb up to the third platform I heard one of the soldiers below us holler, “Get back.” I didn’t know exactly what was happening because I couldn’t see through the platforms beneath us, so I thought the soldier may have been mad at somebody and was maybe going to punch that person. But that’s not what was happening at all.
What was happening was a very large soldier wanted to help some smaller soldiers get up the platforms more easily so he started helping them to do so. Up until that point in the climbing, the only words that were ever spoken by anyone was by that one big soldier who said, “Get back.” Then, all of a sudden all of the other soldiers all started helping one another. And then they all started to giggle. And no one did any climbing alone after the big soldier helped the other soldiers. As a matter of fact, every soldier continued to help one another to climb from that point on. When everyone switched to helping one another they all climbed much faster, much more effectively, and much more safely.
What took the other two soldiers and myself 15 minutes approximately to climb the first two platforms, took all of the rest of the soldiers about 15 more minutes to climb all the way to the fourth platform and slide down the rope. They were all able to do this because everyone helped everyone else. Not one soldier had to climb alone. Soldiers were either pulling other soldiers up or pushing other soldiers up. The teamwork approach to climbing the platforms made a significant difference in the overall success of the performance of all of the soldiers. I’m guessing that we all climbed approximately 300 times faster and more safely when we all helped one another.
This was a very clear and vivid picture for me of what mankind can do when he is given tasks that are either too difficult for one person to accomplish or when working with other people can make tasks get completed sooner, more effectively, or more safely. I had never actually seen an example of teamwork benefit people so clearly in my life before. Mankind with his unique and high levels of social engagement can create unique and even beautiful results of cooperatively working together.
Mankind is the only animal on earth
that has the the ability to
think about complex ideas Individually
and then take those ideas and complete tasks corporately
on such a high level intellectually.
God has placed mankind on this earth with the ability to think about complex ideas individually as well as corporately, and communicate those ideas with other people with significant precision and also with extensive variety. He has also given us the ability to utilize our own personal mental and physical resources as well as our external environmental resources, that are available to us. In the story about the platforms we all physically used one another’s physical and mental help in order to complete the climbing task, even though in that case not very much verbal communication occurred.
Green Beret Training at Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Obstacle number 3
A team assignment.
A 55 gallon plastic drum with water in it
that was supposed to symbolize high explosives
was to be carried seven miles across the military base.
I was watching a television show of the Green Beret Special Forces in Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, North Carolina army base for the Green Beret soldiers that showed several teams of soldiers performing a task that was given to them. They were given a 55 gallon plastic drum with water in it that was supposed to symbolize high explosives. They were also given four 15 or 30 foot long hollow poles that were approximately three or four inches in diameter and approximately 1/8” thick, 4 jeep tires on rims, and a thirty or forty foot long piece of seat belt material. The job for each team was to carry the highly explosive liquid material 7 miles to another part of the military base for storage or for usage.
All of the teams of soldiers were able to carry or drag the explosives to its required destination. They each configured the materials that they were given in different ways in order to accomplish their required tasks. However, I didn’t realize until two days after I watched this television show that none of them at the time realized that the materials that they had been given were exactly what they needed in order to make a skeleton of a car that would also have the ability to carry the explosives for them while they could use the tires to roll the explosives the seven miles required. Although they were all able to transport the material, they were not able at the time to see that they had actually been given a disassembled wagon in which to do so quickly, effectively, safely, and easily.
In this story external or environmental tools were given to the soldiers in order to transport the cargo. However, the soldiers transporting the cargo, did not accomplish their task with the greatest amount of mental creativity and adaptability individually or corporately. And that is fine, because they eventually did find ways in order to accomplish their very important assignment. All of the teams of soldiers were able to transport the explosives, however, none of them were able to manufacture the most highly effective way to do so.
Mission Accomplished.
However, the task was not completed in a highly effective manner.
Obstacle number 4
What can happen when a person does not do the best research possible in order to accomplish a specific task that has significant and multiple life threatening difficulties.
Two teams racing to be the first team and
the first person to reach the south pole of planet earth.
This adventure was a contest to achieve a goal that for one of the teams actually
turned into a disaster, which ended in the perishing of an entire crew
because of a lack of essential specific personal and professional research
before attempting to accomplish a specific task.
This story was taken from John Maxwells’ book entitled,
“The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.”
Two teams had developed the same goal of reaching the south pole before any other human being had done so previously. One of the team leaders was an experienced adventurer. The leader of the other team was a military man who wanted to experience reaching the south pole before any other human being could do so. The two teams set off, researching their mission, and preparing to buy the equipment that they would need in order accomplish their task. The professional adventurer researched everything he could imagine and bought the finest equipment that could be purchased for their task. The military person brought everything that he could think of, however he did not do the essential research that was necessary in order to provide safety as well as success of the task. He seemed to rely more on brute, force, and determination than using his head against nature’s most deadly elements at the south pole.
When the military man’s team eventually reached the south pole, they found a flag with a note on it. The note said, welcome to the South pole, from the other adventurer’s team. After turning around to return back to their base camp all of the people on his team perished due to their exposure to the elements. It was an extremely sad educational lesson to all of us who must realize that excellent and precise research is essential when we try and accomplish various tasks in our lives. Professional and detailed research was the element that was necessary in order to assure the safety of all of the team members and the successful completion of the task at hand.
Obstacle number 5
Utilizing our fullest potential mentally and physically in our life.
The Fighter Pilot Experiment.
The purpose of this test was to evaluate and record the optimal mental and physical capabilities capabilities of a single highly effective individual. The pilot was not allowed to have any written plans and had no time to do any formal independent research. It is my guess that the researchers would use the results of this test in order to try to improve military tactics as well as computer technology.
Scientists wanted to do an experiment in order to find out how much the human mind can think about at one time. So they thought for a while in order to see how they could create a test that might be able to measure those results. The idea that they finally came up with was to go to a military top gun fighter pilot school for training of fighter pilots. At that school, they would ask the instructors who the best pilot on the base was. This pilot would essentially be one of the best United States fighter jet pilots, possible. And he might have even been one of or the best pilots in the world.
The job that they gave him to do in order to test his ability to think about many things at one time was actually very simple. They had the officer get into a fighter jet simulator, and he was only supposed to do one thing. He was supposed to pretend that he was being tracked by enemy fighter pilots. However, he was not allowed to engage with those fighter pilots in combat. The only thing that he was allowed to do was to try to evade the enemy pilots.
Once they put the first enemy pilot on his tail in the simulator, they would tell him, you have an enemy on your tail you must evade him. And then every 30 seconds after that, they would add one more enemy pilot that would be attacking him at the same time as the previous pilots. When the American pilot finally had three, four, or five enemy pilots on his tail, he was shot down in the simulator.
Now the simulator was trying to simulate real pressure of life and death. And although the pilot knew it was not a true life and death situation, he also knew that he needed to act as though it was a life and death situation so that if something like this ever happened to anyone in the sky that person might know what to do in that situation in order to save his life and possibly shoot down the pilots as well. So when he got to the fourth or fifth enemy fighter pilot on his tail, he was shot down. And he responded to the people that were running the simulator with this statement. Why didn’t you tell me that I had another enemy on my tail? The people who were running the program told him that they did tell him there was another enemy on his tail.
The people running the program told him to get out of the simulator and they would go to another room where they would rerun the combat situation on a computer and then the pilot could see exactly what happened and when it happened. The video that they played showed that when the pilot got to three, four, or possibly five enemy pilots, the people who were running the program or the simulator had told him once again that he had another enemy on his tail and that he must evade them as well. However, the American pilot was so busy trying to stay alive by evading the previous pilots that he was now not able anymore to take in any other information mentally. He was too occupied or preoccupied with saving his life. His brain did not register the final command to evade the additional fighter pilot on his tail. And if he was one of the best pilots in the world or if he was the best pilot in the world and he could only think of three, four, or maybe five things at one time, how many things do you and I have to think about throughout every day of our lives?
I believe that everyone thinks about hundreds of things within an hour each and every day of our lives. And that number goes up significantly throughout the many hours of every day of our lives. So as you are trying to slowly and gradually learn these reading and study skills and computer generated research and presentation skills, I would like you to realize that you are not going to be able to progress too quickly in the beginning of learning these skills. However, in the near future, you will begin to develop more proficient abilities with these skills. You will be able to do more and learn more from what you are doing. That’s because you will gradually be developing a foundation of knowledge and experience with which to work from.
You see, many things in life wear out with use and over time. However, the human brain and the human body seem to become stronger and more efficient with use and over time. It isn’t until we become very old that our minds and our bodies begin to shut down. And I believe that they begin to shut down because of a lack of physical exercise and because of a lack of significantly healthy nutrition. Our veins and arteries in our brains get clogged up with junk and we no longer get the same amount of blood which provides nourishment and oxygen to our brain so that it can function properly.
And the rest of our body has the same thing happen to it. However, our physical body also needs physical exercise. And when we are older, we tend to give our body far less physical exercise. Therefore, our body and its muscles begin to atrophy, and we use our muscles less and less each year. And then, since we use our muscles less and less each year, we are able to use our body even less and less each year beyond that. In other words, the less we do the less we are able to do. And the less we are able to do the less we can do. Therefore, the less we are able to do again the next year and so on. And this becomes a downhill spiral physically in our lives.
So as you are trying to mentally develop these learning skills, be patient and try to develop the skills the best you can, but try not to worry about being perfect at them immediately, especially in the initial beginning of your learning process. So continue on and choose those skills that you feel best assist assist you with your learning. And may God bless you as you venture to begin on this new adventure in your life. God bless all of you.
Remember that you are always welcome to contact me if you need anything, or if you have any questions for me, or if you have any suggestions for me. I am always open to communicate with anyone who wants to help to improve the learning process.
Life may be complex sometimes.
However, life does not always have to remain complicated.
We can always take the time to do preliminary research in order to
turn what looks like chaos and complication into
a reasoned and well structured organizational system.
These stories that I have shared with you have put an impression on my mind for the rest of my life. And I think about them every time I’m with people at school or at work and I’m watching them not working together. I realize how much time in their lives at work they are wasting because they don’t know how to work smart or as effectively as they can mentally individually, or because they refuse to work together with other people corporately, in order to produce more and better quality products and services for their customers.
Not only are their products and services that they provide possibly going to be less effective and valuable, their customers will not be purchasing products or services that can effect them as beneficially as possible. Life may be complex sometimes. However, life does not always have to remain complicated. Solutions can be discovered and then engineered in order to create order in the design and manufacture of products and services.
Success can definitely be an individual experience. However, success may also happen with large groups of people who are working together with similar skills in order to accomplish a common unified goal together. If you choose not to read very much then you will limit your knowledge base. You will therefore limit your ability to make informed decisions in your life. And you will significantly limit your opportunities to help other people at home in your neighborhood and during urgent times of stress in their lives because of your limited knowledge base. And you will also limit your own ability to work with groups of people at work because of your lack of a large knowledge base.
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By James Hayes
Chapter 3
Building a foundation and a Balance of
personal skills and professional corporate team skills.
Inspirational thought.
Physical strength and ability is of significant importance in the balance of the lives of every individual. A large foundation of knowledge also significantly matters in a person’s life. Learning how to obtain tools, or in this case, learning tools, in order to obtain large amounts of knowledge will give anyone who uses them a tremendous advantage at living the most fulfilling life that they possibly can. When we balance physical strength and coordination with a large and strong foundation of knowledge, then the human life can be a tremendous experience in spite of the difficulties that the world often throws at all of us from time to time. Balancing a strong physical and mental foundation can also make life almost indescribably wonderful and praiseworthy for many people.
Chapter 4
Knowledge in life matters a tremendous amount.
A large foundation of knowledge in life is always absolutely essential.
It is no secret that knowledge in life matters a tremendous amount. When life is simple, then simple knowledge is all that is required. However, life is not always simple. And during times of difficulty or more complexity in life it is always best for all of us to have an abundance of knowledge and wisdom about how to use that knowledge.
Something for all of us to consider.
Every once in a while,
in the course of a lifetime,
life is going to change or encourage you
to do a little more
than you’re used to be doing.
Every once in a while, in the course of a lifetime, life is going to encourage you to do a little more than you’re used to be doing. It will be during those times that if you should choose to try to do more and grow that you will either have to do what you already know how to do, or you will have to learn more, in some manner, how to do what you need to do. That is what this course in this book is about. It is about pursuing personal growth in your life in spite of good situations as well as bad situations. It is about trying to reach your own fullest God-given potential in your own personal life here and now in order to live as fulfilling of a life as possible here and now and also try to help other people to do so as well. I personally believe that helping other people to succeed in life will place you in the category of a being a leader, a mentor, or at least a teacher. That’s a very good thing in my opinion. Congratulations to you when you choose to take on new challenges and succeed at them. And thank you for all of your energy and efforts.
Chapter 5
Intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of life.
Let’s take a look at both
some intrinsic and extrinsic things in life
that help people to survive individually and corporately.
This may give you some added perspective
and insight about both why and how to grow personally and to teach and lead your children and your students to grow as well.
First of all, let’s take a look at both intrinsic and extrinsic things in life that help people to survive and also contribute to the survival of other people as well.
Intrinsic benefits of life.
Athletic ability
Artistic ability such as painting and music
Beauty
Race
Bloodline, etc.
Extrinsic benefits of life.
Money
Friends
Sympathy from others
Authority
Political worldview
Social affiliation
Unexpected or even expected Tragedy
We need to be aware that for whatever reason there may be individuals as well as groups that can and that may try to steal or destroy what you have in your life.
Those things that they may try to destroy can be intrinsic or extrinsic benefits.
Secondly, let’s consider several intrinsic values that we all possess that may provide us as fulfilling of a life as possible depending on weather or not we choose to try to grow, learn, and utilize our God-given potential to the fullest extent that we possibly can, while we are alive on this wonderful earth.
These intrinsic values cannot be take away from your own physical power and knowledge base.
Prayer
Very early morning Bible reading daily for connection with God.
Physical Power
Knowledge
Understanding complex concepts
Discernment
Discretion with speech and social engagement
One thing to remember is that the above intrinsic qualities in your life simply cannot be taken away from you. They are yours throughout your entire lifetime. And they can be of immeasurable value to the fulness of life that you can experience and that you can help to teach others so that they can experience greater fulfillment in their life as well.
Some people are tremendously blessed in may ways.
Some people are tremendously blessed. They are handsome, healthy, strong, and caring. They have a great family and friends that are godly. They fight for righteousness, justice, and equity for all. God bless them. I’m Truly happy for them. However, they also need to work in order to maintain their many blessings, manage them, continue to develop them more fully, and keep them in a dynamic balance in their life because all of our lives are changing constantly. In other words, they need to continually cultivate a dynamic balance of their blessings throughout their entire life.
However, other people may lack some of these qualities or other qualities in their life that they need in order to create a healthy balance of maturity in their life. For those people they need to try their best to develop, cultivate, and further develop as many intrinsic and extrinsic support systems that they possibly can and maintain, manage, and keep them in a dynamic balance throughout their entire lives also.
Let’s consider the life of Jesus Christ. In the days that Jesus walked this earth the religious leaders continually tried to criminalize His knowledge and His character. He needed to add to His life defending himself and His character as well as accurate biblical theology from those who hated Him and who were theologically ignorant of what the Bible teaches. And we also need to develop our knowledge base and defend it righteously from those who oppose us, as well as utilize our knowledge base continually throughout our entire lifetime for the benefit of ourselves as well as everyone around us.
Who would have ever though that the wonderful aspects of the life of Jesus would actually be criminalized by the Hebrew religious leaders of the day? I personally could not imagine myself trying to contradict Jesus Christ.
All of the qualities in the second list above are attributes that cannot be stolen or destroyed because they are intrinsic. However, some people will still try to lie about our character. And that does happen sometimes. Look at what the biblical religious leaders tried to do before the people of Israel with their own representation of the character of Jesus Christ. They tried to make Jesus seem to be demonic, cruel, unfaithful, and unlawful. However, today, with all of the evidence and analysis that we have historically about Jesus, it is reasonable to understand and to believe that the character of Jesus Christ was without blemish of any kind. His character was kind to people and decent.
Jesus lived a simple and an honest life. And He was ultimately killed actually for two reasons. He told people that He is God’s only begotten Son. That made Him claim to be God, as well, in the form of the Son. And He also strongly criticized the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of the day, who were changing what the scriptures said and meant, so that they could have beneficial lives themselves that were more advantageous than the general public of their day.
However, today with the evidence that everyone has in front of them in print from biblical and extra biblical writings, as well as through general reasoning of historical evaluation, we can see the hypocrisy of the religious leaders and the absolutely simplistic truth and humility about the life lived by Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Living God.
During the time that He walked on this earth Jesus was forced to disprove the wicked words of hatred toward Him from the religious leaders and do more in order to defend Himself verbally, while at the same time continue to carry out His overall mission on earth. Jesus had to change His methods of engaging His followers, while at the same time fighting back against the ungodly religious leaders who continued to try to lie about Him, persecute Him, and ultimately have Him killed.
Now, let’s get back to the intrinsic character traits that people have and need to continually cultivate, further develop, maintain, manage, and utilize in their own personal lives. In this book I have highlighted those intrinsic characteristics that I personally believe are the most valuable possessions that we will ever be able to possess. However, we must absolutely always be reminded that we constantly need to further develop, cultivate, maintain, and utilize character traits within our lives on a daily basis. We must do this so that we can always be on the alert to try to help the needy and the afflicted in our world.
Sure, we need to try to provide for our own household. However, we must also always try to go further than that as well. We must also try to defend ourselves, our family, and our friends from wicked people, and to help those people who simply cannot help themselves. That should keep our lives pretty busy from time to time.
We must try to reach out to our communities around us. Jesus helped the neediest of the needy in His culture. And we must also try to do exactly the same thing if and when we have the ability as well as the opportunity to do so. And we all know that we don’t always have the ability and the opportunity to help other people in their time of need. So try not to let guilt get too strong of a hold on you when sometimes you cannot help other people. Just try to do your best. That’s all any of us can ever do.
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By James Hayes
Chapter 6
Insights before reading
Proverbs Chapter One Amplified version with commentary.
Here is some philosophy and techniques to help you to teach your children or students.
Reminder
None of this work of teaching your children should be difficult. You will only need to take small steps at growth with your children on a daily basis. The knowledge and life skills they may gain over time may eventually grow far more quickly than you think they will.
In this book I have focused on the biblical passages in the first chapter of Proverbs toward the parents in order to help them to get some perspective about why they should personally teach their children what the parents have already learned about God and how He wants the parents and their children to live. This is because I believe the children need to learn these biblical concepts even before learning much of their academic foundation. They need to learn very early in life about God’s laws and His moral values for their protection, for their social relationship development, and for their overall success throughout their life academically as well as morally.
Try to remember that the
individual academic foundational learning steps
that I will be taking you through will be the following.
Scientific academic Knowledge,
Biblical Wisdom,
Understanding complex concepts,
Personal Discernment about people and about the world around them, and
Discretion in a person’s speech and in their social interactions with people.
I believe that the main reason that mankind is here on earth is
to grow and mature academically and biblically
and to show others how to do so as well.
I believe that the main reason that mankind is here on earth is to grow and mature academically and biblically and to show others how to do so as well. Through scientific academic and biblical knowledge growth we are able to gradually develop a mature relationship with our God as well as with one another. Growing and maturing academically and biblically may help us to have a more fulfilling life in general personally because of our beneficial relationships with one another, with God, and with the world around us.
Personal insight.
You do not need to teach the young people or anyone for that matter at the same grade level of academic knowledge that our schools are teaching them at. You may begin to teach and equip them at the academic and moral level that they are currently aware of and are living at. They may be at a lower or a higher academic level than their age level group.
Help your students, children, friends, or business colleagues to set personal dreams or goals for meaning or purpose in their lives and to start to prepare for their future so that they may begin working toward their goals now. They need to have highly specific or precise academic, technical, social, and moral meaning in their life if they are going to work toward their goals. It will be fine if you help them to create and set their goals with them. Goals without written plans in order to try to achieve them are simply dreams. The difference between a dream and a goal is a formally written out plan with specific steps and with time schedules. If you don’t incorporate time schedules in your specific plan then you are more likely to not reach your time goals for achieving the results that you want because you will simply put off working on your goals for any number of reasons. You can always make changes in your plans, however, it is important that you always write out any changes that you make. People do not expect what you are not going to inspect. So set specific time frames and quality expectations for your own goals as well.
The opposite of developing academically and biblically is the following.
If people have no meaning or no purpose in their life then they will probably have no goals to work toward achieving. They will have no specific reason to be here on this planet. They will be less likely to feel a connection with other people because they will have few things to contribute to other people in their community. They will just be here for no reason other than to be here. Having specific purposes in our life creates specific motivation in order to achieve unique, individual, personal goals that are a reflection of your own God-given abilities and potential in your life.
Chapter 7
You may begin to teach and guide your children
by following the learning template that I have discovered
in the book of Proverbs in chapter one.
Valuable insight.
Comparisons and contrasts can be very helpful in order to clarify ideas in life. They can also provide motivational insight as to the significant importance of your goals. They can give us reasons that may motivate us to proactively do things rather than let other people do things for us, even if the way that other people do things is not very beneficial for us. When we learn how to succeed in life by learning about, obtaining, and actually utilizing the tools that we need to achieve our goals, then we will gradually see the results of our efforts and then be able to evaluate our results. Yet we will immediately begin to see the micro results of our efforts that will eventually lead to the overall success of our achieving our overall goals. These micro results that will be observed early in our personal development stages may help us to make early minor adjustments in our development efforts.
In this section of this book I am going to share the eventual overall results of choosing not to grow and learn in our lives so that we can contrast those types of lifestyles with those people who have chosen to proactively take learning very seriously upon themselves in order to accomplish their various goals in their life by using a variety of very small and simple learning tools. Combining these tools in ways that suit your own learning style and needs may result in significant increases in your knowledge and skill development.
One of the goals or focuses in many Christian person’s lives
should be to specifically focus on how
to live their life as fully as possibly
and as responsibly as possible
while they are alive here and now
on this wonderful earth.
When we become Christians we now have a hope for an eternity with God and His Son Jesus Christ in heaven. However, I personally believe that we should also continue to focus on growing, learning, and developing personally and professionally as much as we can, while we are still living here on this earth before we die and go to heaven to be with God. And while we are developing we need to do so by learning about and following God’s laws and His moral values as they are described in the Bible.
I personally find that what is often missing from the focus in many Christian person’s lives is specifically how to focus on how to live their life as fully and as responsibly as possible while they are alive here and now on this wonderful earth. This specific goal is the main purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is to help you to learn how to develop responsibility personally and professionally. It is therefore the main emphasis of my book. That is also the reason that I want to help teach people how to learn using a large variety of small and simple learning tools in order to do so. And I personally have found that a great deal of the information about how to live our lives as fully as we can while we are here on this earth is condensed within the pages of the biblical book of Proverbs. So let’s begin.
Personally, I am also still learning a lot of things about many areas in my own life. And I’m learning how to apply what I’ve learned. I constantly look to the Bible in general and the book of Proverbs more specifically quite often in order to see if my application of what I am learning is being applied according to biblical laws and biblical moral values.
I have taken the following verses from Bible Gateway online from the New American Standard Version of the Bible as well as with NIV or the New International Version of the Bible. I personally like to use the New American Standard Bible because of its clarity of vision and expression.
Here is where we will begin our teaching.
Proverbs, Chapter One and it’s knowledge and wisdom.
I have actually made my own paraphrase version of Proverbs Chapter one from my own reading of it in various Bible translations. I have also added my own reasons for my paraphrases as well as my personal commentary on applications of God’s moral values that He teaches us throughout the biblical book of Proverbs.
It is my hope to complete a paraphrase of the entire biblical book of Proverbs after I have completed the printing of this book you are reading now. I hope that both may give you insight, encouragement, and determined commitment to follow what the Bible has to say about the way that God wants for all of us to live our lives according to His moral values.
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