Josh's Blog

Month: January 2020

  • The Most Dangerous Distractions

    “The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back.” – James Clear It’s easy to get rid of the things that take time and energy that we hate. It’s hard to get rid of the things that we like, but are not important, not something we truly love or…

  • Keep Your Progress

    In James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits”, he argues that maintaining the progress you’ve made is more important than making new progress. He uses the example of money. If you have $100, and gain 50%, you have $150. But it only takes a 33% loss to get you right back where you started. Put in the…

  • Pray.

    Martin-Lloyd-Jones once said “Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face-to-face with God.” Pray for your churches. Pray for your pastors. Pray for the leaders and the deacons and the treasurers and the secretaries and the janitors and the sound guys and the people who slip in the back…

  • Study Skill #12

    Study skill 12: Who are you doing it for? Why do we do what we do? Who are we doing it for? If we’re doing it for ourselves to not fail, it isn’t really worth doing. If we’re doing it to make a difference, if we’re doing to show God’s glory in Him working through…

  • Study Skill #11: Give Good Distractions a Time and a Place

    We all have things to do, errands to run, people to see. These are what I would call “Good distractions”. They are things that we need to do in order to do our job but they are not the key object of our job itself. Michael Hyatt would call these “Backstage Tasks”. He has three…

  • Study Skill #10: Prayer

    One study skill that is often overlooked is prayer. We need God’s guidance and direction in our lives and His strength in our studies. Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.”…

  • Study Skill #9: Teach to Learn Better

    Recently, I have been teaching what I learned through conversations with my friends and on this blog. It has helped me to think through what I need to do to apply what I’ve learned. It challenges me to do what I advise other people to do. To pass on what you’ve learned is to challenge…

  • Study Skill #8: Focus Defined Differently

    According to Daniel Goleman, focus is not keeping your attention focused on one thing for an extended period of time. Focus is bringing your attention back when it wanders. Our brains are wired to be distracted a good chunk of the time. The goal is not letting that distraction de-rail our work but bring our…

  • Study Skill #7: Write It Down

    Simple, yet powerful. If you think of something you need to do that isn’t truly urgent, write it down. Don’t give it the power to derail your study session. Keeping a notebook next to you as you study is a very useful tactic. I need to get back into doing this, it helps me significantly.…

  • In Defense of the Paragraph

    Edit 2/3/2022: 3-4 sentences is actually a better paragraph and writing like this can serve a useful purpose. I just didn’t know it at the time.   I want to take a break from my study skills series to defend the paragraph. In blogs like this, where I’m writing short thoughts, there is a tendency…