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Rescuing Ambition

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Dave Harvey’s excellent book, Rescuing Ambition, releases next month. Through the end of Friday, you can pre-order it for 35% off at Crossway’s microsite.

Harvey argues that ambition needs to be rescued from a false understanding. We tend to think of it “as nothing more than the drive for personal honor or fame.” And ambition that terminates on ourselves, to be sure, is dishonorable. But ambition directed towards a purpose larger than ourselves — ambition for the glory of God and the good of the world — is not only good and right, but essential.

Ambition in this sense is a God-implanted drive to improve, produce, develop, create, and make things better. When ambition dies or is neglected, big dreams die. And when big dreams die, the world misses out, and we fail to realize the full potential that God has given us.

I think that Harvey is right on in this. We have let ambition lie neglected, and as a result have become too accustomed to dreaming small dreams. By rescuing ambition, Harvey encourages us to dream big dreams that are worthy of a big God, instead of being content with life as usual and the status quo.

(This is very related to the topic of productivity, by the way, because ambition drives productivity. Further, I argue in the about page that productivity is not simply about our own personal effectiveness, but is ultimately about helping to make our places of work, our communities, and society more effective. The kind of ambition that Harvey is talking about fuels the drive to be productive in this holistic way. Without ambition, you are more likely to be concerned merely with your own productivity, which aborts the whole concept and turns it inward. Productivity is really about making things better in all areas of life — especially our work, communities, churches, and society.)

So I’m very excited about Harvey’s book. Which makes it fitting that this is the first book for which I have written a blurb. Here’s the blurb I wrote for the book, which sums up my above sentiments:

Dave Harvey teaches us that God wants ambition back in our understanding of godliness and spiritual health. As Christians, we are to be zealous for good works (Titus 2:13) — that is, ambitious for them. We are to be people who dream and do big things for the glory of God and the good of others. This is a critical book for the church today because it helps us recover the spirit of William Carey, who ambitiously said ‘Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.

For more on ambition, let me also recommend John Piper’s sermon Holy Ambition: To Preach Where Christ has not Been Named.

Time Leveraging vs. Time Management

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Here are a few notes I took a while ago from the Harvard Business Review book Taking Control of Your Time on the concept of time leveraging versus time management:

Two key concepts: Time leveraging and time management. Time leveraging is allocating time to the things that give the greatest return. Time management is about discipline and execution—making sure you aren’t wasting your time and that you are following your plan.

You have to have a vision of how you want to spend your time. This vision has to have a clear view of priorities.

Leveraging time is a strategy of using time in an intelligent way to pursue your most important goals. Managing time is the day-to-day process you use to leverage the time—the scheduling, to-do lists, delegating, and other systems. Without the strategy, time management won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals.

Leverage: Taking the smallest action that will yield the largest result.

Goal is first effectiveness, not efficiency.

Update on OmniFocus for iPad

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I will blog on iPads coming up if I get the chance. I do have one and have found that it solves trillions of productivity problems.

One gap right now is that OmniFocus is not yet available. You can run the iPhone version, but there are lots of limitations to that. Fortunately, it looks like a version of OmniFocus developed to take full advantage of the iPad will be releasing in June. Here’s an update from their site.

Drucker on Making Strengths Productive

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From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths–the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.

The Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks

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Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is fantastic and I will be blogging on it if I get the chance. One of his points is that extrinsic motivators often back-fire and decrease commitment to a task. We shouldn’t dismiss extrinsic motivation altogether, but it needs to be very secondary and used right. The primary way to motivate is create the conditions that foster intrinsic motivation–that tap the inherent worth of the task. Which usually means simply making sure not to get in the way of how people are naturally motivated.

Extrinsic motivation is most relevant when a task is routine. But when it comes to creative tasks and the typical nonroutine tasks of the knowledge worker, extrinsic motivation can decrease not only commitment to the task, but also the original and creative thought that is necessary to finding your way.

Here are the seven deadly flaws of the “carrot and stick” approach (extrinsic motivation) that he discusses in chapter 2:

  1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
  2. They can diminish performance
  3. They can crush creativity
  4. They can crowd out good behavior
  5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior
  6. They can become addictive
  7. They can foster short-term thinking

Again, his point is not that extrinsic motivation is always bad, but that it can be.

Priority Matrix for the iPad

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I was just pointed to the iPad app Priority Matrix [opens in iTunes], which allows you to visually organize tasks into the four quadrants of urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and not important and not urgent.

I was pleasantly surprised by the program. I like being able to see tasks visually separated in this way, and the program is very easy to use. I see some potential here for possibly keeping my daily list, since the OmniFocus interface has not yet been adapted to the iPad.

Here’s a video showing how it works: