• It’s not the magic that makes it work; it’s the way we work that makes it magic.
• Creating magic requires that the outsiders never see the effort required to deliver the product.
• Products and services can easily be replicated. So if your company’s competitive advantage is based on products and services alone, you are at risk.
• The three-legged stool: the Guests, the Cast Members, and the business metrics.
• When you do something really well, the word tends to get out.
• All business problems boil down to leadership problems.
• The true work of a business leader, like that of a mother, is to help others to be the best they can be.
• In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.

There is a lot of good content in this book. If you’re a fan of Disney, leadership, common sense, continuous improvement or good stories, this book is worth a read.

I saw this book on someone’s desk a while ago. The title was provocative so I really wanted to check it out. I finally got around to reading it. This isn’t the best book I’ve read by Hybels, but the content supported the premise. Here’s an overview and some highlights.

The premise of Holy Discontent is that in the lives of people who are investing joyfully of their time, their money, and their energies into something [a passion], they can always link it back to a single spark of frustration that fueled what is now a raging fire in their souls. And that this attraction to a specific cause or purpose is irresistible. One example Hybels uses is the example of Moses and the frustration he felt over the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt. Here are some of the highlights:

-       I believe the motivating reason why millions of people choose to do good in the world around them is because there is something wrong in that world. In fact, there is something so wrong that they just can’t stand it.

-       I’ve come to refer to the powerful, spiritual congruence that connected Moses’ priorities to the priorities of God as his “holy discontent,”

-       Still today, what wrecks the heart of someone who loves God is often the very thing God wants to use to fire them up to do something that, under normal circumstances, they would never attempt to do.

-       The most inspired, motivated, and driven people I know are the ones who live their lives from the energy of their holy discontent.

-       Your ability to detect and then act on that which makes you discontent can actually catalyze freedom-based living in the hearts of your friends and family members!

-       Martin Luther King Jr. became famous because of what he couldn’t stand.

-       I think you know the question I have for you. What can’t you stand?

-       A bad day lived from the energy of your holy discontent is far better than the best day lived anywhere else.

-       Figure out what you can’t stand. Channel your holy discontent energy into helping to fix what’s broken in this life.

If you decide to checkout this book (and you should for the sake of your audiences and your messages), it’s divided into 2 parts. The first part is a fictional narrative that tells a story of a pastor learning Andy’s principles from a gifted communicator. The first part was good, but the second half is way better. The entire book revolves around 7 Keys to Irresistable Communication and a relational outlining approach (ME-WE-GOD-YOU-WE) that Andy uses. (By the way, I listened to Andy to see if he followed his outline approach at Catalyst West. He nailed it.)

Here’s some highlights that I clipped via my Kindle 2:

- Every time I stand to communicate I want to take one simple truth and lodge it in the heart of the listener. I want them to know that one thing and know what to do with it

- Every sermon should take the audience somewhere

- Until you can deliver it with no notes, from memory, then it’s not your message.

- Until you can stand up and tell a story, you’re not ready to preach. You see, people connect with a story, and a story takes people on a journey

- Speaking from memory isn’t difficult to do if you’re telling a story. People make it difficult when they try to communicate points instead of telling a story. If you have four or five points you’re trying to drive home, then you get focused on not forgetting any of them.

- Have a one point message

- How can you expect your listener to care enough to remember what you’re saying when you can’t?

- At some point we’ve got to begin caring more for the people in the audience than the person on the platform. When we do, our presentations take on real significance. Until we do, communication is really all about us.

- Preaching for life change requires far less information and more application. Less explanation and more inspiration.

- If you decide to preach for life change you won’t be satisfied until the behavior of your audience is transformed; and you will be willing to do just about anything to see that transpire.
- You need a sticky statement.

- People ask me all the time how I preach without looking at notes. Now you know.

P.S. – This review took 5 minutes since the Kindle 2 already had my notes and excerpts organized.

- If you don’t already read, you won’t read more just because you have a Kindle 2, but if you love to read, you will read more, because in my opinion, it makes reading more convenient, quicker, and easier to stay organized, especially if you are reading multiple books.

- I have only had 2 books that I want to read, not be available for the Kindle 2

- Purchasing content is cheaper than buying traditional books

- Making clips and exporting them, is changing the way I retain information from what I read. You can highlight, take notes etc just like a real book. It creates a text file that you can then export to your computer. Now I’ll have cliff notes for every book I read. Great for book reviews on blogs or later reference.

- It’s not perfect. It does a lot of things really well around it’s core purpose (e-book reader). I don’t love it for reference because while it has great search features, it’s a few steps to switch books. It’s not a show stopper if you want to use it for reference, but to me it could be better. I don’t enjoy reading periodicals on it. I tried the USA Today for free for a week. I stopped after that. It works fine, I just don’t think that’s what I bought it for.

- It’s a small package. I had 5 books with me in a package that’s about the thickness of a pencil and about the size of your normal Moleskin notebook.

- I wish the keyboard had a slightly different feel to it. The layout and size is good. I just find I mis-type things (e.g. miss a letter) due to the type of tactile feedback it provides.

- The battery lasts forever with the wireless turned off.

- The Kindle 2 will also read to you with a ‘Text to Speech’ feature. It’s fine if you have to keep getting through something but are unable to read for a period of time. But in the end, the voice is a little annoying. Those who argue that this feature will replace audio books are dead wrong. I can’t imagine an audio book fan trading their Audible account for this feature. The voice provides no emotion and does mispronounce words from time to time. I couldn’t listen to a whole book with this functionality. (FYI, you can load MP3s and Audible books onto the device and listen to those)

- My favorite part is one handed reading. I can do something else (e.g. feed L.J.) and read at the same time.

- The ability to share books is a missing feature. I think you should be able to loan or gift a copy of a book to another Kindle user, with your notes. I often share or gift books that I enjoy and I think a lot of other readers do too. That is a part of the reading community that the Kindle 2 doesn’t have a solution for yet.

- I think I’m done with old-fashioned books. Right now, I don’t see a need for them. I wish Amazon would have accepted a trade-in of my old paper books for credit towards Kindle content. Might be a good incentive if anyone at Amazon ever happens to read this.

Obviously, this isn’t a full technical review. There are plenty of those online to read (I think I read them all before I ordered mine). If you are considering a Kindle 2 and have other questions just send me a comment. If you’re in the area, I’ll let you check it out. I was upset that it can only be purchased online from Amazon making it impossible to see before buying.

p.s. – the first book I read on my Kindle 2 was Communicating for a Change by Andy Stanley. Look for a book review on The Faction in the near future, using the clip feature on the Kindle 2.

‘It’, is really an easy read. You can really hear Craig’s voice coming through as you read it. He’s as direct and bold in the book as he is in his messages. There’s some really great one-liners too. I love Craig and this book because he is so honest, real and normal (e.g. there is a story that ends with him desiring to punch a lady in the mouth. He didn’t, but it added great color to the story). I would describe ‘It’ as part ‘how-to’ for ministry and part ‘leadership principles for church leaders’. The central theme of ‘It’ is ‘it’. So what is ‘it’? Well, Craig can’t even define it. But he insists that it’s obvious when a church has it and it’s obvious when they lose it. In my limited experience, I’d have to agree. Sometimes you visit a church and ‘it’ is there. Though he can’t define ‘it’ he does a good job of teaching how to get ‘it’ and how to keep ‘it’, primarily through his own experiences with ‘it’ and without ‘it’. Trust me, it’s good.

Besides the principles that he discusses, there are profiles throughout of different, significant pastors that represent the principle that is being covered. The profiles were really effective at substantiating the principles and were great, because they added credibility to the book because it wasn’t all about Craig or LifeChurch.tv. For me, the best part was the last 2 chapters.

I would recomend this for anyone at any level of church leadership (including volunteers). Overall, I don’t know how well the leadership principles transcend the church so it’s not a good leadership read for non-church leaders, but then again, it’s not pretending to be that either. So here’s your excerpts:

- You can find ‘it’ in all types of churches.
- When a ministry has ‘it’, most things the leaders try seem to work.
- When a church has ‘it’, lives are changing, and everyone around knows it.
- Many people misinterpret it by observing a growing church with outward signs of success (videos, buildings, fancy kids’ rooms etc).
- You can’t copy ‘it’. You could try to fake ‘it’, but people would be able to tell.

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting” – Santiago

“Dreams are the language of God” – the old gypsy woman

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” – Paulo Coehlo

“The world’s greatest lie is that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” – Melchizedek

“We’re all afraid of losing what we have. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.” – the camel driver

“If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And if you can improve upon the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves His children.”- the seer

And probably one of my favorites is a dialog between Santiago and the alchemist:

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer.” – Santiago
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of it’s dreams because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God.” – The Alchemist

“A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, an idea and a leader. A group only needs two things to become a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate. Technology has enabled the connection of people to ideas. All that’s missing is leadership – people like you who have a passion about something. Anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at their fingertips.” – Seth Godin from Tribes (paraphrased)

Since it’s a given that if I’m posting about the book, I enjoyed it, I think the way we’ll do book reviews at The Faction is this. I’ll provide one excerpt from the book, that I think best embodies the book’s theme. If it resonates with you, then consider the book a must read.

“God was about to teach us one of the most important lessons to influence a nation, which is: you will never accomplish it if you remain within the four walls of the church. Our mission as believers is to change nations, not just evangelize individuals and build churches. God is not terribly concerned with church size and church ministries. The church fulfills it’s mandate when it changes society, not when it’s confined to it’s sanctuary and Sunday school classrooms. The isolation of the church from the world has led to it’s ineffectiveness and failure to carry out the Great Commission.” - Sunday Adelaja from Church Shift

Ok, so maybe this entry isn’t a must read, but the book ‘Wide Awake’ by Erwin McManus is a must read. If the passage above resounds in your soul even in the slightest way, then you need to read this book. I’ll just leave it at that.