Spartan Christianity

Resilience – How to Recover Rapidly

Resilience is the ability to adapt to situations or recover quickly from a failure. The great value of resilience is that the faster you can recover, the faster you can give another attempt. The skill comes in learning how to think correctly so you maximize your recovery and ability to withstand discomfort.

It is also the ability to be flexible in the face of ever-changing circumstances. If you encounter difficulty on the job, you want to go see the person who is not fazed by this. You want to talk to the person who can laugh in the face of difficulty and begin to generate solutions faster than you can even tell him the problem. The goal we should have as men is to become that person. You must be the person who produces solutions. You are the one who is flexible in the face of chaos and disorder.

Let us look at a few of the key attributes of resilience.

I – Mental Recovery

The essence of resilience is the ability to recover quickly from any event. Whether minor setback, outright failure, or during mental training, the ability to recover fast is key. This is the mental equivalent of resting between sets of physical exercise you want your body to be able to recover in the time allotted to that your performance on the next set will not be reduced.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to simply subject yourself to more events that will tax you. This is a difficult path, but it is very beneficial as well. The more times you can fail, the faster you will be able to recover from failure. You will condition your mind to realize that no failure is permanent. There is no single mistake that can cripple you for life (outside of a felony or something like that).

In the modern world, the majority of our failures or setbacks do not really harm us at all. Our very survival is not at stake when we take an exam or go for a job interview. Nearly every society has some form of a social safety net that can catch us if we faceplant. Therefore, there is no excuse for us to avoid trying many new things. We should race towards failure, knowing that in it is the growth of character and resilience we are looking for.

Mental recovery is also the bottleneck for all other recoveries. We have to be able to recover in our minds before we can get our body to attempt something again. How fast the brain can recover is the rate-limiting step for our total recovery.

II – Physical Training

We can simulate adversity and failure with our physical training. Just like we can train to recover faster in the gym, we can use those principles and learn how to recover faster in our mental training.

If you want to recover faster in the gym, you have to look at the root of recovery and see where you need to improve. Do you need to work on your heart, lungs, nervous system, or muscular system? Which one of those is limiting your recovery? Once you figure that out, you can begin to train it. You can research new training ideas to isolate the system you want to train. You can track your results and see how well you improve over time. There are a number of ways you can train your body and recover faster.

You can do the same thing with your mind. Find the bottlenecks for your mental recovery. Is it the inability to get over failure? Perhaps a low tolerance for work volume. Maybe you are burnt out and need to figure out how to recover while still moving forwards. Whatever it is, you cannot fix it without first identifying it.

Once identified, you can start experimenting with different recovery tactics and see which one works for you. If you are burned out, research how people recover from burnout and what the causes of it are. Learn how to increase your work tolerance and complete more tasks with the same working hours and energy.

The key to rapid growth is to fix whatever problem is the main limiting factor. Once you fix that, you improve in every other facet of your performance. Learn from mentors and people who have been in your shoes before. There is no need to figure out everything through trial and error. Learn from the experiences of others, this will allow you to learn rapidly. If you learn rapidly, you recover rapidly. Pursue knowledge so you can first know yourself so that you can recover and build resilience.

III – Reframing Experiences

To mentally recover, we often have to reframe the experience. This also applies to the anticipation of events that may lead to recovery. Where we choose to focus our minds will be what determines our resilience. If we choose to focus on the negatives, the consequences, or the dangers, we will train our minds to fear and be anxious. But if we focus our minds on the positives, the benefits, and our capabilities, we train our minds to be resilient.

When facing a new event that is causing you fear, shift the focus in your mind. You change your focus by changing your questions. Instead of asking, “What am I going to do when I fail?”, ask, “How am I going to succeed?” Your brain will give you an answer for any question you ask. So, make sure your questions build you up instead of tearing your strength down.

Even if the event is frightening and you are afraid of negative results, write down all the positives that would result from a seemingly negative failure. Write down your problem on paper. Write down what would be the worst that could happen if you failed. Then write about how you would recover from the failure. What action would you take to immediately get back on your feet and start recovering and moving towards a new goal? If we choose to stay still and wallow in our failure, we will only become depressed. But if we begin moving towards a new goal, that movement will fill us with energy, and we will recover.

The worst thing you can do for an injury is to give it pure bedrest. The best thing you can do is get the joint moving as much as you can tolerate and begin to recover. You must do the same thing with your mind.

When it comes to previous failures, you must learn to look back on the lessons you learned while leaving behind the pain associated with the mistake. This can be very difficult, but it is very beneficial to us. No man wants to relive the pain of failure over and over again, yet we do this on a regular basis! Instead of leaving the mistake behind, we choose to play the event again and again in our minds. We reopen those old wounds, experience the worst parts of the failure, and restart the mourning process again. This is no way to succeed as a man.

When we look back on our mistakes, we need to be able to pull out everything we learned and turn a blind eye to everything that is painful. You can do this by learning to first laugh at the failure. If you can laugh at it, your brain will not take it as seriously as before. It must not have been a big deal if you can laugh about it.

Second, look at all the benefits of that mistake. Intentionally look for ways that the mistake led to future opportunities or successes. When you first try this exercise, do not be surprised if you cannot think of anything. Your brain is stilled scarred from the experience. It wants to say, “there is not one single good thing that resulted from that mistake! Don’t ask me that again!” But you must continue to ask it, eventually, it will find an answer just to get you to stop bothering it.

Third, be grateful for the successes and for the lessons. It is difficult to experience negative emotions while also experiencing gratitude. In fact, it is impossible. So, look for all the benefits that have come into your life since your failure and appreciate them. Be grateful for what you have earned or the opportunities you have.

Even if you fail, you likely still have all your basic needs met. You still have food, water, and a place to live in the majority of cases. What then do you have to worry about? Even if the worst should happen at any time and you “fail beyond repair”, you can still come back here. You can reach out to your friends, family, and church for help and they will lend you a hand. Our social structure is built so that we can support one another.

Other Source: Recover from failure – Resilience

The Pursuit of Excellence

A man’s first responsibility is to his life mission(s). A major problem is that the majority of men do not know what their mission is. This is understandable as men are encouraged not to pursue their own mission, but to cram themselves into whatever mold society deems fit at the time. In the modern-day that mold is the standard, generalized college education. The good news is that the lack of a mission is not a permanent state for men.

An even bigger problem for men is the fact that not only are they lacking their own mission, but they do not have any mission at all! It is perfectly normal to not know what you want to do in life especially during the first few decades, but to use that as a justification for doing nothing or for blindly following societal trends is not the way of men. You do not need to have your purpose in life figured out, but you do need to be moving towards some goal.

You must be in the pursuit of excellence

Therefore, set your course and aim for a goal. Make it something you have some degree of interest in, but do not worry if you are not bursting with joy at the idea of pursuing it. Many times, if we simply begin to move, if we start working towards a goal, a better more fitting goal will become visible to us. Thus, we begin to pursue that new goal, and yet again another even better goal is revealed to us until we finally can hone in on the goal and accompanying few bits of work that matter most to us.

It is not about waiting around until you find your purpose to start working. It is about starting to work knowing that your purpose will be revealed as you work.

That being said, your first priority should be the pursuit of excellence in whatever you decide to do, no matter if it is your life mission or not. If you commit yourself to excellence, your purpose will be revealed much faster.

Being excellent at your work is a great way to separate yourself from the pack of men whose favorite pastime is bathing in the mediocrity that they are awarded for by society. The middle ground, their comfort zone is exactly where society wants the vast majority of men. The men addicted to comfort are easy to control by women and the state. On the other hand, men who pursue excellence, improve themselves, and are not content to wallow in mediocrity are a danger to the state. Not because they might overthrow the establishment, but because they are not easily subdued by mindless authoritarian rule. This is one of the many traits of a man of excellence.

Qualities of a Man Pursuing Excellence

I – The Ability to Take Action

Men know that excellence is not equal to perfection. Any attempt to achieve perfection results not only in low-quality work but low quantity work. Without action, there are no results. Without results, there can be no excellence.

As a man who pursues excellence in your life, you must be committed to taking action, improving your life and immediate environment instead of merely planning, studying, and analyzing.

Acting, showing up, moving in the direction of your goal is often half the battle. Very few men are willing to simply show up. They never even give themselves the chance that comes with simply putting yourself out there and attempting. While that is sad for them, it thins out the competition for you.

II – Focus

In a society where humans are trained from an early age to be distracted by anything from sounds to people to technology, the ability to focus is one of the most valuable skills in the world. With focus, a small degree of effort can be amplified into an intense ray of power. You do not have to be able to focus for extremely long periods of time, in fact, this may not be possible. You do need to be able to concentrate, keep your awareness on one task at a time and generate some results.

III – Intensity: The 3 out of 10 Rule

Intensity is the work ethic you need as a man. There are hundreds of thousands of people giving a lackluster effort in every area of their lives. There are people in the gym giving 3/10 effort in their training. At work, they are giving 3/10 effort and working less than one-half of the word day. In their relationships, they are giving a 3/10 effort. The list could go on and on, look at any human endeavor and you will find that the majority of people are giving a 3/10 effort in it.

What makes this so insidious is the fact that these people are actually rewarded for this level of effort. They work just hard enough to see a slight difference in their body from their efforts at the gym. They put in just the right amount of work at the job to keep the boss off their back. Or they invest just enough time in their relationships to keep them from dissolving. The world rewards mediocrity just enough to keep people doing what they are currently doing.

As sad as that is, it gives you a two-fold advantage.

First, if you are willing to increase your day-to-day intensity, you will automatically see more results than the majority of people. And secondly, you do not have to work that much harder than the average person to be better than 75% of workers out there. While this is not an admonition to be lazy and improve only insomuch as you need to get ahead of the competition, it is to say that you do not have to learn how to generate 10/10 effort today. You can start by working up to 5/10, then 5.1/10, and so on. Make small, incremental improvements that can be maintained over time and you will soon find that you have passed the majority of your competition.

From the perspective of the boss or leader, you will instantly stand out from the crowd. There is so much mediocrity in the world that if someone is even slightly above average in their work ethic, attitude, or skill it becomes readily apparent.

Be warned, not as many people will be inspired by your work ethic as you think, in fact, the majority of people may start to dislike, even hate you.

That is because your success reflects their failures back to them. You are succeeding while they are content to give average effort in exchange for average results. But now they are beginning to see the fruits of your labor and will become jealous. They can see the difference in how the boss respects you versus them. They are aware that you are out-earning them, out-training them, and out-living them. This only inspires people who possess a growth mindset; the common man will hate you unless you give him gifts (Proverbs 19:5).

Always conceal your success from others. If you are still in the middle levels of a career or are in a social setting, do not talk or boast about any success or the improvements you are making to your life. Only talk about it if you are directly asked, and even then, always say less than necessary. If one person admires you, four others will be indignant.

IV – Persistence

If you grew up in the last 50 years, then you saw the rise of the “Everyone gets a trophy” philosophy of sports and other group activities. What this means is that everyone is rewarded for artificial success and there is no such thing as failure. Without failure, resilience cannot be developed early. This is a tragedy because, like any other injury, kids recover much faster from failure than adults.

The lack of failure in early life makes failure down the line significantly more painful. As soon as most men get their first taste of a significant failure, they never want to experience it again and will avoid the situation that caused it, which tends to be trying something hard or new.

The issue is that no great success comes without failure and now men are unwilling to risk faceplanting because they want the comfort of steady, low-hanging fruit successes.

“We must dare to be great, and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage” ~
Theodore Roosevelt.

Therefore, a way to separate yourself from the mediocre masses is to pursue failure. Chase it as if it were a limit removing for your life. While you accumulate failures, learn to view them as “feedback” instead of “setbacks”. It is a tool to help you adjust your efforts and shift your focus to a different area or change your preparation strategies. This mindset will allow you to experience repeated failure without becoming depressed. There are essentially no failures that are so devastating that they cripple your life. You can always recover. And the ability to recover faster and give another attempt faster is the root of persistence.

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm” ~
Winston Churchill.

V – Rational Optimism

Learn to change your perspective about your life events so that everything is a positive event. If you are in college and you are scared about failing out of the program, reframe your mindset so that both outcomes are positive. This is not so you can take your ease, prop your feet up on your desk and give no effort, but rather so you can reduce the incessant fear in your own mind that is damaging your ability to generate maximum performance.

Instead of thinking, “If I fail out of college my life is over”, immediately write down what you would do after failing. You could write, “I would have to get some kind of job and pay back these extortionate loans”. Now that you have already established that your life is not over, you already have a plan to rapidly get back on your feet and begin working towards another goal. Then add to this plan by figuring out how you will add value to society or yourself. Maybe then you would finally have the freedom to work on your business, book or whatever career goal you have on the side of your new job.

Whatever you do, you need to develop the habit of quickly outlining every future event in your life so that the positives outweigh the negatives. This can only be done if you think through the situation and convert some or all of those negatives into positives. This must be done on paper, doing it only in your mind will not work. Optimism makes it easier to be persistent, which makes it very valuable.

VI – All Work Is Done Ahead of Schedule

Not only do men finish their work with excellence, but they do so before it is even required to be finished. If you are working a corporate job and want to separate yourself from the pack, slap a finished project on your boss’s table two days before the deadline. You will demonstrate that you are an effective worker who is capable of handling more responsibility and as a result are worthy of more compensation.

If you are still in school or college, finish every assignment at least two days before it is due. Never wait until the last moment to start and complete your tasks. Not only will this cure your stress, but it will build your confidence. You will begin to see yourself as a professional, as one who is ahead of the pack. You then have the free time to look around at your peers and watch them scramble and panic to complete assignments at the last minute.

VII – Consistency

For the man pursuing excellence, consistency may be the determining factor of his success. It does not matter if he takes some grand action if he only does so once per month. It is nobler, and more beneficial to take smaller actions but do some consistently. Writing 500 words per day is better than writing 5000 words one day per month.

Taking small actions on a daily basis is going to lead to much greater success down the road than massive but occasional efforts.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” ~
Attributed to Aristotle, true origin disputed.

VIII – Make Progress

All of the aforementioned qualities are good, but if you are not producing results, then there is a problem. This is not a problem for most people. They are making progress, but they usually do not know if it is in the direction of their goals or not.

Make yourself aware of the progress you are making by first knowing where you currently are. If your goal is to lose weight, you need to know what you weigh today so you can measure your progress in a week or a month. The problem is that it can be painful to measure where we are today. It seems that we are so far away from our goal, or so far behind that we would rather just put blinders on and start working. That is a recipe for success, just not the success you were hoping for.

If you are going to drive to a certain destination, you need to know your current location and the goal location if you are going to successfully use a map or GPS. There is no need to moralize the issue. There is nothing moral about being in Waco, Chicago, or Paris, it is just where you are.

Measure yourself today.

Where is your character, work ethic, or financial report card? If you clearly define where you are and where you want to go, you are ahead of 90% of the population. Most people paddle their canoes in circles, or they follow all the other boats. Very few people know what they want and where they are. Figuring out how to get there is easy.

At times it may appear like you are not making any progress whatsoever. In these moments you need to look around you. How are your college peers performing in their lives? How are the results they are getting in life? If they are giving a 3/10 effort, you will find that you are miles ahead of them in every facet of life. There is rarely a need to compare yourself to others, but occasionally a progress check is acceptable as long as you do not get carried away.

Another sign that will show you are making progress is when others assume your success is the result of talent or innate characteristics. In fact, most people do this with any and every good result someone earns. If someone has straight A’s in school, they are “smart”. When someone is muscular, they “have it easy” or “have time for that”. If a man is successful in the marketplace, others say he is “lucky” or “must be nice”. What if that same person was actually average in every one of those facets, but he just so happens to give an above-average effort in them all? What if he is not smart, but disciplined? Or perhaps he is not muscular, but dedicated and focused. Maybe he is not lucky, but wise and hard working.

Everyone around you will try to minimize your accomplishments by reducing it to natural talents.

They do this because if you are not naturally skilled, smart, or have good genetics, then what is their excuse? To them, you have to be smart, otherwise, they have an excuse for being lazy in their studies. In their eyes, you must have the natural abilities, genetics, and gifts otherwise they cannot make excuses for why they themselves are not experiencing the same success.

Whenever you hear others reducing your successes or trying to say you have natural ability, do not be angry at them. In fact, this should excite you, because anyone who makes those statements identifies themselves as a person who is unwilling to do what it takes to get results and success. If they think success comes through natural ability, they will never be successful. And that is one less person you have to worry about in the marketplace.

Conclusion

One of our roles as men is to work and pursue excellence. After God made man, He gave him work and purpose. The same applies to you. Find your purpose using some of the notes written above. It may take time but do not worry. Work towards a goal, give slightly more effort than your peers until you condition yourself to outwork them, then increase your work ethic even more.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Demons – Are They Active?

“So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore. This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.”
Leviticus 17:7

“Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.”
Acts 19:13-16

Just as there may be active spiritual beings on the side of God, there most certainly are evil beings on the side of the adversary. You know from previous sections about the theory that Satan has a priority list when it comes to temptation, and individuals on the intermediate tier of importance are in theory tempted by demons.

This is one possibility for the activity of evil spiritual beings in the modern day – they are tempting men directly or indirectly through circumstances. Again, this is just a possibility, not a certainty. We can only speculate – this is a thought exercise, not a teaching on doctrine.

We also know from the Bible that demons were once directly active: possessing people, controlling them, and making them take action against their will.

Examples of this can be found in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Acts 19:13-16.

Demons do not do that anymore. There is no evidence of this. To suggest that demons are completely inactive, however, does not seem likely either.

Obviously, we can only speculate, but why would a vast number of spiritual beings sit idle when they have a mission to destroy the church and lead individuals astray?

Demons are not just sitting around doing nothing. They are likely active just as angels are likely active, and their missions directly oppose each other.

Demons may be more passive now, trying to tempt us rather than trying to possess us.

They give us opportunities to fail. They study us and tempt us using our personal weaknesses. C.S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters was arguably the greatest story about demon activity, personalized weakness, and resultant spiritual introspection that the world has ever seen, in my opinion.

The book is about how demons tempt men and the strategies they use in doing so, yet the book can also be used as a tool to look into ourselves and see why we take certain actions and why we desire various evils.

Satan does not have the time to tempt everyone himself. He is not omnipresent. Nor is he omniscient. Because he does not have those God-like qualities, he may delegate and decentralize the task of temptation to his subordinates, otherwise, nothing will ever get done outside of his personal work.

Some people think could be that there are demons on Earth in the form of men just as there could be angels on Earth in the form of men.

This, again, is mere speculation and cannot be proved. Nor does it seem to be very likely. Being in human form would allow demons to create temptation that appears to be harmless interactions among men. Demons could pull other men to do wrong just by getting them to go to the bar for a few drinks or something along those lines. It would be tempting because the invitation would come from a “friend”, who is a demon and you don’t realize it yet.

There may be no demons anywhere on Earth just as there may be no angels on Earth either, we can only speculate, we cannot know everything.

However, there may be a mental benefit to thinking that there are demons on Earth. This thought would make us more vigilant and aware of the possibility of temptation and the presence of vices that draw in our personality by their very nature. Awareness of the possibility of demons makes us more apt to avoid temptation or to recognize “demonic activity” where we think we see it. This itself is a tool, and we as men should never reject a tool that could benefit us in our work.

Mantra

None

Application

Avoid the trappings of demons and the devil. Conduct yourselves like men.

Tips For an Effective Bible Study

I find that the church can be a lot like a popular gym. If you were to walk into a gym on any given day, you would find several people running on a treadmill at a decent pace. If you leave and come back several months later, you will see those same people still running on the treadmill but they look no different compared to the last time you saw them. Not only have they not improved, but by definition of running on a treadmill, they have gotten nowhere.

What is sadder is that many people repeat this same behavior with their religion. They jog on the treadmill of study but never actually improve themselves. If you find yourself in a similar boat, try these tips to increase the effectiveness of your study sessions.

I – Have a Specific Goal for The Study

You are not doing yourself any favors by having vague goals that are somewhere out there in the clouds. You need to clarify your goals and set up parameters for success and failure. Without a specific goal, you are like a sailor without a harbor to sail towards. So you simply float on the ocean, tossed wherever the winds will take you.

So decide exactly what it is you want. Do you want more general Bible knowledge? Do you want to understand more of the Historical context of what you are reading? Maybe you want actionable steps or strategies for your life. whatever it is, if you do not have a goal to find something, you will find nothing.

II – Do not just Cover Ground (The Treadmill Trick)

The main problem with the treadmill people is that their only goal is to cover ground. That is fine and dandy, but it does not provide a clear “finish line” for you. People who get on a treadmill start and stop at exactly the same place. You must have a finish line to run towards, some destination in your mind, otherwise, you are just grinding your gears.

Many people make the January mistake of saying, “This year I will read my entire Bible“. While that is a noble goal, the purpose of it is to cover ground. When the goal becomes to put miles under your feet, the quality of your effort will be decreased. Instead of being focused and present in the study session, your mind may wander and your focus will be lost. This is because the goal is not to learn, but simply to read. While you may gain some knowledge passively by reading, your gains will not make you happy. You will forever make mediocre gains in your biblical knowledge with passive study methods.

Instead of just trying to cover ground, give yourself some kind of evaluation to test your knowledge. Which is the next tip!

III – Evaluate Yourself with Tests

While I tend to be a fierce critic of the school system and of standardized tests, the idea of testing is an excellent learning tool. Though not always a metric of a person’s IQ or comprehensive understanding of a subject, it is a good measurement of how much stuff they have managed to remember.

Before you start a study, do a broad overview of the section of reading, write down a few questions from the next and test yourself on them in 3-7 days. Or you can go online and find test questions about the part of the Bible you want to study. Then you can do your own study, take the online test, and see how your knowledge stacks up to the questions someone else has presented.

By testing yourself, you are forcing your brain to recall information. It is this difficult task of recalling info that forcing your mind into greater growth and knowledge gain. Self-quizzing allows you to gain knowledge much more rapidly than you have before. We will talk about recall next.

IV – Actively Recall the Previous Day’s Work

Once you finish your reading for the day, close your text, shut your eyes and actively remember everything you can about whatever you just read. You can also do this by taking a blank piece of paper and writing down everything you can remember from the text. By pulling these facts out of your mind you engrain them deeper into your knowledge base and increase the likelihood that they will be stored in your long-term memory.

This is even more potent if you repeat it the next day. Take another blank paper and try to recreate the previous day’s notes and reading from memory. These exercises are difficult but provide a much higher return on investment for the effort.

V – Shorten Your Study Volume

Many people take on far too much reading volume, especially if they are starting one of those “Read your Bible in a Year” programs. By volume I mean the amount of reading they try to get done in a day. Most of those yearly programs require people to read 4 chapters of the Bible per day. While that is not an insane amount of volume, it is very heavy for a person who was previously reading zero verses. Especially considering those programs have you start in the Old Testament where chapters can be 60+ verses long on occasion.

It would be better to reduce the volume of reading and incorporate the active reading techniques outlined above. You will have much better results from studying one chapter, performing the active recall and self-testing exercises than you will from straining to read a massive volume of the Bible in one sitting.

VI – Increase Your Study Intensity

Just because you are reducing your training volume does not mean you are off the hook! You do not get to frolic around the daisies like a progressive and expect to make gains. You still have to give some form of an intense effort if you want to see any results. Just like training the physical body in the gym, if you want results, there must be a degree of intensity that is sufficient enough to overload your body systems. It is not enough to do a small amount of volume if you are not being intense with your focus and active recall.

Instead of passively and mindlessly reading Psalms for the 80th time, muster as much focus as you can and aim it at your reading for the day. Make your intensity like that of a laser beam. Focus on reading short passages and then asking yourself questions about them:

What does this mean?
Exactly what is the context?
What is the historical significance of this?
What are the cultural norms at this time?
How does this story fit into the big picture?
How would I explain this concept to a 5-year-old?

By asking yourself questions and focusing, you keep the studying intensity high which will result in more knowledge gains.

VII – Incorporate Memory Work

No training plan is complete without some level of memory work. For this, I always recommend the old-fashioned method of writing verses on index cards. The most noticeable gains in Bible knowledge will likely come as a result of your memory work. By memorizing large portions of scripture you make yourself more dangerous in an argument. The man whose sword is shaper is more dangerous in battle. You now place yourself in a position of strength to strike your foes.

Start with the Aggressive Verse Study

Memorization is best done by starting with a few repetitions of the verse, and then seeing how much you can remember without looking at the index card. Try to repeat the whole verse without looking.

Try to create a mental picture of what is going on in the passage you are memorizing. This mental movie should be as realistic and memorable as possible so you can recall the verse later.

VIII – Long-Term Goals

While the “Read the Bible in a year” plans are noble, they are very common and do not really inspire people because they are not personal enough. I know this because the majority of new Bible readers will quit this plan as soon as they get to Leviticus. Instead of taking on the same goal as everyone else, create your own long-term goal for Bible reading.

Maybe your goal is to become an expert in the book of James in one month. That is a very reasonable goal that would allow you to be very intense and focused without mindlessly following the crowd. By making your own goals you will have a greater connection to them, they will mean more to you and you can stay focused and motivated for longer.

IX – Day-To-Day Goals

It’s not enough to just be the person who reads a certain amount of Bible in a year, you need to have some kind of day-to-day goals. You need to be the type of person who studies the Bible each day. When your long-term goals seem lofty and far off, just focus on the short-term goals that you can accomplish today.

Did you read the amount of Bible that you decided on personally? Did you engage your mind in active learning with recall and self-testing? Can you look at what you accomplished for the day and check it off as a solid day’s work? It does not have to be a massive amount of work, just a small amount of discipline that is done every day.

Final Thoughts

These tactics should help you greatly in gaining more knowledge than you have gained before. 95% of people study passively 95% of the time. By simply becoming active in the study process, you set yourself apart from the masses and will make massive knowledge gains. Active learning is the key to success.

Do you have any tactics you like to use in your study? Leave them in a comment below!

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Respect No One but Treat Everyone With Respect

If you were to walk up to any of the chumps in the world and ask them about respect, they will often give you a long lecture about the moral nature of respect and men’s responsibility to respect elders and women. They will promote this idea even if the elders are fools and the women do nothing more than merely exist.

I am not convinced that having a vagina automatically confers respect. I am also not convinced that simply having watched the passage of 60 winters makes a man worthy of respect. In fact, I have a very simple, yet unpopular personal philosophy when it comes to respecting others. You likely guessed from the title:

Respect No One, but Treat Everyone With Respect

Respect: “admire (someone or something) deeply, as a result of their abilities, qualities, or achievements.“

That is the verb form of the first dictionary definition of the word. Take a good look at the definition. It becomes very clear that respect is based on qualities, achievements, and/or character.

Does an old man who has done nothing with his life besides complaining about the “kids today” deserve respect? No. Because he does have abilities, qualities, or achievements worthy of respect.

Does a woman who has done nothing besides own a vagina deserve respect? Well, that certainly is an anatomical quality, but not one that demands respect. Why is a vagina more respectable than a penis? I think men provide lip service to women, insisting they are respected so they can keep them happy and secure sexual intimacy with them.

The fact of the matter is that respect is contingent upon value. If you provide nothing of value to society you will not be respected.

I once had a friend when I was younger who loved to dish out verbal jabs but could never take them in return. He loved to make fun of the other guys but was always offended if you ever made fun of him. At one point we were in a group of four guys and were joking about respect. We joked that we didn’t really respect him at all (well, perhaps a half-joke). To which he came back to me privately and said, “Well, you know you really should respect me“, to which I responded, “why?” He had no answer to that one-word question. He thought respect was something that just fell out of the sky.

The problem with so many people is they think that their age, sex, race, or profession is what makes them worthy of respect. Perhaps that is true of some professions that are admirable, but the other qualities do not earn you respect. You will not be respected for your immutable biological qualities. You can and will only be respected based on the value you can bring to society.

There are more than enough soft males who think women should be respected simply because they are women. If you ask them, “Well why should women be respected“, they will answer “Because they are women“. And the circular reasoning will go round and round for infinity. The fact of the matter is that there is no real answer to this question. There is no answer because 80% of men have not sat down and taken the time to think through the idea of respect and why we as a society simply give it to a woman based on her anatomy alone.

The problem is that to even question whether women are worthy of respect gets you labeled a “misogynist“.

You cannot even question the status quo without being shamed by society and the feminized church. Imagine that: If you use your mind in an attempt to critically think, you will be shamed by that selected group. That single fact is one of the top reasons religious people are the targets of ridicule due to their lack of open-mindedness. Even though the majority of secular men are guilty of the same manner of mindless thought, the religious are the easiest target.

If the Bible is without flaw and the Church teaches the truth, it should be able to stand against any proposed criticism or question. The truth is what remains after all that is false has fallen away. What is false cannot be removed without asking questions.

Therefore, it is not disrespectful to simply ask a question. People may infer some form of disrespect, but that is generally because they are intellectually dishonest or have weak positions. But even if it was disrespectful to ask questions, perhaps they should still be asked anyways. Because you should respect no one, but treat everyone with respect.

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