For months, or maybe years I've been wondering how to keep track of spiritual notes. How many journals should I have? Which journal should I take to church? How should I organize impressions during general conference? Where should I put my scripture study notes? Maybe it's an excuse, but I kind a haven't done a lot of that over the last few months or years. But this week I had a weird sort of Revelation: shipping beats perfection. This is one of the core values at Khan Academy. The idea there is that you can write and tweak code forever, and it will still not be perfect. Maybe that's what I wanted, perfection. So now I'm going to just do it. Something is better than nothing. I'm not going to be embarrassed about my unorganize notes, electronic or handwritten, I'm going to be embarrassed about not having notes at all.
Of course this could be applied to a lot of different things. Sometimes in the church we plan a lot, but maybe we just need to fellowship a lot. CS Lewis said: Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.
What do you think?
On another note, I really intend to look at this blog more often but I don't get alerts in my email. And please excuse the punctuation, I am doing this speech to text.
I had to google "khan academy shipping beats perfection," because I'd never heard that phrase before and thought it must be a typo. http://bjk5.com/post/60760280107/shipping-beats-perfection-explained
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea. I used to be a huge perfectionist, and it prohibited me from doing a lot of things. (It still prohibits me from sewing.)
As far as journaling goes, my current system is to have a "large plates" DOC file and a "small plates" DOC file. (I got that idea from someone on this blog.) The large plates is just the weekly write up of my week that I send to Mom every Saturday. I'm already doing it, so it requires no extra work on my part except for a copy and paste. The small plates is something I record when I have a special spiritual experience.