Last issue Kevin Miller reminded you that you don’t have to know everything and posed five questions you can ask yourself when you’re trying to select your key information areas. Read Part Two below to create your own short list and learn how to stick to it.
Creating your short list
Now you’re ready to list your key areas for study, using the chart below. This will be a rough draft; feel free to erase or scratch out as you go. For each area of study, make sure it fits most or all of the 5 criteria:
- No one else in my team or life can be expert in this; it’s something only I can specialize in
- This area of information can’t readily be looked up or obtained elsewhere
- This is a subject on which I’m making major decisions or will soon
- The few key people in my work or life depend on me to know this
- This subject fits my life’s calling and strengths.
If you’re like me, you will end up with a short list, a modest list, a manageable list. Your goal is to eliminate enough topics so you can concentrate deeply on others. Eliminate and concentrate.1
Yes, you will lose knowledge of some things, which stings. I got an email from a man who described himself as “a Renaissance person: certificated educator, published composer, ordained minister, published author, Ph.D. professor, somewhat-effective executive, radio speaker, parachurch ministry leader, husband and father.” He admitted, “It’s hard to resist diversified learning, since life is so interesting!”2
I feel the same way. But the alternative to a short list is not more learning, but less effectiveness. Let T.D. Jakes describe what happens to the person who refuses to set priorities: “Overloaded people fail. They always have and they always will. Like an airplane, we can only carry a certain amount of weight. If we have too much baggage on board, we will be ineffective and we won’t be able to soar. Most people end up exceeding the weight limit. Motivated by the desire to please, impress, or otherwise gain commendation, they take on too much and, in the end, fail to reach the heights of success or else crash because they ignored their limitations.
My Key Information Areas(rough draft; don’t worry if it’s not polished |
“In order to maximize your life, you have to minimize your load.”3
By the way, your short list will change over time, and that’s fine and necessary. My list 20 years ago, when I edited curriculum for youth groups, read like this: youth ministry, adolescent development, educational approaches, writing. I studied youth ministry and education. I stayed up to date on the trends, key thinkers, important developments. Now I ignore most information on youth ministry or education—not because those subjects are unimportant, but because they’re not my current areas for learning.
Today, my list reads: paid-content online, leadership, new-product development, and preaching. Notice the vast realms of knowledge not on my list. For example, I don’t study writing in depth as I once did. But at this stage of my life, writing is not the information area I need to study most.
Final check: If your list holds more than five key information areas, you probably are still not giving up enough. Remember the powerful premise of this chapter: you do not need to know everything. Less is more.
Refuse to be pulled out of your key areas by insecurity over what other people know—or claim they know. Alan Nelson, who pastors a church in Scottsdale, says, “It’s easy to get intimidated by leaders who tell you about 12 books they’ve just read. But I have to ask, If I were to read those books, how would I really benefit? How would my people benefit? What good comes of it?”4
Cave Art
Okay, okay, now that I’ve insisted you can’t list more than 5 learning areas at a time, I’m going to open a loophole. A big loophole.
Everything I’ve said so far assumes you want greater focus and effectiveness in your work. But that’s not the only reason we read or the most important reason we read. We also read to escape, to meditate and reflect, to recalibrate our lives, to grow spiritually, to enjoy learning.
I think of those early humans, 17,000 years ago, who speared mammoths and painted cave walls in southern France. They were masters of hunting and masters of art. Some of the time, probably most of the time, they focused on hunting, stalking bison and ibex, spearing their game, just trying to eat in order to live another day. But they felt another impulse, to create something of beauty, to pick up a piece of charcoal or iron and sketch large red cows, a herd of yellow horses running wild, a fierce black bull with massive forelegs and curved horns sharpening to a point. What possible benefit did they derive from painting the walls of their cave? Paintings didn’t fill their stomach or warm their body or protect their family. But as humans, they needed to paint, and today we know about them and care about them because they did.
Similarly, there is a focused study for everyday effectiveness—the Reading of the Hunt. Just as essential to life is a meditative, meandering, muse-led study for the expression and expansion of our soul—the Reading of the Cave Art.
Your learning list should include Cave Art areas, subjects that seemingly offer no immediate practical benefit, that stimulate your imagination, broaden your understanding, and deepen your empathy. Listen to some people describe their Cave Art areas of learning:
Jay Kesler: “I read novels for enjoyment, escape, and enrichment. I read John LeCarre spy novels for the intrigue. I read and reread authors like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov because I cannot have every human experience, and good novels let us live life in ways we can’t otherwise. You can learn more about the soul, for example, the plight of the sinner caught in systemic sin, by reading Dostoyevsky than by almost any other way.5
David Hansen: “I mostly read dead people. Reading things that are old delivers me from the feeling of information overload. So much of what’s promoted now will be gone in three or four years.”6
Fred Smith: “I want to stay close to certain writers, even though I already know what they have to say. I read Oswald Chambers, for example, nearly every day. I want to maintain a personal relationship with his type of thinking, his personality.”7
If you had to list Cave Art areas you would love to study now, what would those be? Add one or two to your list above.
I find that my Cave Art areas change more frequently than my Hunt areas. I flit and float, like a butterfly crossing a meadow and landing on different flowers: history, modern politics, murder mysteries, race relations in America. I follow my interests and my sense of God’s leading. On such a leading, for two or three years, I read spiritual classics of the Christian West—Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections, Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians; Benedict’s Rule. (I also read Zits comic books, but I don’t know whether to claim divine sanction for that decision.)
Further—and this is profoundly important—when doing Cave Art study, I read in a different way. Sven Birkerts calls it Deep Reading or Vertical Reading. But for me its best description comes from Eugene Peterson, who calls it Spiritual Reading: “Spiritual reading is mostly a lover’s activity—a dalliance with words, reading as much between the lines as in the lines themselves. It is leisurely, as ready to reread an old book as to open a new one. It is playful, anticipating the pleasures of friendship. It is prayerful, convinced that all honest words can involve us in some way, if we read with our hearts as well as our heads Spiritual reading, for most of us, requires either the recovery or acquisition of skills not in current repute: leisurely, repetitive, reflective reading. In this we are not reading primarily for information, but for companionship . It is a way of reading that shapes the heart at the same time that it informs the intellect, sucking out the marrow-nourishment from the bone-words.” 8
By now, you should have selected a short list of areas of information, the topics of study that will focus your learning. That list includes Areas of the Hunt—topics of immediate application in your daily life—and Areas of Cave Art—topics of soul-nourishment. Happy hunting. Happy painting.
1. This phrase is from Ray and Anne Ortlund, Lord, Make My Life a Miracle (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2002)
2. Personal correspondence, 30 June 2001
3. T. D. Jakes, Maximize the Moment: God’s Action Plan for Your Life (New York: Berkley, 1999), pp. 15-16
4. Alan Nelson, personal interview, 28 February 2003
5. Jay Kesler, “Filling in the Blanks,” in “Managing the Information Overload,” Leadership (Volume XVI, No. 2, Spring 1995), p. 126
6. David Hansen, “The Dead Writers’ Society,” in “Managing the Information Overload,” Leadership (Volume XVI, No. 2, Spring 1995), pp. 124-25
7. Smith, Learning to Lead, p. 85
8. Eugene H. Peterson, Take and Read: Spiritual Reading: An Annotated List (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), pp. ix-x
9. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999)
Click to read Selecting Your Key Information Areas – Part One
Kevin A. Miller is vice president of resources for Christianity Today International, editor-at-large of Leadership Journal, and executive editor for PreachingToday.com. He is the author of numerous periodical articles as well as the books Secrets of Staying Power and More Than You and Me.
