#desirable difficulty

Hayatta karşılaştığımız en önemli derslerden biri, zorluklarla nasıl başa çıkacağımızı öğrenmektir. Çoğu insan zorlukları görmezden gelmeyi veya ertelemeyi tercih eder, ancak asıl başarı bu zorlukları kucaklamakta yatar.

New Post has been published on https://www.crownofcompassion.org/2021/05/11/win-the-day-7-daily-habits/

Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits . . .

Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits . . . (Multnomah, 2020)

Win the Day: 7 Daily Habit to Help You Stress Less & Accomplish More is Mark Batterson’s latest book.  Mark continues to serve as lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, DC.  In the Introduction, Pastor Batterson underscores that everything in your past serves as preparation for something in your future.  Most significantly, God never wastes days – especially bad days!  Therefore, your future is right here, right now (aka the eternal now).  Furthermore, identifying life’s subplots provides one key to helping you flip the script.  Also, you flip the script when you set God-sized goals that stretch your faith.  Yet, Mark defines success as the product of well-managed failure, while strength is the result of well-managed weakness.  Therefore, God want to use you at your point of greatest giftedness.  But He also desires to use you at your point of greatest weakness.

However, what we perceive as isolated incidents often prove to be inciting incidents that prepare us for future opportunities.  As a result, when you lean in and learn to kiss the wave, you emerge stronger, kinder, and wiser.  Certainly, the process isn’t easy or painless.  But kissing the wave acknowledges that pain is what it is.  Thus, you own what happened without letting the pain own your emotions.  Above all, don’t confuse self-sufficiency with spiritual maturity.  God’s grace supplies the only self-sufficiency you need.  Also, you must give dead yesterdays a proper burial before flipping the page on the past.  And eat the frog rituals eliminate excuses and, more specifically, the option of opting out.  Those daily rituals maximize your God-given potential and save time/energy by streamlining your life.  That, in turn, helps you make, rather than find, holy moments within hurried minutes.

Our job, therefore, is to consecrate ourselves to God; doing the little things like they’re big things – fly the kite.  To win the day and make it a masterpiece, recognize each day as a miracle.  For the best decision you make for yourself involves making decisions against yourself.  Because you receive a far greater payoff than the sacrifices you’ve made.  Embrace desirable difficulty as a gift from God.  Set stretch goals.  In addition, Mark stresses, it’s not safe to play it safe.  Therefore, to cut the rope means taking calculated risks.  It also signifies the way we cut the ribbon on the dreams God’s given us.  And when you feel like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, God often has you right where He wants you.

New Post has been published on https://www.crownofcompassion.org/2021/04/24/making-decisions-against-yourself/

Making decisions against yourself

“The best decision you can make for yourself is making decisions against yourself.  It’s disciplining yourself to do the right things day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out.  If you pay the price, the payoff will be greater than the sacrifices you made.”- Mark Batterson (emphasis author’s)

“They go from strength to strength, till each appears before  God in Zion.”- Psalm 84:7 (NIV)

Mark Batterson concludes Chapter 8 of Win the Day as he talks about the concept of desirable difficulty.  Robert A. Bjork, who coined the term in 1994, describes desirable difficulty as a task that requires considerable effort.  Certainly, difficult tasks slow down the learning process at first.  But, such tasks yield greater long-term benefits than easy tasks.  Hence, Mark offers this formula:

Deliberate Practice + Desirable Difficulty = Durable Learning

A great way to achieve this is through stretch goals.  As a result, you go from strength to strength – little by little.  Consequently, over time your ceiling becomes your floor.  However, Pastor Batterson cautions, if you start too fast, you’ll finish slow!  Therefore, you need to pace yourself- which is the genius of kaizen.

Emil Zatopek, the greatest runner of all time, measured five foot seven and weighed 145 pounds.  In addition, he possessed little natural talent and ran with an unorthodox style.  Thus, sportswriters said he ran like a man who’d been stabbed in the heart.  Yet, in the three years prior to the 1952 Olympics, Zatopek won sixty-nine races in a row.

Furthermore, while on sentry duty, he’d run in place in his combat boots for hours.  And he often carried his wife on his back when he ran.  Also, Mark adds, “Success will not be shortchanged, and it never goes on sale.”

Finally, Mark underscores, if you want to fly the pennant, you need to fly the kite.  How?  You:

commit yourself to kaizen

embrace desirable difficulty as a gift from God

set stretch goals

make decision against yourself

define the win

Today’s question: What Bible verses support you in making decisions against yourself?  Please share.

New Post has been published on https://www.crownofcompassion.org/2021/04/19/desirable-difficulty-an-oxymoron/

Desirable difficulty - an oxymoron?

Skill-Drive game from the 1950s, made by Tarco Toys.

“Desirable difficulty.  Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?  What’s desirable about difficulty?  At first glance, nothing!  Upon further review, everything.”- Mark Batterson

“In fact, [the other ants] left in such a hurry that none of them noticed the two ants who stayed behind.  ‘Why go back?’ one asked the other.  ‘The place may not feel like home, but look at all those crystals.’ “- Chris Van Allsburg, Two Bad Ants

“All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.”- Psalm 25:10 (ESV)

As a child, I kept my small treasure trove of games on the floor of my bedroom closet.  Recently, one long-forgotten game came to mind.  Skill-Drive.  With electronic (more like magnetic) remote control!  Underneath the road course from Miami to Los Angeles, lay a gizmo with a magnet on the end.  Moving the steering wheel caused that gizmo to expand and contract, allowing the driver to navigate the winding path.

However, the driver needed to take it careful and slow to avoid hitting a bridge or driving off the road.  All in all, a fun pre-PlayStation way to test your driving skill and develop coordination!

Writing in Win the Day, Mark Batterson cites former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Mrs. Thatcher described a day when you feel supremely satisfied at the end.  Lounging around all day fails to elicit that feeling.  Instead, it’s a day where you’ve done everything you needed to do.

Certainly, tasks that require desirable difficulty slow down the learning process at first.  Above all, though, such tasks yield greater long-term benefits than easy tasks.  Because easy tasks quickly bore us.  Also, if a task is too hard, we quit.

Hence, as we minister to others, we comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  While we find the former far easier than the latter, the former’s not nearly as important.  While comforting the afflicted results in warm fuzzies, spiritual growth happens through afflicting the comfortable.  James 1:2-4 described this desirable difficulty.  Furthermore, Mark exhorts:

“When we go through tough times, God is building emotional fortitude in us.  He is preparing us for bigger and better things.  The challenges that seem incredibly difficult right now will seem like a cake walk in ten years!”

Finally, in Exodus 29 we discover the Israelites preparing to enter the Promised Land.  However, Mark observes, God throws in a little monkey wrench into their plans.  He tells the Israelites that He won’t drive out the inhabitants in a single year.  Rather, He’ll do it little by little.  In the same manner, God delivers us, promotes us, and grows us little by little.  Why?  At best, we possess an unreliable ability to anticipate consequences.  In addition, God’s reason far surpasses human reason.  Although we often find that hard to accept, Mark cautions that we resist at our own risk.

When Tarco Toys designed Skill-Drive, they created a challenging route.  For a straight road presents no desirable difficulty.  Therefore, stretch goal enable us to go from strength to strength – little by little.  And over time, as you stretch your faith, your ceiling becomes you floor.  But you must pace yourself.  Because if you start too fast, you’ll finish slow.  Thus, Mark encourages:

“Flying the kite . . . [is]  giving it everything you’ve got.  And it’s doing so until the day you die!  Why?  There is no finish line!  If you win the day that way, you will have won the game of life long before God says, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’  That’s how you become the best version of yourself possible, and that’s the definition of success.”

This is a very interesting idea about how learning is necessarily difficult and that when the answer comes too easy we are not left with anything. Does this mean that having the internet as a tool runs contrary to learning? This following is a transcription of the contribution of Dr Lisa Son Associate Professor of Psychology to BBC Radio 4 Programme, ‘Is Ignorance Bliss?’

Metacognition is how you think about your thinking, it is really a self-reflection ability that humans have. Rather than I think therefore I am, I can think about my thinking therefore I am. A little piece of metacognition is the sense that if you are handed information on a plate then because you didn’t do the thinking on your own this puts you at risk of forgetting it really quickly. The learning isn’t very deep.

There is something known as “desirable difficulty”. This was a term that was first talked about by Robert Bjork who is at UCLA in Psychology. There is this idea that the more effort you put in, meaning the more you try personally to remember or retrieve a particular item or target from your mind the more likely your are to be successful in retrieving that same item later on. If it is easy you can just looking it up on google or wikipedia or someone gives you the answer, you didn’t really try to retrieve it on your own then that means it was just superficial and it didn’t really get encoded into your long term memory.

The goal of learning and education is that they retain this information for the long term, because if we don’t have long term knowledge we are not going have creativity. We have to be able to have long-term knowledge to continuously think in novel ways, We want to be well-rounded and want to be able to think about new ideas. We experience problems throughout our lives and really life is about problem solving. We see problems that are in all different areas of knowledge.

I am one of the kinds of people who do not want my children to be on the internet or on the ipad at all. I want them to be on paper and pencil and books. I want my kids and the students that I teach to value the thinking process and not feeling like they have to know everything perfectly at every moment. But before the internet world things took longer to learn. This allows you to think I don’t know this particular topic or concept but that’s ok I have time to learn.

Is Ignorance Bliss?: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0639xsw

Dr. LIsa Son: https://psychology.barnard.edu/profiles/lisa-son

“I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults,…