(3 min read)
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Strategic Intelligence Questions
- Giving yourself a score between 0-10, how would you rate your current spiritual development?
- What do you feel you would have to do next, to discover the deepest level of who you are?
- When you get to the end of your life, what do you want to hear others say about what you truly lived for?
- What in your life is best for you to, deliberately, keep small or move slow?
- How do you improve your spiritual score, or balance, by a single point this week?
Key Strategic Sentences and Paragraphs from ‘Present Over Perfect’
‘You cannot feel or taste or touch those things without a soul. And so what good are they to you, if you gain them at the expense of the softest, most precious part of you? (p. 224).’
‘You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level (p. 199).’
‘I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organised (p. 197).’
‘But I’m out of that game, because I came too close to losing the only thing I really have: myself (p. 163).’
‘I used to overwork in order to feel important. What I’m learning now is that feeling important to someone else isn’t valuable to me the way I thought it was. Feeling connected is very valuable. But feeling helpful to strangers doesn’t do it for me anymore (p. 143).’
‘It’s about realizing… how deeply and honestly we connect with the people in our lives, how wholly we give ourselves to the making of a better world, through kindness and courage (p. 129).’
‘Robert was in a tuxedo. The video he wanted… to capture was a toasts for his kids’ weddings. Because he won’t be there… (p. 117).’
‘What I’m learning is that you have to stop doing a whole lot of things to learn what it is you really love, who it is you really are (p. 101).’
‘You wander from room to room
Hunting for the diamond necklace
That is already around your neck.
– Rumi (p. 99).’
‘… you don’t have to fling yourself around the planet searching for those things outside yourself. You only have to go back into the stillness to locate it (p. 93).’
‘But competition has no place in my life anymore. The stillness reminds me of that (p. 72).’
‘Picture your relationships like concentric circles: the inner circle is your spouse, your children, your very best friends. Then people you know, but not well… to the outer edge (p. 55).’
‘It had never occurred to us, in church-building or any other part of life, that someone would intentionally keep something small, or deliberately do something slow (p. 45).’
‘I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. – F. Scott Fitzgerald (p. 43).’
‘You can make a drug – a way to anesthetize yourself – out of anything: working out, binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering, cleaning, dieting. Any of those things can keep you from feeling pain for a while – that’s what drugs do (p. 38).’
‘Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul (p. 36).’
‘If someone gave you a completely blank calender and a bank account as full as you wanted, what would you do? (p. 30).’
Until the end…
Whatever you do…
Give your heart to it…
Stay strong!
