1 simple, quick way to head toward a vision for your life

We wrote before about 7 key ways to find a vision for your life. Here’s a simple way to get some forward motion.
First, figure out your SHAPE. I first heard the SHAPE acronym from Rick Warren’s ubiquitous Purpose Driven Life. It stands for: S)piritual giftings, H)eart/passion, A)bilities, P)ersonality, and E)xperiences. Grab a piece of paper, [...]

How the Taliban use Luke 10 to control villages in Afghanistan

In “On War #325: How the Taliban Take a Village,” William S. Lind and Mark Sexton explore the current methods used by the Taliban to gain control of an area in Afghanistan. The analysis is interesting because it reflects a successful pattern similar to church-planting movement theory revolving around Luke 10 and the “person of [...]

7 ways community helps vision

Swarms begin with vision but are sustained by communities of small groups banded together in the pursuit of vision. Dunbar’s Number (see Wikipedia article, and Seth Godin) theorizes that at most you can have about 150 people in a ‘tribe.’ Christopher Allen has written about Dunbar’s Number in the context of online gaming to make [...]

7 ways to find a vision for your life

Swarms of people gather around a compelling vision. But how do you find a vision, your purpose, that thing that pulls your eyelids open in the morning and kicks you energetically out of bed? There are all sorts of different ways out there. You can hunt them down. Or you can read this post for [...]

Missionary Advocate: How to be a Digital Curator

We all know about the explosion of information and its effect on us. More and more is being created on a daily basis: new articles, new books, new headlines, new videos, new music. We also know that more and more that is being created is either untrue, mindless drivel, evilly addictive, or simply not intended [...]

Learning from parallel visions

Most people who are reading this blog know that I tweet. A lot. In fact, I tweet even more now, because I have discovered a plugin for Wordpress, which powers my blog, that links my Tweets to the blog. So where I used to tweet sporadically and post a lot of “links elsewhere,” now I [...]

How a Promise can Cut through Global Clutter

Our world is an incredibly noisy place. Over 6 billion people live life and make noise: talking and writing and sharing about their lives, their needs, the desires, their dreams, their visions, their passions. Some make more noise (even when dead), and some make less.
Marketing is the art of getting your message heard in the [...]

A five-minute guide to building a swarm

What does it take to build a swarm? This isn’t “rocket science.” It’s being done every day. Here’s a short “five-minute” guide to doing it.
Phase 1:
1. Establish an initial personal plausible promise. Do this first, for yourself, not in connection to anyone else. This is your personal goal: what you feel called to do. This [...]

How-To: Present Your Plausible Promise

Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen) has a great post up highlighting a new Youtube presentation on “The New Urbanism.”
 

 
The presentation itself has to do with how urban sprawl affects the world’s carbon footprint, and how we might redesign it. The video itself is not really the point, however. The style of the video is, and [...]

How to link your blog and social networking sites

Here’s a simple, step-by-step process for maximizing the social networking impact of your missions blog.
The first step is to create a blog if you don’t have one. To do this, you need to have a fairly clear idea of what you want to achieve. Blogs that are rarely added to are like magazines that never [...]