What Happens in Heaven when we PRAY?

I dreamt that I went to Heaven and an angel was showing me around. We walked side-by-side inside a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, “This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received.”

I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.

Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section.

The angel then said to me, “This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them.” I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.

Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly doing nothing. “This is the Acknowledgment Section,” my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed.

“How is it that there is no work going on here?” I asked.

“So sad,” the angel sighed. “After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments.”

“How does one acknowledge God’s blessings?” I asked.

“Simple,” the angel answered. Just say, “Thank you, Lord.”

“What blessings should they acknowledge?” I asked.

“If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy, and if you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity.”

“If you woke up this morning with more health than illness.. You are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day.”

“If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation… You are ahead of 700 million people in the world.”

“If you can attend a church without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world.”

“If your parents are still alive and still married…. you are very rare.”

“If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, you’re unique to all those in doubt and despair…….”

“Ok,” I said. “What now? How can I start?”

The Angel said, “If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you as very special and you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.”

Have a good day, count your blessings, and if you care to, pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.

 

ATTN:   Acknowledgment Dept.

“Thank you Lord, for giving me the ability to share this message and for giving me so many wonderful people with whom to share it.”

If you have read this far, and are thankful for all that you have been blessed with, how can you not send it on?

The One Belief That Is Holding Back Your Career – Fred Kofman

Your job is not your job.

Your job is not what you do, but the goal you pursue.

Yet most professionals I know limit their careers believing that their job is what they do. When I ask them, “What’s your job?” They give me answers such as, “I run sales,” “I look after operations,” “I manage HR,” “I develop new products.”

So did I. I was a teacher. My job was to teach. Or so I thought.

What’s Your Goal?

Human action is behavior with a purpose. A person acts because she wants to bring about a future she desires, a future she believes will not come to pass without her effort.

The value of an action lies in its contribution to the actor’s goal.

I learned this thanks to the work of Ludwig Von Mises, long after I got my Ph.D. in Economics. Until I read Human Action I had never asked myself what future I was trying to bring about through teaching.

But in a flash of humbling insight I realized that teaching is irrelevant; what matters is helping others learn.

That realization changed my career, and my life. I stopped teaching and started helping my students learn; I stopped advising and started helping my clients succeed.

How would you change your job description (and your Linkedin profile) if instead of your role you focused on you goal?

But this shift would not be enough to maximize your value. If you are a member of an organization, your individual goal is not your real goal.

Soccer Anyone?

If you play defense, what’s your job?

Not to defend, because you job is not what you do but the goal you pursue.

So your job must be to prevent the other team from scoring, right?

Wrong.

What’s the goal of the team?

To win.

What’s the goal of each and every player in the team?

To help the team to win.

Imagine you are losing one zero with five minutes to play. Would you go on the offensive? Or would you stay back arguing, “My job is to prevent the other team from scoring, not to score”?

I bet you’d attack, because you know that your real job is to help your team to win.

Your real job is not to defend. Defending is how you generally do your job, but not always. At times, attacking is how you best help the team to win.

Your value as a player is your contribution to your team’s success. If you think that your job is anything else than helping your team to win, you will lower your value and limit your career.

Business Anyone?

Your real job is to help your organization accomplish its mission. Your job description describes how you generally do this. But “generally” does not mean “necessarily.” At times, you must sacrifice your personal goal (the lower) to promote the organizational goal (the higher).

If you are to reach your full potential as a professional, you must never place “your job” above the organizational goal. Otherwise, you will commit a sacrilege, giving up the organizational goal to pursue your personal goal.

Your value as an employee is your contribution to your organization’s success. That’s why in order to win, you must subordinate to the team.

There are times when a defender must go on the offensive, even at the risk of a counter-attack. If not, the team will underperform. Worse yet, defense and offense will play against each other instead of align against the opposition.

Take a profit-maximizing company. If salespeople maximize revenue, they may focus on high-revenue, low-profit opportunities. If production people minimize cost, they may focus on low-cost, low-profit opportunities.

If the highest revenue products have the highest costs and lower profit margins than mid-revenue ones, and the lowest cost products have the lowest revenue and lower profit margins than mid-cost ones, revenue-maximizers will clash with cost-minimizers.

Unless all members of the organization understand that the common goal and sole measure of success is to maximize profit, they will not work together; they will not play to win.

Tearing Down the Silos Is An Inside Job

Every client I’ve had has asked me to help them “break down the organizational silos to improve collaboration.” A typical example was a financial services company where defense, I mean credit managers, had the goal of minimizing unrecoverable debt. Meanwhile, offense, I mean business managers, had the goal of maximizing return on assets. “You are imprudent, your credit standards are too loose!” complained the ones. “You are overly conservative, your credit standards are too tight!” decried the others. Not surprisingly, the company was not doing well.

It is tempting to fault compensation systems for organizational misalignment. Irrational performance metrics certainly bear much of the blame. But even the best system will not solve the problem. It is impossible to align a complex organization through financial incentives. (I will show this in my next post.)

Organizational alignment requires leadership, culture, and clarity of purpose. It demands that you, and every one of your colleagues, drop the limiting belief that you were hired to do your jobs.

So what will you tell the next person that asks you, “What’s your job?”