There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” G K Chesterton

Productivity is not just about more.

It is about enough. Getting the most out of your intentioned, invested input, so that you can enjoy the benefits of time and money it affords you.

The payoff is not more boxes ticked, more lists annihilated, more dollars flowing, more minutes filled, more activity, notoriety, fame, fortune…

Rewards of this kind have their payoff, many of them positive, but like a hungry dragon some ambitions will never be satiated.

Praying just last week I heard these words come out of my mouth, “Lord I want to serve you in simplicity and sincerity, uncluttered by my ambitions.”

It made me think about the nature of growth, and the importance of knowing what success looks like…

https://davidleemartin.com/know-your-enough-and-lengthen-your-stride/

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So, yeah, today, what I want to continue talking about is our exploration of creativity, just jumping in and just continuing to look at that whole arena. And what I want to talk about is today is knowing your enough and lengthening your stride kind of tuned to different subjects in some ways, but very much related, I believe. And G.K Chesterton said this. I don’t know much about him beyond this quote. I think I’ve seen a few quotes by him.

00:00:42.750]
So he’s obviously a bit of a dude back in the day. And he said this. He said there are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more, and the other is to desire less. And I think that there’s like a great deal of wisdom in what he’s sharing here is that sometimes it’s not so much our it’s not so much what we are pursuing and accumulating. That’s the issue. It’s the fact that there is an and an unhindered desire behind our actions that has never really been given consideration.

00:01:27.750]
You know, like the question is, if we reach enough, will we even know that we have arrived over? What does I’m sure most of you most of us are like the rest of us. And the likelihood is we have pursued certain goals. We’ve pursued certain like stated outset, outset. We’ve set out in a certain direction looking for an outcome. We reach that outcome. And then for whatever bizarre reason, we keep moving the goalposts. But the important thing, I guess, to remember is this.

00:02:05.310]
It’s not just about more. Productivity isn’t just about more, more, more. It really comes down to the the whole conversation of what is enough and productivity. To me, that at least is about enough getting the most out of my intention and invested input so I can enjoy the benefits of the time and the money it affords me. You know, the payoff for a productive day, a productive week, a productive year is not just more boxes ticked, although there’s like I guess there’s a certain dopamine hit that comes with taking something off the to do list.

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I’m not a big fan of to do lists, to be honest. I find that there more a list of things that are not yet done. And so they tend to kind of hinder my enthusiasm. It works for some, it doesn’t work for me. So the payoff isn’t just more boxes ticked take more lists annihilated, more dollars flowing, more minutes filled, more activity, notoriety, fame, fortune, impact, influence. All of these things in and of themselves may be may be a payoff.

00:03:29.250]
They may even be very positive, but they’re a bit like a hungry monster that, you know, can see some ambitions just simply will never be satiated. You know, if we if we’re overly ambitious and we don’t know where our satisfaction point is, where if we don’t know where our enough is, enough place actually is where it’s unlikely will ever arrive there. And I was praying last week and I heard this well, they actually came out and spilt onto the the pages of my journal, but these words came out in prayer.

00:04:11.730]
Lord, I want to serve you in simplicity and sincerity, uncluttered by my ambitions. And it just really got me thinking, like, wow, you know, in this in this striving to grow, in this striving to for increase in this striving for expansion. It’s so important that we know what our picture of success looks like. You know, the prophet Jeremiah said this. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. It’s not not really not really a kind of encouraging word in some ways.

00:04:56.820]
You know, it’s it’s a kind of strips things back to their bare bones. Who can know it, I the Lord searched the heart and I tried the rains even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings. Interestingly, this month, we very much are equating productivity with fruitfulness. And then he goes on to say this like funny little statement. He says, As the partridge sits on eggs and does not hatch them, you’d have to do your own study of partridges sitting on their eggs if you if you want to know more about that, like the natural kind of natural picture behind that.

00:05:42.140]
So is he that Gaynes Rich is not by right. He shall leave them in the midst of his days and at the end shall be a fool. And so there’s a sense in which God tries and tests the reins of our hard you know what really pierces my thinking about this verse, certainly as already today, was this statement I the Lord search the heart. I tried the reins, try the Raines’s good old solid King James English for testing the motives.

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You know, elsewhere in the New Testament, we read this for the word of God is a dishonour of the thoughts and the intent of the heart. The word of God is that discern sorry that the verse there in Jeremiahs, Jeremiah 17:9-11, and this particular verses from Hebrews chapter 4:12. There’s a bit more to it, but this is one part of that verse that the word of God discerns the intent and the motives of our hard.

00:06:50.770]
And so at the end of the day, in our pursuit of becoming bigger people, helping more people, doing whatever it is we do, okay, making more money, whatever it may be, at the end of the day, it’s not just our making that matters, but the motive behind making. And so in that it’s important, I think, that we determine our real payoff and the liberties that success and productivity might grant us. You know, so when we reach our rich point, whatever that may be, we can we can enjoy our journey there.

00:07:32.800]
But when we arrive, we’re not just on this hamster wheel of I’ve got to have more. And that could be more. That could be more of anything. It’s not not just money. You know, you’re rich points might be time with your family. There are many very men and women well furnished with finance who are utterly poverty-stricken in their family life. That’s not that’s that’s not rich, that’s not a rich life, you know, so so it’s you know, it might be time with family, it might be time and finance to travel.

00:08:09.440]
It might be the opportunity to be with an elderly parent. Time to study and expand your spiritual horizons. You know, not everything is measured by by how much you produce and how much money you make. There are so many other liberties that actually we’re seeking. Money is just a means to an end. What is your end? Money in and of itself is not an answer to the to the craving of your heart. Something else. It’s something else that you’re pursuing, something else that you’re looking for, something else you’re desiring.

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And money is just one one avenue to help you get there and help you fulfil on on that thing. What is that thing for you? What does freedom look like for you? What does liberty look like for you? What does joy, peace, wholeness, satisfaction, contentment? What does it look like for you? What’s your enough place? You know, and the list for the list of those things is going to be different for different people.

00:09:22.760]
But it needs to be something far less general and just be happy or be rich or be free because they are not things that you can necessarily quantify or measure. You know, I’m a strong believer in abundance and, you know, I’ve never been labouring against limitation is is often not a great deal of fun. You know, being rich in time and richer in money gives you more options. Being rich in motivation, being rich in skills gives you more opportunities to reach out and to stretch out and to become more and to help more.

00:10:09.230]
You know, I believe in in abundance, but I think it’s very easy that we fall into a temptation of always chasing more. We we set ourselves a goal. We set ourselves a line, we reach it, and we never even stop to celebrate. We just keep running and we just keep. All right. The next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. But and it’s easy to fall into that endless chase just chasing.

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And then, like you ask people, what are you chasing? And oftentimes they wouldn’t they wouldn’t even know what they’re what they’re running after. You know, productivity for productivity sake, prosperity for prosperity sake, abundance for abundance sake is really not enough of a sake. We need something bigger. We need we need to sense purpose. And the scriptures tell us that God discerns and searches out the motivations of the hard, you know, ambitions can be very easily moulded by mixed motives.

00:11:17.090]
Sometimes we can be pursuing more and and running to end it, like seeking to produce and getting into like that busy life, busy world because we’re trying to prove something to someone. We’re trying to impress someone. You know, these things can be very, very deeply rooted and being able to allow God in and move in and discern the motives behind our desire and that the. The the momentum of our hard to go forward and to expand and to produce, you know, sometimes it’s great to just come back and real things back in and get before the face of the Holy Ghost and just say, hey, how what’s going on here?

00:12:11.410]
Really what is really behind and what is really fuelling this desire to to move forward? I’m not saying that it’s anything bad or wrong. It’s far from it, actually. But it’s good to enter into that same conversation that the Holy Spirit has here in the scriptures and allow God’s word to search our heart and search out the not just the surface, not just the froth, but actually not just the doings, but actually come down into the place of motivation.

00:12:48.010]
Why am I doing this? Why do I desire this? Why am I seeking this? And in that place, we can begin to discern more clearly what it is we really want and what it is that would really bring fulfilment and satisfaction to our hearts so we can live not only profitable, prosperous lives, but peaceful lives. Peaceful lives. I love this, you know, and then then you flip the coin to the other side and the problem is like we’ve been talking about kind of pathway to kind of walking a satisfied life with God can sometimes be like overcrowded with ambitions.

00:13:45.670]
Yeah, the opposite side of that is some people are simply not ambitious enough. They don’t recognise just how how much incredible and how much awesome they have to bring to the table. So they never really have any ambition to bring it, to discover who they are, to discover their greatness, to to uncover what God has planted on the inside and make sure they bring it. You know, it’s like ambition in itself is not a bad thing. It just needs to be directed.

00:14:20.170]
It just needs to be be be on the right tracks. You know, it needs to be discerned and understood and motivated by something bigger than self. I think there’s this there’s this great verse. I found this verse today in and the guy in. Let’s have a look, see if I can. It doesn’t want to come up for some reason. Never mind. It’s from the God’s word translation. And it says this is what the Paul the Apostle, you know, speaking really into this whole conversation of ambition and pursuit, he says, this is what I do.

00:15:09.010]
I don’t look back. I lengthen my stride and I run straight toward the goal to win the prise that God’s heavenly call offers in Christ Jesus. And I just love those words, man, I don’t look back, but I lengthened my stride, you know, he was in pursuit of something he was ambitious to to move toward the goal and win the prise that God’s heavenly call offered him in Christ Jesus. There are tremendous prises that we can obtain in life, ones that will be perfectly fitted and affirm both our call in God and our abilities.

00:15:57.580]
And like the question is, how do we then Lanson astride knowing that we have this heavenly call that right now is being worked out right here on Earth? And certainly one of the ways in which I believe we can do that is we come we allow the light of God’s word to search out the motives of our heart. So we have a very, very clear why. And that why supersedes all of that kind of froth and the bubble and the, you know, like just just the mixed messages that come when we begin to talk about productivity producing influence and money and all of those conversations, man, if we can just strip all of those back to why do I do what I do?

00:16:46.930]
Why what is this ambition that I have to make a difference? What is fuelling this ambition and allow the Holy Spirit to speak into that? I mean, like I say, is when when I was conversing with him the other day, this idea of wanting to live a live in a very, very in a place of satisfaction, live in a place of blessing. Here we go. Yeah. Lord, I want to serve you in simplicity and sincerity, uncluttered by my ambitions.

00:17:26.680]
And I don’t want or like world the ambitions to have me running all over the place, I want I want godly ambition to carry me into destiny. Well, thanks for listening, hopefully. It’s been an encouragement to you today, if you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at Davidleemartin.com. Have a great day.