Having spent most of my adult life in the military I learnt from the beginning of my career that the efficiency of soldiers was more important than most other things. Being obedient was important and you were drilled over and over again in various skills in order for them to become second nature so that when the order was given to be executed you would not think about what you were doing, you just executed the drill, efficiently and quickly, as taught.  

Now, I am not saying this is wrong, as a matter of fact I have taught my children to do the same thing because it can save their life in an emergency. But as we grow older, we start to understand things differently and we learn how to do things differently which means that the drill somehow becomes less important. Let me demonstrate with this illustration: When approaching a street, I will tell my children to stop and I expect them to stop immediately because doing so will save their lives, potentially, because there is traffic on the road and wandering onto the road is dangerous. So, as a young child being obedient and well-drilled is important because it can save a life, so efficient execution of the drill is great. As we gain experience the need to tell them to stop becomes less because the drill has been embedded in their training to the point where they will do it automatically, this means they are efficient in the execution. 

When we grow up and have learnt to detect danger and have learnt how to react to dangerous situations, we are then able to either detect these situations early enough and so avoid them, or we are able to deal with them because we have been trained to do so. I no longer have to tell my kids to stop at the traffic light or stop sign, because they have become effective at doing so themselves.  

And so, most of us have become efficient at doing things because we have been taught to do so … but I want to challenge you to start thinking about becoming more effective and teaching your kids how to do the same. And there is one very important difference between efficiency and effectiveness …  

Efficient means we do things right (drive, type, swim, write, speak etc) and we spend a vast amount of our time in life becoming better at what we do while being effective means doing the right things. This means that we deal with things that will make us become better people instead of doing things that will make us become better at doing things.  

This is a weighty subject and I will address this in more detail in later posts but the take away for today is this: 

It is important to do things right but it is equally, if not more, important to do the right things. 

Be driven by love and fueled by desire 

Shalom