A baseball bat, a tennis raquet, and a golf club. They all have something in common--each of these has a sweet spot. Tonight, I'm trying to help you find the sweet spot.

Dallas Willard noted an experiment done with mice a few years ago. A researcher found that when amphetamines are given to a mouse in solitude, it takes a high dosage to kill it. Give it to a group of mice, and they start hopping around and hyping each other up so much that a fraction of the dosage will be lethal—so great is the effect of "the world" on mice. In fact, a mouse that had been given no amphetamines at all, placed in a group on the drug, will get so hyper that in 10 minutes or so the non-injected mouse will be dead. "In groups," Willard noted, "they go off like popcorn." You'd think only mice would be so foolish as to hang out with other mice that are so hopped up, so frantically pursuing mindless activity for no discernible purpose that they put their own lives at risk.

“We send packages by Federal Express, we use a long distance company called Sprint, we manage our personal finances on Quicken, schedule our appointments on a DayRunner, diet with SlimFast, and swim in trunks made by Speedo.”

In the spiritual Iife, the word discipline means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act.' Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned on or counted on.

"Fifty percent of all we taught you is wrong," announced the President of Harvard Medical School at commencement. "The trouble is, we don't know which fifty percent."

When I was seven or eight, we lived next to a boarded-up school. We took turns rotating the merry-go-round in the playground for our friends. They'd climb on and grab the rails, and we'd run alongside as fast as we could, pushing. The bigger kids relished the thrill of hanging out beyond the platform to experience maximum Gs. The smaller ones were taught to quit crying by slowly working toward the center pole. The closer you got, the more stability you enjoyed. This is an important principle. The faster your life goes, the more focused you must be on your center if you're to survive and thrive. And what or who is the center of your life? It's not your family or career; it shouldn't be your golf game or favorite football team. It's God. We often forget or neglect that. Due to the exhilaration of our ride or sheer panic from its velocity, we hang on for dear life but never catch our breath. It's time we realign our activities around the security of that perfect center, drawing closer to him.

There is not much risk that an executive will cut back too much. We usually tend to overrate rather than underrate our importance and to conclude that far too many things can be done only by ourselves. Even very effective executives still do a great many unnecessary, unproductive things. But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bugaboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people. A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was a torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, ‘Lord Heart of the Matter’ and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington." (I cannot count the number of times that illustration has come into my mind at critical moments. I determined to ruthlessly cut away whatever was not crucial to the task, asking myself repeatedly, "If I had two hours per day or ten hours per week to this job, what specific things would I do and what would I not do? As Drucker indicates in many books, no matter how much wise pruning one does, the information worker will always have much more to do than he can possibly get to. as much as possible must be delegated to others.)

If you could once make up your mind in the fear of God never to undertake more work of any sort than you can carry on calmly, quietly, without hurry or flurry, and the instant you feel yourself growing nervous, like one out of breath would stop and take breath, you would find this simple common sense rule doing for you what no prayers or tears could ever accomplish.