Doing Things Twice

A couple of weeks ago, my husband, David, and I attended Storyline conference in Chicago. Storyline is a once a year conference, hosted by our friend Don Miller, where a bunch of like-minded folks come together to decide to do something more than navel-gazing with their lives.

Don is a great teacher, and no matter how many times I get to hear him speak, I’m always charmed by his quick wit, ability to deliver clever jokes, and profound, humble wisdom. If I could pick a teaching style to emulate, it would be his.

This was David’s and my second trip to Storyline, and at dinner one night, a friend asked what David thought about it the second time around.

“It’s great to hear it again,” he said. “Last year it was good, but it was like drinking from a firehose. This year, the things I need to do are really standing out. They’re easier to see and grab hold of.”

This made me think:

In today’s culture of one-and-done, it’s good to do things twice sometimes.

We live in a society that focuses on “the next big thing.” We only want to do things once, and then we’re off… chasing the next big thing — pursuing the new thing everybody’s talking about, the latest phase, the bandwagon all the cool kids are on now…

Our FOMO (fear of missing out) causes us to chase after every new opportunity/book/event/blog that everyone else seems to be involved in, and we don’t even realize how much we’re actually missing out in that pursuit.

In a rat-race life, where we’re racing from check mark to check mark, it’s good to admit that we raced through something and should slow down and do it over again, learning to savor it more that second time around.

We have lost the value of learning over time.

We’ve gotten used to microwave speed, and have started expecting everything to happen quickly. We want overnight success, and to instantly master something new, and to glean all we can in one sitting. But learning doesn’t work that way. LIFE doesn’t work that way.

It’s good to go to the same conference twice, because you’ll get something different every time. It’s helpful to take an e-course more than once, or read a book multiple times, because you’ll pick up on new things that next time around.

When we get stuck in the one-and-done rut, we cheat ourselves out of learning. Let’s remember that it’s about the process and not just the checkbox of completing something.

What have you done once that you could do again,
not for the purpose of mastering it, but simply to learn something new in the process?