I guess I'd rather be loved than respected.
What I find them struggling most isn't with one of the twelve [things from daily list]; I find them struggling with what decisions to make.
Vision is a picture of a desired future; a picture of something that I don't possess right now, but it is something I want to see and experience, and something I want the people I am leading to experience.
There are pockets of the church that will "give up," and reap a bountiful harvest. They are going to have huge success, like the church has never experienced since the Book of Acts.
The church will not stay the same. It will either blossom because someone understands the season the church is in, or it will wither very quickly.
In the book [Today Matters] I talk about successful people make important decisions early in their life, and then they manage those decisions the rest of their life.
I remember as a seventeen-year-old kid saying, "If attitude made me captain of this team, I'm going to have a good attitude all my life."
We often wait for the resources before we make a move.
God gives us the vision, then He expects us to walk in obedience. As we do, the resources we need come to us.
If I'm halfway to the dream, at best, half of my resources are there. Your resources to fulfill the dream will come during the last step of the dream.
Why would God send people to our church if we don't have a great dream? Why would God give a multigifted, multitalented, and multifinancially wealthy person to a church if the biggest thing you are going to do is paint the restrooms next year? That's bad stewardship.
I felt the hand and the call of God in my life that I would be doing ministry and trying to serve Him the best that I could.
I really didn't settle stuff spiritually until I was 17 years of age. But through my teenage years I just knew that someday I had to settle accounts and get things straightened up and move in that direction.
I started out in the ministry, went to college, started as a pastor, pastored for basically 25 years. That was a good time, I really enjoyed it.
It was while I was pastoring that I began to realize that pastors were not growing churches because they didn't understand leadership because they were not trained, adequate leaders.
It was in the mid-70's, '74 or '75 I started doing leadership conferences for pastors and in '79 I wrote my first book "Think On These Things".
I hold conferences, and the result of that was that the secular community also started picking up my stuff, and pretty soon they wanted more. So I realized I could not only minister to the Christian community, but I could also minister to the corporate community. So my books started crossing over, and then I began to intentionally have them cross over.
I was greatly affected by a guy named Rob Briner, who died about five years ago, who wrote a book called "Roaring Lambs", which is a book on how to be salt and light in the secular community.
In the corporate community the key word is respect. In the corporate community you don't get a relationship until they respect you first.
I've worked very hard at giving excellent training and good materials, resources, books, and then the corporate community gives me respect. And I'm finding now that they really want a relationship with me, they're letting me in their lives, and of course, when you get in their lives you find a tremendous need for God.
I literally wrote a book on it called Your Roadmap For Success. And in it I said success is three things: knowing my purpose in life, I think it's impossible for anybody to be successful until they really discover why they're here on earth and what God has planned for them; secondly, growing to my maximum potential.
What am I doing with the gifts that have been given and the opportunities that are mine to make things better for others? I think it's always - success has to be beyond the person who is themselves working for personal success. It's also got to be helping someone else.
I do a lot of conferences, a lot of leadership training. For about six or seven years I've been making this statement - every time I make it, I can see people just kind of - it's just one of those light bulb moments.
I keep telling people that the secret of their success is discovered in their daily agenda. What they do daily is going to determine their success.
There's a tendency for us to think that the secret of our success is something that is mystical and maybe someday my time will come. And it's certainly out there somewhere; it's around the bend; it's at the top of the hill.
