02 · What I love
God, family, innovation/creativity and reason are not competing claims on my time. They are elements that don't conflict but work together for success. The four quadrants are how I check that I am honoring God' plan.
For some reason, I have always had faith in God, but it has been tested throughout my life. I exercise faith to go into the unknown... of building ideas and technologies that others doubt can be done, or verbally say "you can't do that"...
My day starts before the sun with my "Solo Time" which is my workout then scripture study and prayer. God is the great "Air Traffic Control" for life. We just have to tune into the right frequency and obey the instructions. My week sets aside the Sabbath. I have found that the discipline of the small things — showing up, reading, kneeling — is what carries the turbulence of life when life throws it at you.
Faith has never asked me to stop thinking. It has asked me to think about what matters, and to be honest about how I spend my time and resources. Every company I have built has been better because it has a purpose more than making money. The older I get, the more important this principle is in my life.
No one has ever told me, at the end of a deal, that they wished they had spent less time with their children to get it done.
My family is the main reason of life. My wife has been my great co-pilot. My children and grandchildren are the best argument I know for building things that last: they will inherit the companies, the communities and the character I leave behind, whether I intended to leave them or not.
The rule is simple. Be in the room I am in. Dinner is a meeting that cannot be rescheduled. The cockpit is the one place where the phone is off — and that is not a hardship, it is the point.
I believe everyone had a God-given "spark" that is their own. Gifts, ideas, passions, interests that are truly their own. We need to cultivate and nurture that spark. Plan time to turn off the world, technology and noise and listen to the clear signal that will help us build this spark into something that will help our purpose of life.
Ask the hard questions before you get on the runway. Do your pre-flight planning well. It is so much safer and helps you relax when you are at altitude going 450 knots.
I read history more than business books, and physics when I can follow it. Reason is how I honor what I have been given: by studying it, questioning it, and refusing to let a belief stand unexamined just because it is comfortable.
In the firm, reason looks like the preflight — the strategic plan written down before the first dollar moves. In the cockpit it looks like trusting the instruments over the inner ear. In faith it looks like reading the text again, slowly, to see what I missed. It is the same discipline every time.
IV · The 4 Quadrants
The attitude indicator sits in the middle of every instrument panel because it answers the only question that matters in cloud: are the wings level? This is mine. Four quadrants — spirit, heart, mind, body — each with one question I answer every Sunday night.
Prayer, scripture, Sabbath, service.
Did I begin each day with God, or with my inbox?Marriage, children, grandchildren, friends who tell me the truth.
Who did I give my full attention to this week?Reading, study, teaching, the hard questions asked early.
What did I learn that I did not go looking for?The companies, the cockpit, sleep, movement, the outdoors.
Am I fit to be trusted with the plane and the people?Every Sunday night I draw the four quadrants on a single sheet and write one honest line in each. A quadrant that gets a weak line two weeks running gets the next week's first appointment. That is the whole system. It has survived thirty years because it fits on a napkin.
Faith, family and reason are the loves. Work and health is the quadrant that lets me serve the other three for longer than my enthusiasm alone would allow. Leave it out and the plan becomes a wish.
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The firm, the operating companies, and the work of teaching what the positions taught me.