Knowing God’s desire for His people to be productive, I, one day prayerfully asked the Lord as to what changes He would have me to make in my lifestyle so as to be more so. He spoke in a manner I understood and instructed me on the first thing to do. I was to uninstall two applications from my phone. One was an entertainment app and the other, a game I played with my friends.

Obeying the Lord in this matter was not a big thing for me, because, I did not think that these apps were an important part of my life. However, a week after this event, my phone brought a statistic to my attention. It showed that my screen time (my phone usage), had gone down in the week that passed, by an average of two and half hours every day.

The statistic shocked me. It also got me to think very seriously about what had happened. This statistic was telling me that the two applications I had uninstalled, had been consuming around eighteen hours from a week of my life. This would roughly translate to 936 hours or 39 days in a year. It would end up being one wasted year, in every ten, spent by me on the face of this planet.

Time, the most important resource of all, that I had, was being drained away by two apps on my phone… and I would not even have known it, had it not been for my conversation with my God.

Farmers who engage in the process of sowing and reaping know that between seed time and harvest is a period when care is to be given to the crop. The supply of water and fertilizer is part of this care. But experienced agriculturists would tell us, the removal of weeds is an equally important part of this care that is required.

Weeds do not wait for an invitation. They simply start growing alongside the crop. What makes them detrimental to the crop is the fact that, they utilize resources supplied for the crop to sustain their growth. This ends up stifling the crop and hence, the crop will either end up yielding lower than its potential or destroyed completely.

Weeds like these might exist in our lives too. Whatever they are, they have the ability to hinder us in the employment of our gift in an effective and efficient manner.

The experienced farmer, because he understands their destructive potential, takes the time and effort necessary to identify and destroy weeds that spring up in his fields. Individuals and businesses would find this a necessary and most profitable exercise.  General Electric’s greatest ever Chairman and CEO Jack Welch, talking about the success he enjoyed says, “My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too”.

Time wasters, resource drainers, negative influences, adverse relationships, destructive habits…the list of weeds with the potential to block our journey towards the extraordinary is long. It is for us to identify and destroy such.

The mission starts with careful and prayerful evaluation of all areas in and all things pertaining to, our lives. Yes, a “Weed Audit” is warranted. Try doing this by answering a few questions as regards all that exists in your life.

1. Is “this” – “adding to” or “subtracting from” my life ?
2. Is “this” – an influence that moves me “towards” or “away from” my destiny?
3. Is “this” – “something I can change for the better” or “something I need to push out ”?

The more questions you ask and answer, like the samples above, the easier it will be to identify and destroy the weeds in your life.

Developed and marketed by Apple Computer Inc, the Newton was an early device in the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) category. Running on a proprietary operating system, the Newton OS, this was the first PDA to feature handwriting recognition. Product Development had started in 1987 and it took six years of work for the first device to be shipped in 1993. According to former Apple CEO John Sculley, the company invested approximately 100 million dollars to develop Newton.

The Newton was considered technologically innovative at its debut, but a combination of factors, some of which included its high price and early problems with its handwriting recognition feature, limited its sales.

Steve Jobs, after his return to Apple in 1997 made what I call the “Weed Audit” and found that the Newton did not merit the infusion of further resources to better the product and boost sales. He evaluated the product, market potential and whether changing the product or scrapping it was more viable. This led to Apple discontinuing the Newton from 1998. But Jobs saw the   potential in the technology and concept, if not the execution, and eventually led Apple to create its multi-touch devices the iPhone and iPad.

Newton PDA, a product into which a lot of money and effort had been invested, had turned into a weed. Resolving the technological issues might have been possible. But the cost to do so would have made the ‘price obstacle’ to sales, an even more problematic one. Jobs evaluation of market potential brought him to the conclusion that the Newton had to be scrapped. He took what was good in it and did what was necessary to keep Apple ahead of its competitors. Sentiment, ego and the like did not influence his decision. He scrapped the product because he thought it would drain resources that could be better used otherwise. The use of what was freed up resulted in the iPhone and iPad. Statista.com states that in the fourth quarter of 2019 the iPhone ended up contributing 52% of Apple’s revenues.

An unknown author gave this piece of advice “Give a weed an inch and it will take a yard.” 

Yes, indeed !. Compromising coexistence with weeds is an impermissible lifestyle for those journeying to the “Extraordinary”

From the book “The Pursuit of Extraordinary” by Yohan Philip