Living in Beta

Live in perpetual beta. It’s an idea derived from the same term used by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre in their book Mavericks at Work, and I think it’s a great approach to life in general. Live in perpetual beta. ‘Beta’ is the term used by software companies when one of their programs is in the ‘testing and adapting’ phase. They’ll often make the software available in a kind of ‘limited release’ so it can be used by thousands of people. Feedback and user results are incorporated in the final stages as a product is ‘tweaked’ for delivery. Beta.

‘Sticky thinking’ is a term we could use for feeling like you’re done or ‘finished’. While it can bring us a great sense of relief (feeling like you’re done), it also puts us in a low energy (and low opportunity) mode. After all, in that kind of setting our daily goal is to simply ‘be’ what we already ‘are’: finished. That’s not really the kind of thinking that springs us forward into great passion.

“…Why worry about a speck in the eye of a brother” Jesus said (rather famously) in Matthew 7:3, “when you have a board in your own?” That question seems to carry the same kind of challenge because it seems as though Jesus is hinting that something about the way we see makes ‘specks’ look like ‘planks’ when we’re looking at someone else’s life, and ‘planks’ look like ‘specks’ when we’re looking at our own. So at the end of the day, perhaps the best advice is to live as though we are in perpetual beta.

This Sunday is the final installment in our series, “Unwritten”. Join us for coffee at 9:29 or 11:11 if you can; or tune into the podcast through the week.

Have a great Thanksgiving,

Chris