By: Elysse Burns on February 8, 2024
As I mulled over Tim Harford’s How to Make the World Add Up, I was transported to my undergraduate classes when I was a naïve business student. Sitting in a business law class, we had just finished the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and I felt physically ill from the information learned.…
By: Debbie Owen on February 7, 2024
I had been listening carefully to my spiritual directee for most of the last half hour. Let’s call her Paula. Paula had had a lot of challenges in her adult life. Because of this, she was struggling to think of God as a Father she could trust. She felt like it was always “me, myself,…
By: Chris Blackman on February 7, 2024
The pastor of a mega-church that Nancy and I once attended was a phenomenal speaker (although, with 20 years gone by and seminary under my belt, I would push back on many things he said). The one thing I appreciated about him was that at the end of every sermon, he would look out at…
By: Nancy Blackman on February 7, 2024
Anytime I see a book title with the word “numbers” in it I run away as quickly as I can. Far, far away. I have never been fond of numbers, but interestingly, Tim Harford refers to this as a sense of naïve realism, where we “confuse our own perspective with something more universal.” [1] In…
By: Diane Tuttle on February 7, 2024
When I first started reading Tim Harford’s book How to Make the World Add Up, I thought, ah, this read will be a breeze. I agree with Harford’s premise that statistics can give us valuable information. At first glance, his ten rules for thinking about statistics seemed straightforward and easy. Early in my career, I…
By: Graham English on February 7, 2024
“How to Make The World Add Up” is a book about how to look at statistics and how we might be able to navigate the sea of numbers that bombard us every day. We often make significant decisions, based on the numbers, so it’s helpful to have a framework to work with that can help…
By: Shela Sullivan on February 6, 2024
I was eager to read, [1] “How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers” by Tim Harford. Numbers intimidate me. My history with math exams in school and college was challenging, but upon reading the reviews, I convinced myself that it was time to overcome my intimidation of numbers…
By: Adam Cheney on February 6, 2024
I have four teenage daughters living at home. Thus, the iconic star – Taylor Swift, is a topic of discussion around our dinner table almost nightly. This week we have seen a collision of the political world and pop culture, all centering around Taylor Swift. Now, I am not a closet Swiftie (A person who…
By: Glyn Barrett on February 6, 2024
How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford caused me to reflect on my experience leading a growing and diverse church over the past sixteen years. In 2007, we planted a church in central Manchester in the north of England. We initially began with ninety people, and after six or seven weeks, the…
By: Ryan Thorson on February 5, 2024
Hartford’s book is helping me make my world add up. I have the great joy and privilege of being a pastor of a local church in the Northwest. I’ve been pastoring here for nearly 12 years and have pastored people through the highs and lows of their lives, my life, a global pandemic and presidential…
By: Jeff Styer on February 5, 2024
I read Tim Harford’s book How to Make the World Add Up and listened to two lectures that he gave in Oxford[1]. As I read and listened, I asked myself two questions, how do these relate to the other books we have read, and how do they relate to leadership. I am going to process…
By: Jennifer Eckert on February 3, 2024
In her 1985 hit song, We Don’t Need Another Hero, musician Tina Turner sang, “All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome.”[1] This anti-love song is about a woman who desperately yearned for “freedom beyond the ragged dystopia”[2] of her oppressed and loveless marriage. She finally sought and found independence and encouraged others to stand…
By: Noel Liemam on February 2, 2024
This book, “The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work,” has a very long ‘working-out’, or way of showing, or detailing of the stated point. I tried here and there within the chapters to pick up the points, but it takes me longer time therefore, I went to look for the summary and…
By: Elysse Burns on February 2, 2024
This week I had the privilege of visiting Chiang Mai, Thailand for a company retreat. Personally, I feel like I took my own Hero’s Journey just to get here from Mauritania. While in Thailand, I have participated in many sessions meant to encourage those of us working overseas. The teaching that most sparked my interest…
By: Chad Warren on February 1, 2024
Are you a “Treky?” In the 1960s, the U.S. was deep into the space race, which created the perfect environment for the television series Star Trek to gain popularity and capture the imagination of a nation. I visited the Museum of Pop Culture several years ago in Seattle, WA. Most memorable for me was the Star…
By: Julie O'Hara on February 1, 2024
Facing the struggles of my doctoral journey thus far has led me to question why I even started and I felt shamed by my initial response. Had I really convinced my husband to accompany me on a three-year investment of time and money out of a twisted ego need to earn the title of ‘Doctor?’…
By: Kari on February 1, 2024
The last thing I wanted to read for our assignments this week was concerning the imaginative world of mythology. I have always been one to choose more realistic literature. My childhood imagination would take me into made-up worlds, but my reading choices did not. I preferred Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie over…
By: Daren Jaime on February 1, 2024
He was my hero, and I was always unashamed in celebrating his victories, letting anyone who would hear me talk about an ordinary guy who could do extraordinary things. I remember my heart beating and blood pressure rising as Clark Kent would leave his job at the Daily Planet to fend off Lex Luthor…
By: Ryan Thorson on February 1, 2024
As I read the Campbell’s book this week (even though it was a reread from my English Literature days in my undergraduate studies) it was hard not to see connections in my everyday life as a husband, father and pastor. Last night in particular our older kids and my wife and I gathered around the…
By: Nancy Blackman on February 1, 2024
I don’t consider myself a hero, but this book reminds me of some people who have been heroes in my life. I think about my eldest aunt on my mother’s side (이모 – imo – pronounced “eemo”). For the longest time, Korean women were not allowed to get an education beyond 8th grade, but my…
