Story #1:<\/p>\n
There was an old Indian Chief who once commissioned a group of young men in his tribe for a major project. \u00a0The Chief understood the value of documenting the lessons of the past, for the benefit of future generations in the tribe. \u00a0So he set the group out to gather, compile \u00a0and document and the history of their people. \u00a0And after years of work, they presented to\u00a0the Chief a pile of documents in 20 large binders, each as big as War and Peace. \u00a0The Chief was proud of what the men had accomplished, and thanked them for their work.<\/p>\n
“But,” he added solemnly, “there will be few who read this in its entirety\u00a0before they grow old. \u00a0My people are required to do much. \u00a0Therefore, go and reduce this information to something more reasonable.” \u00a0The group was a little disappointed, but removed the 20 document sets and set about reducing the content.<\/p>\n
A few weeks\u00a0later, they returned to the Chief with a single binder of documents\u00a0as big as War and Peace. \u00a0The Chief was pleased and thanked the group again, but\u00a0stated it was still too big. \u00a0“I want something that can be read by everyone in a reasonable amount of time.” \u00a0The group left again, and a few days later, returned with only a few sheets containing the history in a much smaller binder. \u00a0The Chief was very happy and thanked the group again. \u00a0But as they were leaving he said, “Now wait! \u00a0I need you to summarize all of this in one sentence, which I will use as the title\u00a0for this\u00a0book of history.”<\/p>\n
The group just looked at each other, with a smirk, as if each knew what the other was thinking. \u00a0Then the leader wrote down the sentence they would use for a title, and handed it to the chief. \u00a0It said: “There ain’t no free lunch.”<\/p>\n
Story #2<\/p>\n
A pastor in modern day America was looking for a way to help people to read the Bible, and understand the history it contained. \u00a0He gathered a group of believers in his congregation to take the content of the Bible and reduce it to a smaller version. \u00a0In much the same way as the Indian chief sent his group back a few times to continually reduce the volume it had, the pastor did the same.<\/p>\n
Once the group finally had the Bible down to a size the pastor felt was appropriate, he also had them create a single sentence to summarize its history. \u00a0The sentence they came up with was:\u00a0Has your way really worked?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Story #1: There was an old Indian Chief who once commissioned a group of young men in his tribe for a major project. \u00a0The Chief understood the value of documenting the lessons of the past, for the benefit of future generations in the tribe. \u00a0So he set the group out to gather, compile \u00a0and document […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,19,21,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-non-technicalthoughts","category-politics-and-public-policy","category-just-on-my-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1915,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}