• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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I know a few friends on sabbatical right now. Having never been on one myself, I’ve always kind of frowned at the idea. Seems like a luxury for rich people, or a last-resort for someone on the verge of a meltdown. Either way, I used to think that sabbaticals were for people who didn’t know how to pace themselves appropriately.

I’ve since grown up a little.

I’d really like a sabbatical.

Daniel Pink tells of Stefan Sagmeister and the one-year sabbatical that Sagmeister takes every seven years. He makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been in my current “state” for seven years this November. Seems about right. Perhaps if and when I transition from my current role/responsibilities/season?

“Preach as you go!” -Saint Francis of Assisi

I’ve always been curious about the life of Francis of Assisi. From Brennan Manning, who often quotes Francis, to my friend who has a millennium old man crush on him, it was time I got to know Francis for myself.

Unfortunately, the book I chose for my introduction was a bit too cursory. In Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale, Ian M. Cron does an admirable job telling a fictional story about a “reverent agnostic’s” journey to Italy to encounter the life of this much-loved saint. Although this was not the book to read for really getting to know Francis, there were several hooks that pointed me toward wanting to learning more.

Life 800 Years Ago
Cron gives some context to the life of Francis, to understand how the world worked a little back then. “The medieval Christian perspective got beaten up during the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers saw the universe less as a mystery and more as a machine where you got hold of truth by using reason, not divine revelation. The Christian worldview that had never been challenged before suddenly came under attack. Scientists replaced theologians, and the age of modernity was born.”

“Eventually,” says Cron, “the church became so threatened by modernity’s scorn that they turned the Bible into more of a history of ideas, rather than a story.” “The Bible is less a book that tells us what to do than a story that tells us who we are.”

As a result, “early Franciscans used songs, storytelling, impromptu dramas, and poetry in their preaching rather than philosophy, logic, or theology.”

Simple Life, Significant Living
“You couldn’t read anything about Francis that didn’t talk about his devotion to poverty. He actually despised money.” “Maybe living the unprotected life is what it means to be a Christian?”

Most of Francis’ writings “are about the importance of worship, liturgy, and the sacramental life.” In this age of “lights, camera, action!”, Francis was more about “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Cron would end each chapter with his main character writing a journal entry, as if writing a letter directly to Francis.

Francis, your genius was that you read stuff in the Bible (like the Sermon on the Mount) and you didn’t spiritualize or theologize it. You heard Jesus say, “Happy are the peacemakers,” so you got up every day and embarked on a new peace mission. My usual approach is to read the Bible, try to understand what it’s saying, and then apply it. Your formula was the reverse. You applied the Bible and then came to a fresh understanding of what it actually meant. What a concept.

“Francis was so animated that people called him the ‘living tongue.’” “A truly great preacher isn’t someone with a seminary degree who explains the gospel. It’s someone who is the gospel.”

Jugglers of God
“When the front door of the intellect is shut, the back door of the imagination is open.”

“Francis, you changed the church (in fact, you reevangelized it) -not through being critical but through forming a community that confounded it.”

Now I see the Story more like a painting filled with glory, poetry, and even blurry lines. Paintings are trickier than photos. They’re open to a wide variety of interpretation, depending on who’s looking at them and the situations those viewers live in. Seeing the Bible this way could lead to things getting messy from time to time-but the Word is living, not static. Our job is to invite people to inhabit our story, to be part of what God’s doing in history. And we don’t need to feel constant pressure to defend it against its critics. Truth doesn’t need defending. It is its own witness.

“Let us begin again, for up to now we have done nothing.”
-Saint Francis, in the last days of his life

Max Chafkin wrote a great cover story for Inc on Paul Graham and his Y Combinator consortium that helps start-ups get from idea to company.

The article is a great lesson on leadership, focus and results. One of the closing paragraphs in the story captures the essence of Graham and Y Combinator quite nicely.

Twenty-seven more companies will join Y Combinator in June, the program’s biggest class yet. Earlier this year, Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that backed Google, agreed to give Graham $2 million to put to work. Graham hopes to use the money to expand Y Combinator, to fund 60 companies or more every year. I ask Graham why he is so intent on growing. Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab,” he says. “They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders.”

It would be great to see Y Combinator-type companies for a variety of different industries, including the nonprofit world.

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago brainstorming some new ways to approach an event that has been held for over 75 years. The event today is completely different from the way it started, but for the most part, it has been held hostage to the same rhythm and reason for the last decade, if not longer.

Not five minutes into the conversation and some in the meeting were already feeling threatened. The look on the face of the guy next to me screamed “How dare we consider changing our event in such a way!”

The conversation turned out to be very fruitful and everyone left the meeting feeling heard and harkened to consider and explore meaningful alternatives to next year’s event.

Since this meeting, I’ve been thinking a lot about traditions and values.

Traditions guard.
Values guide.

Traditions perpetuate the good and the bad.
Values parse the good from the bad.

Traditions make way for the predictable.
Values make way for the potential.

Traditions are inherited.
Values are imbedded.

Traditions can stall progress.
Values can stimulate progress.

Traditions can be eliminated.
Values can be illuminated.

Traditions can stop a company.
Values can sustain a company.

Traditions are neutral to meaning.
Values are necessary to meaning.

Traditions are contextual.
Values are collective.

What do you think?