What's Luke Thinking?

Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes

One early morning as a middle school student, I made the dreadful error of allowing my dad to drive me to school without having my backpack in the car. Luckily, he was generous enough to drive back to the house for me to grab it and get to school just a little late.

As I’m sure is a similar experience for many, my dad delivered an on-the-spot lecture about preparation that would rival the greatest orators of history. Admittedly, this was probably not the first time he had to teach me this lesson, but it’s the first time that I remember (and I know it was not the last time – sorry, Dad!).

A few years later, I joined the Boy Scouts, which, to my surprise, was all about preparation. Looking back, that may have been the primary reason my dad was so gung-ho about my joining. I did not know this, however, until I walked into the rustic scout hall for the first time and noticed the walls were littered with phrases all having the same underlying theme that I just couldn’t quite place my finger on. That was until I turned around and, in very large lettering, was a sign that said, “Be Prepared,” which I soon learned was literally the motto of the Boy Scouts of America organization. I, along with a dozen or so other unprepared boys, in a chorus of voices ranging from pre-pubescant squeaks to mid-pubescant voice cracks to post-pubescant strained vocal chords, making a deeper voice than was accurate, recited that motto before every weekly meeting for the next seven years of my life.

For years, I struggled to grasp the importance of this “preparation” because it didn’t really seem like I was preparing for anything other than the task I should have already been doing. There was nothing special about being “prepared” as I understood it, just that if I wasn’t “prepared,” I couldn’t do the task at hand. Taking my backpack to school was a necessary element of being a student – it wasn’t preparatory to me; it was part of the task itself. Given that it is such an important theme, I assumed it would have some magical effect to make the actual task different.

Because of this, I started to view preparation as just a mechanical component of the machine required to execute the task. Be a student? The machine looked something like this: have a backpack > take backpack to school > use things in backpack to participate > learn > apply > take backpack home. Each step is a cog that would not allow the machine to run properly without it.

This began to change, however, in the tenth grade when I began taking tennis lessons. At first, I thought of it as another type of mechanical preparation: I will learn how to hit the ball better, which is a necessary element of playing the game, then, using what I’ve learned, I will go play. As I’m sure many of you can guess, it wasn’t that simple.

Instead of adding new cogs to my tennis machine, I was surprised that most of my machine actually remained the same. My lessons were spent replacing some parts and adding minor ones, but mostly just putting the machine to use. For a little bit, I’ll admit, I found this goofy – I knew how to play tennis! I had a machine; I thought that I needed a new one to do it better.

What I slowly saw happening, however, is that my machine, although roughly the same, started behaving very differently. At first, I didn’t have to think about using the machine; I stepped onto the court, and it turned on by itself. Then, I didn’t have to think about which levers needed to be flipped; a ball came my way, and I reacted instinctively. Things started to become automatic, which meant things happened a lot faster. It also meant that I could turn my focus to parts of the machine that weren’t automatic.

I had the machine, which I thought meant I was prepared, but I had to use extreme mental energy to focus on every single part of it; I was too busy running the basics to use any of the more complex machinery that was available. This is where I learned the difference between mechanical and lubricant preparation. Lubricating my mental machine was the magic I looked for in preparation all along, but it required the mechanical preparation to be built and functioning. This was revolutionary, but it was really doing a very simple thing. Lubricant preparation reduces decision fatigue.

The brain is exceptionally powerful, but the old adage still stands: there is an amount of straw that will break the camel’s back. We normally take a step back before our brain “breaks,” but how often do we load it with enough straw that it moves, but at a crawling pace? Lubricant preparation frees up all the mental load taken by seemingly small decisions, but decisions that, nonetheless, require the brain to hold them, remember them, bring them to our attention, process, decide, and execute. That’s a lot to do! When you add up the 40-50 “small” decisions for any machine to function, we rarely get to use the full extent of our machines.

Although I wanted to be a tennis star, I was also an intense student in high school. I wanted the best grades and wanted to do all the extra assignments. I loved tennis, but school was far more important. I found myself sometimes distracted in lessons and even games, thinking about my homework I had left to do or a topic I didn’t quite grasp in class. These thoughts slowed me down when I was playing, but it didn’t make sense to me because that was a different machine – it shouldn’t be affecting my tennis machine.

Regardless, I wanted to be less distracted. So, I started doing my homework earlier in the day – before tennis lessons or scheduled matches – and, to my surprise, I became a better tennis player! Even though school had nothing to do with the task at hand, if I thought about the task, even subconsciously, I was still processing information about it. This helped me consciously think about the fact that the brain is a system, even if we often don’t treat it as such. Our machines, although working for specialized, smaller tasks, all work toward the same overarching goal: to make us function! They share the same warehouse, the same materials, and pull from the same, limited energy source.

Knowing that the brain is a system reveals crucial information to us: even if we make one of our machines as efficient as possible with mechanical and lubricant preparation, the entire system of our brain may still be bogged down by another machine that isn’t up to code. It’s like closing an open Excel window to make Word run better, but keeping 47 tabs open in Chrome. To fix this, we need to focus on parallel preparation. By focusing on other machines, we can make them all run better. If something’s pulling too much power, it’s pulling it away from something else, and that has a cost.

Thanks to my dad teaching me the importance of mechanical preparation on the way to get my backpack, I started focusing on what preparation really did, and I found myself coming to understand it in this three-part system. Like most things, it’s seemingly intuitive once it’s explained, but to fully understand something is to be able to fully apply it. We identify a concept, but we apply its elements.

I now apply these elements to push myself to my upper limits as much as I can. This can take form in simple ways, like doing my laundry at a set time every week so I never worry about running out of underwear, or in larger ways, like making my lunch for the entire week in advance, which saves me the stress of having to figure that out when 12:30 rolls around every day and my stomach starts to rumble. Still a student, I even schedule when I’m going to study, what I’m going to study during that time, and where I’m going to study it. Making those tiny decisions lets me get straight to the work instead of having to hold where I’m at in each class, sort through what I need to do, and decide what to do at a given moment.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, wrote, “We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.” To ensure that we fall on something good, we need to mechanically build a good machine, use it, and lubricate it so it works to the best of its ability, and then look for parallel machines that are pulling resources unnecessarily.

What machine are you most focused on making run better? Does that machine need better mechanics, lubrication, or is something else pulling resources away from it?

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“For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it?” Luke 14:28 (NASB)