On instruction manuals and discipleship

I hate following instructions.

It’s got less to do with the rebellion of wanting to follow them—you know me! I sort of love rules!—and primarily due to my struggle to read a list of steps and follow accordingly. I know they try to make it as easy as possible with their 1, 2, 3 approach. It really is a valiant effort. Much better than reading a garbled paragraph (or worse, without diagrams) but I dread any task that requires me to learn how to do something new in 5 straightforward steps.

I learned this was a subconscious pet peeve of mine when tasked with taking a swab test. The results would help me determine which supplements are a waste of my time and what foods I maybe thought were good for me but weren’t. The information I would learn from the simple test could change my life or at least potentially save me from spending whatever a lifetime supply of Vitamin D and beef liver pills costs.

But I was dreading this task for one reason. I didn’t want to read the instructions. Blame it on my learning style (which I’m not totally sure I even know) but the thought of reading instructions stalled me for days. I needed a full supply of energy and for it to be the first task of my day. You know. “Eat the frog”¹ style. I needed a wide birth to get it done. Give me the whole morning people! I have a new task I’ve never done before and who knows how long it will take?

Three minutes. It took three minutes.

The good news? I tackled my whole to-do list that day. 😜

The task was mostly mental. And I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve become a society who loves a good instruction. Everything comes with a manual, a guide, a 3 step process. It’s all to get people from point A to point B with as little friction as possible. I remember learning about this in marketing books. Create a 3-step process or a framework that helps people go from prayer journal lurker to purchaser. Get them over the hump with an easy-to-follow how to.

And they help of course.

But I think there’s something that helps more that previous generations instinctively did.

This did things with someone. Have you ever learned an important skill watching someone else do it? It’s the craziest thing.

It feels like you’re not even learning something new! You’re just watching!

You’re watching the mom who’s kid you nanny wash baby clothes and learn how to get rid of stains while you debrief the day.

You watch your dad grease a squeaky hinge with 2 minutes and a can of WD-40 so you know what to do next time instead of living with it for months.

You watch your friend have a tough phone call and learn how to stay calm too even when you’re right.

You watch your sister hang a picture frame and hook up her TV in her new bachelorette apartment and remember for next time, it’s not as hard as you thought.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things but are we stressed because we’re all trying to learn things in silos? From paper instructions? Or even YouTube videos?

The math alone makes it obvious how silly this is. 10 of us spend however much time learning something. This came up the other day when Lindsay, VMP’s new owner asked how to do something. I was soooo glad she did. Why agonize for hours when I could give her the answer in a 45 second Voxer message?

The alternative to instruction manuals is life-lived with others. We often think we don’t “have time” for people but maybe we do if we simply do what we are already doing together.

Like Costco trips. Maybe your friend knows of a great dinner hack and gets it every time she goes that you’d never think of it except you shopped together and now you know.

I’d love to learn how to make bread but I can tell you after checking out the sourdough book at the library and saving some pins on Pinterest, my desire or know how to bake increased exactly zero percent. But to go to a friends house and watch her bake bread? I think I’d get it!

At the conference we attended recently the speaker (Grant Skeldon) made two distinctions about mentorship and discipleship.

"Mentorship requires time on your calendar. Discipleship requires access to your life."

We aren’t meeting up at a coffeeshop to study a passage or to coach someone on business principles. (Although that’s not bad!) We’re letting someone into our daily life. Seeing someone live their life provides so much opportunity to learn without the manuals.

And maybe learning styles come into play a little bit here. There are people who want to take it into their own hands and love straightforward directions but I think for many of us, we’ve lost the concept of discipleship in many ways and are suffering in our little silos trying to make sense of an endless supply of instruction manuals.

We can learn a lot from others when we don’t even realize it and I kinda think that’s the coolest part—not glancing back from manual to product and back again till we make sure we’re doing exactly like the diagram. We’re learning without even knowing when or how you’ll use it one day.

1. Eat the frog means to do the hardest task or one you dread the most, first thing.