Now we are starting to get to the meat of this book. Most people, when they talk about the role of faith in their lives, they focus on the comfort that it can provide them as they face their challenges.There is nothing wrong with that focus. Faith can, in fact, be very comforting. We live in a scary world. Even people like me who live relatively mundane lives living in suburbia and going to work in an office every day have fears that keep us up at night. Being able to turn to God for support in such times is truly a comfort.
Most discussions of faith stop there. In my opinion, however, that is less than half the story. To me, the most important aspect of faith is the potential your connection with the Almighty can provide you for guidance in your life. I am in favor of people living active, exciting lives. This is the kind of life where you will find the opportunities for growth and learning that will lead to deeper faith. And the benefits multiply. As you gain more faith and your connection gets stronger with the Almighty, you are more open to the guidance you are receiving. Your success in receiving that guidance and following then leads to deeper faith. And so on and so on.
There are several ways we can approach faith in an effort to understand how and why we receive guidance. The first is the most pedestrian. A recent trend in business is what is called “crowd-sourcing.” Essentially, businesses work with groups of people to help design new products. Technology has been especially helpful in making this approach effective. By having people log onto a website and directly comment on or make changes to the ideas of others, designers have been able to get all the best input for their products.
This approach makes sense. Ultimately, marketing is all about developing a product that meets the needs of a group of potential customers, and then getting those potential customers to be aware of the product. If the potential customers are involved in the design of the product right from the beginning, you know that what you are creating will meet their needs. So the goal is to get as much input from as many customers as possible so that you give them something they will want to buy right from the beginning.
