Last week an idea really clicked with me. Living a disciplined life should not be the goal. Rather a discipline is something that I do so that I can live a certain way. The act of taking out the garbage isn’t my goal. Eating healthy isn’t my goal. Rather those are things that I do so that I can live life and not get distracted by those things.

So, what are some of my goals? I want to live a life full of passion. I want to be connected in meaningful relationships with people. I want to help people experience a meaningful life. So, I need to strategically lead my own life so that things don’t distract me from these goals. That’s where discipline enters the picture.

I want to focus on a few disciplines that help me to not get distracted from my goals:

• By spending time in God’s Word, I can learn from His passion.
• By focusing on my health, I can live more vigorously and invest more freely in relationships.
• By studying and reading, I can develop skills in leading people.

I need to understand what my motivation is. It’s so easy to get caught up in a task and forget why it’s even important.

Where have you lost your motivation recently? What is an area of your life you want to grow in, and how can a discipline help with it?

For a couple of years I’ve been thinking there has to be some way to have dynamically created animations to use as song backgrounds. Several months ago I came across some Quartz Composer animations that were controlled via sound. But, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to use any of these animations in real time with our presentation software.

So, finally last week I decided I was going to experiment with using some sound triggered Quartz Composer animations for song backgrounds. After a few hours I finally setup a video camera to capture my Mac’s screen animation and feed the video into our presentation software via a live firewire feed. It was clunky and awkward to control, but it worked and looked nice. Unfortunately, I only really found one useful Quartz Composer animation to use, Soundstream. So, I’m not ready to put it into regular use, but I proved it was worth exploring some more.

So, has anyone else used any music visualization or VJ software to create song backgrounds? Any advice you can share?