Hank Smith: 00:03 Hello everyone. Welcome to another FollowHIM Favorites. This is where John and I are sharing a single story to go with each week’s lesson. John, we’re in sections 23, 24, 25, and 26 of the Doctrine and Covenants, and you’ve told me you have a story.

John Bytheway: 00:18 Yeah. Hank, we had a great discussion when we did these sections and one of the little phrases that’s here is lay aside the things of this world and seek for the things of a better, and you said something about having apps that you ought to delete. And it reminded me of a story. I have a little book called, I Still Want to Be An Astronaut by James Perry.

Hank Smith: 00:38 I know James, he’s a great guy.

John Bytheway: 00:40 Yeah, he’s great. He said, I know I talk about Matt Meese a lot, usually in a good light, but he suggested a corrupt app to me once. It’s called Adventure Capitalist. And you click a button to pretend to start a business, then you click a button to pretend to sell stuff. Then you click a button so the computer clicks the button for you. That is the entire game. And for some evil reason, it is so addicting because you see your money go up and up and you can get upgrades. One upgrade makes you start the whole game over, but this time it goes faster. So you make money faster, but you have to do the whole thing again. That way there’s no end in sight and you keep going back to make sure all the buttons are clicked. There is no skill and it is the devil.  

  01:20 My life changed the day I deleted the app. It was the bravest thing I did that day and I was finally free. I couldn’t keep going into the app to check it because it wasn’t there anymore. You have to actually delete the app. You have to commit, or your suffering will never end. It does not matter how much work you put into the app. If it is bad for you, it is bad for you. You can’t say, I put so much work into making this cake out of gunpowder and thorns and sin so I have to eat it now. In economics, it’s called sunk cost because you can’t get your money back. It’s sunk. But you can decide not to waste the money you still have on it. Don’t keep making a decision, you know, it’s just bad because you’ve already spent a ton of time making it. Let it go. It’s in the past and move forward with better decisions. Seriously though, delete the app. 

Hank Smith: 02:09 That is awesome.  that’s funny. We need to have Matt and James on the podcast with us. 

John Bytheway: 02:16 Oh, we wouldn’t get anything done. We’d just sit there and laugh. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 02:19 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 02:20 I love the idea. Lay aside the things of this world. Seek for the things of a better, and Hank, you told me about a student.

Hank Smith: 02:27 Yeah. She said that she deleted an app and we were talking about the parable of the sower and how apps could be like weeds, right? They take all of our time, but don’t give anything back. She said, I just realized that I have deleted an app and then redownloaded it. And that’s like pulling out a weed and then going and finding it and replanting it back in your garden. We have a good laugh about that. So John, maybe verse 10 would be, lay aside the apps of this world and seek for the things of a better, and that could be the Gospel library app.

John Bytheway: 03:00 There you go.

Hank Smith: 03:01 James, thank you for that awesome story. Hey, come join us on our full podcast. It’s called FollowHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We are with Morgan Pearson this week. She’s a podcaster and a journalist. She loves Emma Smith. It shows when she tells her story.

John Bytheway: 03:17 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 03:18 And then come back here next week. We’ll do another followHIM Favorites.