This year we celebrate the ‘D’ in ‘CREDIT’: diligence - kia pukumahi! We will encourage everyone in our community to work carefully and persistently toward their goals; to work consistently and sustainably.

Diligence is the antidote to ‘last minute’ action that may go either way. It’s a strategy that lets us break down the big things in life by gradually chipping away at them. At the heart of diligence is an invitation to learn to love what you do, and we can understand this in at least two ways.

First, if we learn to love what we do, we will find joy. When I was in high school, I learned to hate a couple of subjects: in part, I didn’t understand them, but more significantly, I didn’t want to understand them. This did not enhance my life (or anyone else's!). More recently, I have begun to appreciate how much I missed and how rewarding it is to finally ‘get it’. All I had to do was change my attitude.

Secondly, it is worth remembering that learning enables us to love what we do. The better you know how to do something, the more fun it is, the more fun it is, and the more you love it. So, if you are training and discover day-by-day that you can go further faster with less effort and a bigger high - that is a win for diligence. Suppose you keep practising an instrument until you nail that piece you always wanted to play. Go diligence. Or maybe it’s a system you keep refining or a relationship you are investing in. More data, more experience, greater understanding, new insights - they can all contribute to joy in what you do.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proposed the 10000-hour rule. This claims that if you invest 10000 hours in learning something, you will achieve mastery. This suggests that hard work alone will guarantee success. In reality, this is only part of the picture. Anders Ericsson adds another critical variable: how good a student’s teacher is.

At Dio, we will work diligently to support our students’ learning, role model good practice, and enable our rangatahi to learn to love what they do.

God’s desire for us all is that we flourish by doing good. We may not always do things well, but by choosing to do good things diligently, we will become more like the greatest Teacher of all. So “let’s not get tired of doing good. At just the right time, we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.” (Gal 2.9).

Reverend Stephen Black

Chaplain