Jon Acuff is the New York Times Bestselling author of six books. For over 20 years he’s helped some of the biggest brands in the world tell their story, including The Home Depot, Bose, Staples, and the Dave Ramsey Team. 

Most recently he’s spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences, colleges, companies and churches. Featured regularly on national media, Jon has been seen on CNN, Fox News, Good Day LA and several other key outlets. 

Today, he’s going to join us to talk about his newest book, Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking. We think it’s something every entrepreneur should read, but we’ll let you listen to Jon to find out why...

Episode Transcript

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Jon Acuff: I think one of the greatest things that ruins of Faith Driven Entrepreneur is shame of success, like there is such a toxic shame of success with faith based entrepreneurs I talked to where, like in Nashville, every musician's an entrepreneur, every musician that gets to do it for a while is an entrepreneur. I talked to one the other day and he was like, yeah, if you buy a seventy five thousand dollar suburban people say, good for you, it's a family car. If you buy a seventy five thousand dollar BMW, they say, shame on you. Jesus rode a donkey. And the perception of those two brands and what that does to entrepreneurs that pull back and don't use their full gift because they're afraid to shine the brightest they can like, that topic's fascinating to me.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast William Rusty, good morning. Good morning. We're here, John, thank you for being on the show. This really excited to get in your latest book. One of the things that we want to do with every one of our guests is at least get a flyover of your journey, who you are, where you come from, how you got here, how faith worked its way into your life as you kind of came into your vocation. Bring us up to speed.

Jon Acuff: Sure. Yeah. As I mentioned, I grew up Massachusetts. My dad's a pastor, so he planted a church there, a Southern Baptist church there in the 80s, which is kind of unheard of. So I would say I got a lot of my entrepreneurial spirit from being raised by a church planner. I think good church planners are good entrepreneurs. And so that's kind of my background. Went to school in Birmingham, Alabama. Sanford majored in advertising, always loved advertising's ability to encourage action from a writing perspective. So really was an advertising geek, started a blog that ended up gaining some traction, had a lot of fun with that. I was working at companies like Boz and Home Depot and Staples and their marketing departments and then from there, got to spend a few years in Nashville working with Dave Ramsey and learning a lot of how do you build a personal brand that helps people? And then seven or eight years ago started my own company. And so I've just loved that journey. It's unexpected. I love to tell people from a faith perspective the best things that have happened in my entrepreneur journey were gifts, not something I caused. So I didn't make the guy like a random person at Dave Ramsey's company read my blog and thought we should have him come speak up here. I didn't create that. I didn't strategize that like it happened because I was creating content. But it also was a gift. And so the best things that have happened to me were things I received, not things like forced. And when you understand that, it takes a lot of the pressure off of being an entrepreneur and thinking I'm one move away from the thing or I'm one move away from the whole thing falling apart. So that's part of my journey. I live in Nashville for the last ten years. I've got two teenage daughters. My wife and I have been married twenty years and April. So that's that's kind of the snapshot.

Henry Kaestner: OK, that's good. So you hit on something that I think is really important and that is that lest we be tempted to really take credit for things, I think that every entrepreneur can look back in their lives. And yes, undoubtedly there's a lot of hard work. And yet I think that in my case, in my entrepreneurial career, it's absolutely those moments. And they become just a great gift, not only because they're a great gift that things happen, that in allowing a business to flourish, but because God showed up in a way that you don't feel like you have the entire responsibility on your shoulders and that you have to make success happen. Too much of a pressure, especially if you're going to be in the entrepreneurial game over the long haul. It's just too much pressure. And so that's a really key takeaway along the way. So a pastor's son, Southern Baptist Church in New England, it's different and it's definitely new. Where did your faith become your own? Was there a time or was it always just kind of like it's always been there, it's always been your operating reality? And there wasn't that inflection point.

Jon Acuff: Now, I would say in different ways, like in my twenties, in my thirties, even in my forties, like, it's kind of funny to think that I could be like, OK, I've arrived at my face like I feel like it's always growing, it's always mustard seed out. And so I would say, like the first wave is when I went to college and I was like, OK, I'm not with my parents anymore. They live in Massachusetts, which is a different planet from Alabama. So, OK, I'm exploring new parts there. And then it's like I get married and it's like, OK, how do I lead as a husband? How do I, you know, like, I didn't realize I was so selfish. Like when you go from I to we today and you're now you've got kids like that's part of the journey. And then even in my forties where you go, OK, I want to create work, that is it wrapped up in my identity. So how do I release that, like how do I have my full heart and work but not leave my heart there so that when I receive feedback it feels like an attack. How do I tangle, you know, what I'm creating for my identity? So I would say like the two big inflection points that would be mid twenties, plugging into a men's group where I learned how to be in relationship with other men, like I just didn't know I was like friendship handicapped. I just didn't know what it meant to be in relationship to the men. That's probably one of the big inflection. And then I would say counseling in my thirties, counseling in my forties, like there's been inflection points there, too.

Henry Kaestner: Somewhere along the way, you found out that you have a gift and being able to write down ideas and people saying that's actually really good. When was the first time that happened for you?

Jon Acuff: Well, it happened in third grade. I had a teacher, Mrs. Harris, at Doyon Elementary School in Ipswich, Massachusetts, that laminated some poems I wrote. And that was the first time that I was like, Oh, man, I feel like I could do this. It was having a teacher believe, you know, there's something I see in you. You don't see in yourself. I always tell entrepreneurs, like, you're not supposed to do this alone, like we need other people, like we desperately need other people. But to admit need feels like weakness and it's actually a strength. And so, like, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that don't want to say, I have this need. I can't do that. I've come to the end of my abilities and so I would say third grade, I want a poetry contest in high school that was another like, OK, maybe I can do this. And then really, when I spoke the first time and I got paid to be a public speaker, I thought, OK, like, I think I can figure this out. And then it just went from there. And then, of course, like it was really validating to have a guy like Dave Ramsey go, hey, we want to put you on stage. And that's another like you can't take credit for it. I went from speaking to audiences of like 80 people to eight thousand in a period of weeks when I joined him. And so that he was able to say, I'll give you 10 minutes in this arena to open the thing. I dare you to get to that level and like, oh, OK, I better figure this out. So those would be some of the moments where I thought, OK, maybe I can like in a humble way. It wasn't like I knew it always. It was like, well, let me try the next thing I love, like when somebody says, oh, be fearless, be fearless, be fearless. I don't know, like at least from an entrepreneur perspective, you always have fear because you're always doing things of a different size. When I spoke to one hundred people, I had one hundred percent fear and I overcame that. But then I had a thousand people. I spoke to a thousand people, then I had ten thousand. And so, like I can tell when I'm getting stagnant, when I've lost that kind of sense of, OK, I got to trust, I got to have open hands in this moment because it's beyond the moments I know how to do. I no longer can control it. I'm a perfectionist. So when I'm white knuckling my entrepreneur experience, I know that I need to go. Wait a second. I got to open my hands again. This is me trying to john this moment and I'd rather not.

Henry Kaestner: You remember what you said on the stage with Dave Ramsey that went from eight thousand to remember what kind of. Yeah, ten minutes. Do you remember what you said?

Jon Acuff: Oh, yeah. I mean, I know what kind of jokes I would do. I would do jokes where I'd say like that I over purchase things like when I go into a new hobby, I get the expert level thing and then it hangs on my wall and shames me. So I don't casually go into I'm going to cycle, I go I need a carbon fiber bicycle that's built to scale the Alps. And so like I would do financially based humor where I would say, like, here's something I did. Here's what happened. Here's something I did. Here's what happened. So it was all financially based humor. I mean, I use humor to communicate, so I try to find a funny story that was relatable. I wanted people in the audience to go, oh, OK. He gets what I'm talking about. When you're on stage, there's an automatic gap between you and the audience and your job as a speaker is to close that gap. So I tell speakers all the time a mistake is a failure that makes you relatable because everybody in the crowd thinks you're different than me. And nothing fast forwards a connection like, oh, they made a mistake. They're like me. And so I would try to share honest stories that are relatable that were funny.

Henry Kaestner: So speaking of finance, probably most people don't know that you're a proud owner of a Porsche 911 three and a boogying. Yeah, I FDE story.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, they're right behind me. They're Lego. Unfortunately, I would like maybe there's an episode you guys have done on this. I think one of the greatest things that ruins of Faith Driven Entrepreneur is shame of success. Like there is such a toxic shame of success with faith based entrepreneurs I talked to where like in Nashville, every musician's an entrepreneur, every musician that gets to do it for a while is an entrepreneur. I talked to one the other day and he was like, yeah, if you buy a seventy five thousand dollar suburban people say, good for you, it's a family car. If you buy a seventy five thousand dollar BMW, they say, shame on you. Jesus rode a donkey. And the perception of those two brands and what that does to entrepreneurs that pull back and don't use their full gift because they're afraid to shine the brightest they can like, that topic is fascinating to me. If you guys could fix that, that would be awesome.

Henry Kaestner: Let's do it right now. Before we get there, though, I do want to come back to the fact that you're an author. You wrote a book called Stuff Christians Like. The simplicity of the title is beautiful. Tell us about that. And then what was the inspiration for the idea? And tell us about the

Jon Acuff: title wasn't even like that. It wasn't even an original concept. That's what's funny about entrepreneurship. Like there is a really popular blog at the time called Stuff White People Like. And it was this white dude kind of riffing on surburban like, oh, they like Kalki, like all these. And he was really talented, really funny. I think his name was Christian Lander. And I thought at the time, you know what, Christians like ripping off popular ideas and putting a God spin on them. I was like, we do that all the time, which is such a poor reflection on the creator of the universe. We believe God created the heavens, but we're going to rip off your idea and put a Jesus coat of paint on it. And so I wrote this silly idea and it was all in a list list. No one was stuff Christians like stealing secular ideas. And I thought I'd write about it for a day or week. I had 50 other dumb ideas, like I owned so many terrible GoDaddy URLs. And on day I think it was like day nine, 4000 people showed up to read it and then it just started getting passed around and people started to send it to me and go, Have you seen this? Like they didn't know I wrote it. So then I just started to go, Wow, there's a lot here. And at the time, like if I started it today, it wouldn't have been as successful because there's a lot more people in the faith based satire world. But at the time, there weren't a ton of people. I wasn't a pioneer by any means, but there was just less people in that conversation. So it kind of stuck out a little bit. And that's what kind of group?

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, in many ways. I think it's probably a. Precursor to the Babylon Bee,

Jon Acuff: yeah, the Wittenburg door, I think, was around there at the time that was really successful. So like I just had fun but eventually, like, I did it for eight to 10 years and I felt like I had covered that. Like, you get to a point where, like, I've done this topic, somebody else needs to have a fresh stab at it. I need to do a different topic

Henry Kaestner: as I go through the list of books you written. All of them, I think, are relevant for a business leader. And that's not me trying to sell all of your books on the same podcast, although I

Jon Acuff: prefer to focus on soundtrack's. Let's new one. Whenever someone says, what's your best book? The new one. That's the one. Let's yeah. Let's aim towards that. Let's OK,

Henry Kaestner: so we're going to go there because the next question is one of the books you've written are the ones that you'd point entrepreneurs to. And I think we've got our answer. Tell us why.

Jon Acuff: I would say finish and soundtracks are the ones and the reason why we're finished is it's all about goals. I went to the University of Memphis and commissioned a research study with a PhD there named Mike Peaslee. And we looked at nine hundred people for six months as they worked on their goals to figure out what does it really take to finish a goal. And entrepreneurs are classic chronic starters and they're inconsistent finishers. So that one, I would say, hey, if you're an entrepreneur and you're like, OK, yeah, I start a lot of things, but I don't finish them, I'd recommend that soundtrack's is about how our thoughts impact our actions, which impact our results. And entrepreneurs struggle with that. Like overthinking is, I think, the most expensive thing entrepreneurs invest in without even knowing. It slows down decisions. It slows productivity, skills, creativity. And so we did another big study about, OK, how can you be deliberate about which thought you listen to? And what's fascinating, as even my most Taipei entrepreneur friends who are like the layout, the clothes the night before and like measure the grams of protein they're getting, they don't pick their thoughts ahead of time. So very few of them go, I got a big pitch meeting coming up. Here's the three soundtrack's I want playing during that meeting. They just show up and have thoughts versus honing them. So many people, even if they're really good at other parts of their life, take their thought life really casually. And I think it causes a lot of challenges that if they got their thoughts in order, the actions, the results would start to open up in a different way.

Speaker 3: You know, I so love what you said about the I can't get past it. The GoDaddy you URLs. You know, I think lots of entrepreneurs do the exact same thing. Do you ever have the phenomena when they come up to renew, like, again, you look at it, you go, what was I thinking?

Jon Acuff: No. So Rusty that's a great question. My wife and I use agreement is if I haven't touched it in a year, I have to release it to the wife. So if I haven't done something with word ninja dot TV, I need to give that like be free and if you come back, it means you love me like I need to let that go. So yes, some of them, it's more like variations around, like what did I think would happen that I needed to have Jon Acuff with four FS and the dog like that. There is going to be like a Romanian teenager that squatted on Johnny come with for us. That was like, I'm sorry, I own it. It's now ten thousand dollars. Like some of those I go, I reserve that out of fear, not out of state.

Rusty Rueff: That's great. I think it happens to a lot of us in the book soundtrack's you talk about overthinking is a personality trait. And that what really struck me is the sneakiest form of fear. Go into that for us, to me, because I don't think everybody recognizes that, that, you know, that paralysis that comes from analysis, you know,

Jon Acuff: sneaky, sneaky, because it pretends it's helping you be prepared. It goes, oh, no, no, no, no. This is about being prepared or being prepared for being prepared. But I always say, like being prepared leads to action over thinking, leads to inaction. Like even there's a lot of entrepreneurs right now. Listen to this. According New York Times. Eighty one percent of people, American adults want to write a book. Guess how many do every year? Less than one percent. So. Eighty one percent say they want through. Less than one percent do. And part of the reason is they almost write a book. They overthink the book. They add pressure to the book. They spin out on the book. And so that's why it's sneaky, because it can pretend like if I say to you like. Are you a workaholic? Most people recognize that's not helpful, like it doesn't like high performing is one thing. But if I say are you a workaholic one, people recognize that as bad. And two, they don't want to self identify it. That's the funny thing to me. When we asked. Ten thousand people do struggle with over thinking, ninety nine point five percent of people said yes, which if you're an entrepreneur, if you ever find a thing that ninety nine point five percent of people raise their hand for, go make that thing like go figure out. That's like my big thing with entrepreneurship. I'd rather meet a need than inventiveness. It's expensive and time consuming to invent the need. It's way better to meet a need. And so that's why I think it's Nikias that all these people raise their hands. I've never had a book where more people go, Oh, that's for me. Or you either say it's for you or you know exactly who. It's for you. Oh, my husband. We talk about that all the time, like I need to get him this book. So that's why I think it's a sneaky form of fear. It's because it can pretend it's not initially until you start to unpack it and go, wait a second. That's what I'm doing. And it's not helpful. Hold on. So that's part of why I love talking about it.

Rusty Rueff: So if ninety nine point five percent of the population overthink, so they say that they overthink, what's that tell you about what's going on in society?

Jon Acuff: Well, here's the here's the interesting thing. So 20, 20 was catnip for over thinking like we did the study in twenty eighteen before a global pandemic before like masks, before staying at home, before a possible recession, before the election, before civil unrest. Like all these topics that kind of threw grenades into our thought processes, like people I read an article the other day, people are afraid of the doorbell now because they're like, we don't know who it is. And the idea of what that's doing to our faith, to our courage. So, yeah, I mean, I think the world is at a high point on overthinking because, like, we're feeding ourselves social media, we've lost trust in so many of our institutions. And so, yeah, I thought overthinking was high in twenty eighteen and then we went through this year. So that's part of what Parli I'm excited about. The book is that in the middle of the pandemic I definitely had a lot of stress like I did. You don't hear me say otherwise, but I felt like I had some tools because I had spent two years learning how to swim and then the world got covered in water. So like, as I kind of tried to process, like I lost 70 percent of my career and much 70 percent gone because I'm a public speaker. But guess what's not happening? Live events. So, OK, like I got to figure this out. If I didn't know how to kind of be deliberate about my thoughts, it would have been a lot harder year. But because I had some tools that I'd spent years figuring out, I could say, oh, I recognize that. That's overthinking. I just got invited to overthink something. I'm going to pull back. And so that's why I'm excited about launching this book is I think a lot of people after the year, year and a half we've just had, are going to say, oh, this this is fresh air.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah. You know, all the public speaking that hasn't happened in our executive producers had the easiest time getting to get people to come on the podcast available. Everybody's available.

Jon Acuff: Everybody's I mean, I've pivoted and done I probably done thirty five virtual events now and I've really learned to enjoy those. But I miss public speaking and I feel fortunate. I mean, I live in Nashville where if you're a musician, like at least I can do virtual consulting. I can write books like if you're a drummer for a touring act that's no longer touring, that's super challenging. So I feel that especially in this city, like the amount of artists that have been unable to do their job and what that's doing to entrepreneurs.

Rusty Rueff: All right. So let's go back to the entrepreneur theme in the book. You know, you're addressing this overthinking. Is there an antidote or are there just little things that we all have to do to get past it? I mean, give some advice to the entrepreneur.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, I mean, the big thing is I don't think you say stop overthinking or like you'll never overthink again. I just don't think that's possible. And also, I have an amazing thinking brain. Why would I try to turn that off? It would be so much better if I just thought the things that helped me. So my big thing is, if you can worry, you can wonder if you can stand, you can soar. So the big trick there is going, OK, I have all these thoughts that I don't want to have that aren't helping. I'm going to replace them with thoughts that actually move me forward. In a sense, I'm going to take these thoughts captive. I'm not going to sweep out this house completely and have it be empty, like I'm going to feel it deliberately. So that's the main trick as you go. I kind of teach three hours. I say you retire, you're broken. Soundtrack's. Wow, this thing. Let's make it hyper specific for entrepreneurs. The contract where you got screwed three years ago is still impacting your next contract. The worry about somebody taking advantage of your intellectual capital because somebody did is still having a voice in the middle of this. And you go, OK, that's a broken soundtrack. I want to retire that. I want to replace it with a new one. I'm going to come up with a new one when I get into contract situations and I'm going to repeat that one. So often it becomes as automatic as the old one. So really, like those are three practical things you can do retire, replace and repeat. So I love. Teaching my stuff, I try to make it hyper practical, I consider my job to be putting handles on ideas. We have enough ideas in the world. We don't have handles to take them with us. And so if I do a good job, I give you a handle, an idea, and you can take it with you to Tuesday to Thursday at your meeting next week to the pitch. That's my goal.

William Norvell: Well, John, William here, thanks so much for walking through that, I'm gosh, I'm stuck in a lot of this. I'm like beyond over thinker, so I am just soaking all this in. One of the things I want to move this towards a little bit is when I hear you talk, one of the things that God's been taking me on, I don't understand this concept that well, but I'm thinking about it. It feels like there could be a spiritual warfare aspect to kind of what you're talking about. The devil is, of course, above all else, a liar and tries to confuse us and try to not let us focus on the goodness of God and the gifts that he's trying to give us. Right. Do you deal with the faith and spirituality piece in the book? And if not 100 percent?

Jon Acuff: No, no. It's a business book. No, my niche my niche is like I get to go and speak to corporations because I write business books. So no, I'll go where I'll talk about that is if a church comes and says, hey, we want you like we know there's spiritual aspects to this, we want you to come speak about it.

William Norvell: And how would you in this session? Because we do a faith driven entrepreneurs if you could maybe peel back a little bit, how would you think about Christians as they're reading it? How would they maybe add a spiritual lens to what they're reading? Well, I

Jon Acuff: think the average Christian who reads it is going to go this is Proverbs. This is the New Testament. This is, you know, think of what's true and lovely and beautiful like thought. Life is very well documented throughout the scriptures. You know, for me, here's an example. So when I was writing the book, my wife, this is my seventh book was kind of like, hey, you're a jerk when you write books and then you're a jerk when you have to promote them. And she used words, language in that. But we'll pray for her. And she was like for two years, you're a jerk. Write it to your jerk jerk promoting it. This isn't going to work like this doesn't work for us. And so I said, OK, I want this whole process to be light and easy. I'm promised the burden is light and easy. So I'm going to put on a Post-it note on my window that I see a thousand times a day light and easy, so that when I kind of tighten up as an entrepreneur, I think I have to control it. I remember there's a verse, there's a promise. I want the soundtrack of this book to be light and easy. That doesn't make sense and it really doesn't. But I don't have to understand peace for it to surpass my understanding. So, like, that would be an aspect where I'd go, OK, I'm told this is the promise. I'm going to turn it into a thought that I think about a hundred times a day. And I remember, OK, hold on a second. I'm all in this process. I'm trying to control it. That's not what I'm called to do. A promise is going to be like and easy. What does that look like? So, yeah, I think that that's what's fun about the books. If you're a Christian, you go, yeah, this stuff reaffirms what I think. This stuff reaffirms that OK, it's clearly scriptural. I remember another author, a friend of mine who's a doctor said he likes to share the idea and just not give the address. He goes like, I love when somebody can go, Oh, I recognize this. It doesn't say it's the second verse of revelations, but it's clearly that this is the foundation. So that's always my goal is that if you're a nonbeliever, you connect with the book, it challenges you. It makes you curious. If you're a believer, you go, Oh yeah, yeah, I recognize this. Like, this guy's speaking my language like, that's great.

William Norvell: Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. And as I think about, you know, leadership style books are problem solving books. I love them. I eat them up because I have a lot of problems. So I read them all the time and I can't wait to read yours. Sometimes it slips me into a mindset that, you know, I need to be doing more. I need to be achieving more, you know, and actually it takes me away from depending on God and it puts it on me like, well, I have these actions now. These people are telling me I can do this right. How would an entrepreneur listening this? How would I balance that right from faith in God? I mean, you said some great things earlier, but I want to give you another chance to answer this question specifically. That doesn't.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, so I mean, I like one hundred percent get that. That's certainly something like my wife has said before. You act sometimes like you're one book away from perfect, like go get the next one. Right now I'm going to like I shouldn't own three books on how to sleep better. That we measure our sleep so that we can perform while we're sleeping is ludicrous. That we get up in the morning and go, let me get to my sleep stat so I could judge my sleep performance. Like, no wonder we're spun out. No wonder we overthink. But like, for me, I still come back to the story of the talents where the master says, Hey, here's ten, here's five, here's one. And how they interacted like the ten guy didn't say, nah, like I want to just trust in the master. I'm going to bury it. The guy who buried it was the guy who didn't trust. He didn't ball out. He was the worst entrepreneur of the three because he said, I know your hard. I know you're a terrible master. I don't want to do this. You're a terrible landowner out of fear and a broken relationship. That's where he had a hard time. So for me, I want to be the ten or the five. I want to go like I got my little five and this is the peace. And I love Kerry. New Hof, who's a friend of mine and I would say is in the mentor category for me, said one of his prayers. Always let God determine the size, let God determine the size. So if he wants like I would love this book to blow up, I've never had a book go like millions of copies I've never like I would love that. And if God determines the size of that, awesome. If he doesn't determine the size, then we'll figure something else out. I know it's working for my good, but I just keep going back to that ten five one and how they add. Because it says they immediately put it to work like the 10 guy, the five guy, Amy, you're like, all right, roll up their sleeves, they didn't go well, I don't want to do too much work and not trust God. They're like, no, I got it. Like, he gave me this task. I'm going to be the best at what I can be here. That's my model. And it is a dance. It is a balance. It's not like you do it one day and then you're good for the rest of the year, like you're constantly that tension of I'm doing too much, I'm not doing enough. Like, let me reassess. Let me kind of dial it in.

Rusty Rueff: So the one talent guy overthought it.

Jon Acuff: One hundred percent. Well, yeah, because he overanalysed like oh and he was afraid. It's really a fear story. Like I've misread it as a laziness story. It's not a laziness story. It's a broken relationship story because he misread the farmer, the owner, whatever, and didn't understand who he was and then out of fear buried it instead of going, OK, I'm going to try my best and I hope it works. I hope I double my one. I'm going to but I got to jump into the game because I have a brave, bold, generous person who gave me this one to build versus I'm afraid I can't trust this. I'm just going to hide like. Yeah, he's one hundred percent overthought it.

Rusty Rueff: So bring all this into the context of goal setting because, you know, right now we're sitting on top of one technology after another that's going to help us set our goals, track our goals. You know, this Monday, dotcom, this that, you know, throughout all of our lives, goal setting, overthinking. Or not overthinking?

Jon Acuff: No, I mean, I'm a I love goals, like I have a podcast. All it takes is a goal where I talk about I'm just a goal nerd like I absolutely. We are joking about the Lego sets. Like, I have goals around Lego sets every part of my life. I love to go. OK, well, how do I do that? Like, I have a goal right now to overlook offense once a day because I caught myself, somebody would ask me to do something and I would act offended. And I was like, that's not the spirit I want. Like, I want to be deliberate about that. Like, I want to overlook

Rusty Rueff: an offense and not like, look, go in the backyard and look over the fence.

Jon Acuff: No, no, not a physical fence, not like a home improvement kind of thing, but like, why am I reacting this way to people? I want to work on that. So I'm a big believer in goals. My big thing, though, is like, why am I doing the goal? What am I expecting to go to deliver me? How am I going to do it in a measured way? How am I going to be a community about the goal? How do I make sure it's not an act of perfectionism, but it's actually something that's sustainable? So there's it's like anything else in life, there's ways you can go wrong with a goal. But for me, I feel wired for goals. And, you know, I always say, like a goal is the fastest path between where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. And so, like for me, I love that and I test them. That's the other thing. You try it for a month. If it doesn't work, you do something else. But, you know, it's not asking about that. What Stephen King, like, people aren't born prolific. They work prolifically. Like Stephen King doesn't have extra fingers. It's not like, wow, he's got fourteen fingers. That's why he's written fifty. Are you sure? Are you sure? Positive. I've seen his hands. He's constantly showing. You say they're beautiful hands. And so like I just think, OK, I want to have a goal because again, I want to be that ten where I'm like I'm putting it to work and I feel connected to it. And it's not my identity. Like, that's another dance. William is like, OK, it's not my identity. I mean, because that's what they say. Books are like, don't take it personally. Yeah, that's easy to say when you're an accountant and like you're doing the numbers for the quarterly projection. When it's a book and your name is on the front and your picture is in the back, there's a chance you're going to take it personally. So you have to really work at that. So for me, I love goals. I would talk about goals for hours and hours.

Rusty Rueff: We should have you back and do that because, I mean, there's a lot of people who get stuck at that stage, right? They overthink their ability or their inability to set a goal.

Jon Acuff: And here's the problem. They go, I want to do a goal. And they brainstorm their goals, which is sometimes really difficult. And they come up with twenty things. They don't know which one is the right one. And the problem is we think there's a perfect one and there's not. So you go, I just got to find the right one to work on. I've got to find the right forget it. Like find three and work on them kind of back and forth. Like it doesn't like you don't have to find a perfect one. So for me, I always tell people I have one to three kind of big life goals going on. I have like three to five medium things have like seven to ten habits. You're trying to track or tweak. Like, I try to drink sixty four ounces of water a day, for instance. That's one of my goals right now because I did a gallon a day and it was terrible. Like it's a life dominating goal to drink a gallon of water. It's dumb. You have to plan your day around. Where will I be to use the bathroom like it's useless. But that's a habit that doesn't compete with me. Writing a book like one of my big goals is to launch this book. Awesome. That's one of my big three. But it doesn't compete with the sixty four ounces of water. I've never had to say to Baker, the publisher, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to do that podcast. I'm going to be drinking water during that hour. So like I like to have different size goals that are doing different things in my life.

Rusty Rueff: Your enthusiasm is contagious. I understand how you use humor to engage people. Thanks for doing that with us today. And I'm not sure I've actually laughed and smiled through a podcast session.

Jon Acuff: Oh gosh. Back to that Rusty. Yeah, these are fun

William Norvell: and it's exciting because I get to tell my friend has been pushing me to drink a gallon of water that no, it's just not worth it. Sixty four ounces. I'm a send him a clip.

Jon Acuff: The only thing I learned when I drink two gallons of water for two weeks in a row was the location of bathrooms. And then like if you fly, you look like a crazy person. You have a two hour flight. Like I did this whole joke about like, you've got to watch the but the light because they're like they're real mad if you like, congregate near the pilot. So you got to watch the light like a hawk, like you can't get work done because you're so focused on the stupid, like you got to pop out of your seat because if you're in row ten, that's nine rows of people that have a head start on you. And so, like, no, it's not worth it to. And then, like, the benefits people give are always like you can float your vision. It seems like people find you more attractive.

Henry Kaestner: Like a water landing. Yes, yeah. Yeah. You laugh, you laugh. But in the event of a water landing,

Jon Acuff: you know, so. Yeah. Well, you don't drink a gallon of water here first. I'm as much a scientist as an Instagram influencer is. We both have the same degree in science.

William Norvell: Amen. Amen to that was we come to close one thing I did do before because stuff Christians like I came to know the Lord right around twenty, ten or so and I think it was just it off is a big part of my life. It was a big part of like, wow, you can make fun of this thing. You can like be humorous as well as, you know, love the Lord. And like, I hadn't seen a lot. That is a big part of mine, and so I went back and Googled a bunch just for fun before we got on the episode today and I'm only going to share one, but it was pretty funny for our business audience. One of my favorites was And you think I wish God was my boss. That would be awesome. He wouldn't care about my sales sheet. He'd care about my soul sheet. And then you feel a little embarrassed because, you know, that was such a low quality joke.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, that is that is. But that's fun. Like, you got to take them, like you got to have like somebody who was like that was a dad joke. I was like, yeah, my dad like I was 17. You're like for seven. Like what should I like. I shouldn't be in a nightclub. Like it's better for me to be making bad jokes than me to be like, hey, you guys want to go dancing. Like what? It's like I'm a dad.

William Norvell: Like that's your target audience. Now you got to embrace your target audience.

Jon Acuff: Exactly. Yeah.

William Norvell: So well as we do come to a close, unfortunately. And as I said, we'll have to have you back on some certain things. What we love to do is invite our guest to tell our audience a little bit about what the word of God is doing in their life. So the way we like to do that is just kind of think about it could be a verse or a story that you read this morning that God brought to your mind. It could be something you've been meditating on for a season or your your whole life even. But just invite you to maybe share with our audience something from God's word that impacts the way you think about the world.

Jon Acuff: Yeah. So, I mean, I have a goal. I'm going through the Gospels. That's what I'm doing right now. Andy Downs inspired me. She had a goal sheet about reading through the Gospels. I read through the entire Bible last year. So this year I was like, I want to read the Gospels and really kind of like hone in on Jesus, what his life is about, like John Mark Colmer, like, apprenticed myself. So today I was in John twenty one and I was just overwhelmed that like the first thing Jesus does after Peter has completely abandoned him and the power of like Peter goes back to the only thing he knew that's such a powerful entrepreneur lesson having failed, he becomes a fisher like he goes, I'm going to fish now. I'm going to go back to fishing, goes back to fishing. The first thing Jesus says when he sees Peter is like, hey, you should throw your nets down on the other side of the boat like he gives him a gift. This person is just screwed him in every way possible, has stabbed him in the back so deliberately. And the first thing he does is go, hey, let me help your business, like, let me. And it's so full they can't even pull it up. And then, like, what happens next? He makes them breakfast. Like, which of the people you've hurt deeply is like, hey, come have breakfast. Like, I'll bring breakfast to you. So that's what it was like. Just the generosity of that is what this morning I was kind of kind of riffing on Amen, amen.

William Norvell: There's a great scene of that, too, if anybody has. I don't know. We've talked about this on the podcast yet. I hadn't seen the chosen yet. The scene of that. It's a great series that's recently launched the scene of the boat overflowing and the people rushing towards it and the look on Peter's face and he and, you know, the way they depicted in the movie. Then he goes and kneels before the Lord and says, You are our Lord. It's just staggering.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, I've heard great things about it.

William Norvell: Yeah. It's a good pictorial vision of that exact moment. So John, can't thank you enough for coming on with us and spending some time. We can't wait. I don't know when this will release, but probably when the book's out there. Can't wait for everybody to read it. I can only imagine how many people are going to be really excited to get their hands on it.