Ask Me Anything

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. Today we're releasing a special Ask Me Anything episode in which you guys get to ask me your questions about faith, work, a bunch of other topics. Typically, I'm the one asking guests questions, but we decided to take this opportunity to flip the mic and have you guys ask me what's on your minds. And over the past couple of weeks, you. You guys have submitted some really terrific questions. My team and I culled through them all. We chose seven of the best ones for me to answer right here. So without further ado, let's get to the first question.

Hi, Jordan. My name is Kelsey Kemp. I'm a career coach and a podcaster specialized in helping Christians discern their occupational calling and also practically land a job that's aligned with it. I am also a proud resident of Austin, Texas. I. I pretty much never shut up about it. I do think it's the best city in the world. But my question for you is, how did you decide to do work that's specifically meant for Christians? I know that you write at length in the Master of One about the importance of doing masterful work that appeals to both Christians and non Christians alike. So how did you decide you wanted to address Christians specifically in your books and your podcast? This was a tough decision for me as well, so I'm curious how you approached it. 2. I do have a bonus question because I can't resist. What pieces of advice are you really excited to give your girls as they grow up and make their own career decisions? Thanks, Jordan.

I love these questions, Kelsey. So first, I just want to say how much I love, love, love Austin, Texas. So my favorite cities. I love the Driscoll Hotel, so, so much. I love the trails. I love the restaurants. Next time I'm there, let's organize a meet up at Torchy's Tacos. That'd be a lot of fun. All right, so your first question. How did I decide I wanted to address Christians specifically in my books on my podcast? Yeah, Obviously, we make no secret of who I'm creating content for here on the podcast. At the very beginning of each episode, I say, this is a podcast for Christians, and my team and I are laser focused in on that. I know that's not a decision that a lot of other authors make, unless, you know, maybe some pastors try to write exclusively for the church. So first, let me address the irony of this decision, and then I'll get to kind of why we've chosen to focus on this lane. So the irony is that this whole podcast in my books and everything else I'm doing is about celebrating the work of Christ followers that is not overtly evangelical. Right. People who are living out the call to mastery in every corner of creation. You know, people like, like Joel manby, the former CEO of SeaWorld, who We've had on the podcast Living out the Call to Mastery in Business. Lindsay Ray, episode 39, who is a nurse practitioner. I'm thinking of Jeff Heck, the CEO of Monday Night Brewing, who we've had on the podcast. Right. These are people who are serving Christians and non Christians alike through their important redemptive work. So back to your question. Why in the world have I chosen to focus exclusively on talking to the church? Yeah, listen, because this was honestly just the unique lane I saw God calling me to occupy. There's not a lot of people out there who are raising their hands and saying, I want to help Christ followers connect the gospel to their work across vocational lines. Right. Not just for entrepreneurs or teachers or writers, what have you, but every Christian. And so I see my job as to help every Christ follower understand that their work matters to God so that you all will scatter to every corner of creation and be a faithful presence amongst the lost in your own war communities. Right? Yeah. The biblical story of work is one that, as you guys know, it gives great dignity, it gives great purpose to our lives, to our work. Do I think that message is winsome to those outside of the church? No doubt. Right. But until the church itself gets that message, yeah, we're just gonna keep on preaching to the choir, if you will. I hope it makes this content more valuable, more relevant to you who are following Jesus day in, day out. Because we could talk so openly about our why, namely the gospel and how it impacts the. How our pursuit of mastery in our crafts. Right. So that's hopefully answers your first question. Kelsey, your second question. I loved. You know, what pieces of advice am I really excited to give to my girls as they grow up and make their own career decisions? Great question. Some of you know, some of you might not know, I have three daughters. Ellison, Joy, who is six years old, Kate, who's four, and Emory, who just turned one, who we adopted about a year ago. And yet we're already talking a lot about work. I know it's going to come as a huge shock to you guys. In fact, Ellison, my six year old Elson and I just launched an Etsy store together which was a ton of fun. We launched it like right before Black Friday. If you're curious. It's called Seasons Reading. Wink wink. And it's fun. We got a bunch of, you know, we're selling seasonal bookmarks and she's having a blast and actually like, you know, generating sales from all over the world, which is super fun. So my message to them, to my kids, about work right now, given their age, is pretty simple, right? And it's that work is a joy because work is how we serve the world. That's what I really want them to understand at this early age. Work isn't something that, you know, daddy and mommy do to make money primarily. It's a way that we help people. It's a way that we serve people. So when I come upstairs to go to work every morning, you know, sometimes the kids will say, you know, they'll express disappointment that I have to go to work, whatever if they're home from school during the summer or whatever. But then they'll remember, oh, yeah, but Daddy's got to go help people. Daddy's got to go, you know, record on the microphone to help people or write a book to help people. You know, it's interesting. I think Covid's given us a really great opportunity to talk about this. And I would encourage you all listening to use Covid as an opportunity to help your kids understand the value and meaning of work. You know, we've been praying, like I'm sure you guys have with your kids, that God would rid the world of this coronavirus, you know, or as Kate, my 4 year old, says, the K virus is what she calls it. And it's been a great opportunity to explain to them how God will do that, how God will rid the world of this virus or at least make it less severe. He does that through the work of his people, through scientists, through doctors, through public health experts. He does it through Christians and non Christians alike. But he does his work through people. You know, it's pretty rare these days that, you know, God works through miracles that fall from the sky like they do like they did in the Old Testament, New Testament, you know, much more common is that he works through the miracle of our vocations, through the miracle of work. That's how God heals the world, right? He does it through our work. He works through us. By the way, N.T. wright is one of my favorite theologians. We've had him on the podcast here. He wrote a terrific book called God and the Pandemic that articulates in a really beautiful way how from Genesis 2 until today, God has always chosen to do his work in the world through human beings, through his image bearers. It's a terrific short read. If you want to go deeper on this topic, if you want to get a preview of that and his writing on that, you go listen. He talks about this for a couple of minutes in our podcast episode with him, episode 44, which is our second most popular episode ever. It's terrific. So I hope that answer your questions. Kelsey, let's move on to the next one.

Caroline Newberry Parker. I work for Aramark in first aid sales. I live in Gainesville, Florida. My question for you, Jordan, is this. As someone who I know has many talents, would have been playing the piano and music, how did you kind of zero in on what you do now? Your focus is Master of One, not being a Jack of all trades, but yet you yourself are kind of a Jack of all trades. You've done a lot of different things. What made you streamline what you're doing?

Caroline, Very excited to see your question come through. Caroline is actually a friend of mine from our days in Tallahassee at the Florida State University, so I knew I had to select her question. By the way, Caroline, thanks for supporting my teaching Ellison and Theology of Work by buying some bookmarks from her Etsy store. That was very sweet of you. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. I am a Jack of all trades. You know, going back to our days together at Florida State. Caroline yo. In college, man, I was doing so many different things. I had a different internship every single semester. I played piano at a wine bar. I played in a band that toured around the state of Florida. I interned at the White House. I worked at a tech startup. I was a vocal major, a poli sci major, and then finally a public relations major. I was the quintessential Jack of all trades, Master of none. There was nothing that I could point to to say I was really great at or that I was pursuing mastery. And I wrote a little bit about this in Master of One, you know. You know, today, present tense, I have no problem being described as a Jack of all trades, Right? I think that's the inevitable byproduct of proper exploration and experimentation in one's career. Right? To find a thing that you really want to go big on. Like I talk about in the book, the first step you got to explore, you got to try a bunch of different stuff. And as you do, I think it's inevitable that you become a Jack or a Jill of all trades. Here's what I have a problem with. I have a problem with being described as A master of none. Because the essence of. I mean, we talk about this in the podcast all the time. That the essence of the Christian life is to glorify God and love our neighbors as ourselves. And we do that when we do our work masterfully well and serve as effective imitators or image bearers of God's character of excellence. Right. By the way, the opposite of mastery, I would argue, is mediocrity. And mediocrity is nothing short of a failure of love and a misrepresentation of our Father. It's the ministry of excellence that we're after. And not saying that we're going to be excellent, we're going to be perfect every time, but the pursuit, it's the pursuit, I think that that matters and that glorifies God. It's a pursuit of mastery that really, really matters. And so for me, yeah, it took years of experimentation to find the one vocational thing that I was prepared to really go big on and really commit to. You know, my one thing, if you will, in the parlance of the book, is entrepreneurship. And that one thing is applied with an ever increasing amount of focus. So today, it's applied solely to leading this company, Jordan Rayner and Company, where I have the privilege of channeling a bunch of different gifts into a single focused direction and a single mission of inspiring and equipping all of you, all of us, to do our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. All right, let's move on to the next question.

Hi, Jordan. My name is Dawn. I am designing homes in Portland, Oregon. And my question for you is what strategies do you use for prioritizing your work and making sure that you are being effective with your time? The thing that I find that I'm struggling with as I run my business is just, you know, I have family demands and I have all these different business demands, and I know I can't do everything. I know I need to say no to some things, but sometimes it's hard to know how to prioritize and what to do say no to. And I do want to be effective with my time and just wondering how you manage all that.

Thanks.

Excellent question, John. So I could write an entire book on this topic. And in fact, I kind of just did. So some of, you know, I've been busy writing my next book. I just finished the first draft, literally, I think two weeks ago, finished the first draft. And it's all about how we as Christ followers can practically day to day redeem our time as we seek to do our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. So here's the deal. You can't even preorder the book yet, so don't worry, I'm not pitching the book just yet. Stay tuned here on the podcast for details, but I'll give you a preview of it because I answer your question directly in the book. So your question don't what strategies do you use for prioritizing your work day to day? How do you figure out what you're going to say yes to and what you're going to say no to? So I'm going to oversimplify the answer just for the sake of time here, but one of the best tools I've ever seen for answering this question is called the Eisenhower Matrix, which you may have heard of before. It's named after President Dwight Eisenhower and how he, he developed this grid for prioritizing his work. So it's a simple two by two chart, right? Four quadrants. We'll link to a visual of it here in the show notes. But from top left, moving around clockwise, you know, top left quadrant, quadrant number one is urgent and important work. Quadrant two is not urgent and important work. Quadrant three, bottom left hand corner, yeah. Is urgent and not important. And then quadrant four is not urgent and not important. Right. So that's the order in which your to do list should be prioritized. Number one, urgent and important. Number two, not urgent and important. Number three, urgent and not important. Number four, not urgent and important. You know, so for you, Don, you're designing homes in Portland. So I'm going to assume some things about that, assume some things about your work to try to make this example a little bit more practical. So, you know, let's say you've got a proposal that you've got to send to a prospective client. That's something that's important. It's a means of driving new business, and it's urgent. Thus it's quadrant number one. And that should be the first thing that you're budgeting in a given day, right? Then you move on to quadrant two, looking at your to do list, your inventory of actions and projects and, and figure out, okay, what's important but not urgent. And this is usually the stuff that we put off. But you know, if we actually do the work, if we actually do this work, it will ensure that there's a lot less emergencies in the future. Right? So, for example, Don, let's say you're constantly getting bogged down by, I don't know, urgent administrative tasks. If that's the case, the highest leverage thing you can do might be to, you know, hire an assistant. But because, you know, quote, draft job description for an assistant isn't an urgent task, it tends to be the one that gets pushed off the most, thus only making the problem worse and worse. So simply being aware of that can be helpful. I love this quote from Tim Keller. He said, quote, self control is the ability to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing. Unquote. That's a. I've got that plastered in my mind, memorized in my mind, and I think about that frequently. So once coming coming to my daily routine, right? So once I identify what I'm going to be working on in a given day using the Eisenhower matrix, I then plug those tasks actually into my calendar a day ahead. They're essentially appointments with myself to do deep work on that particular task. So this is all a lot, a lot more intricate, a lot more complex than I could properly explain in podcast and audio format. It's really helpful to see what this looks like physically. And I actually have a video in which I teach on this exact topic in a pretty robust way in my community for redemptive entrepreneurs. So Don, if you email my my assistant Kayla, we'd be happy to give you a month free in that community so you can watch that whole training. Her email is right here in the show notes of this episode. Very easy to find. By the way. Is any of you listening who are entrepreneurs? I would encourage you to consider this community for redemptive entrepreneurs. We have a video training every single month on a really practical business topic. You get a daily devotional from me and you get to connect with other Christian founders. And you can learn more about that@access.jordanrayner.com we got the link there right in the show notes here. By the way, I mentioned the daily devotional you get there. We also some of you may not know, we send a weekly devotional every Monday morning, helping you connect your faith with your work at the very start of the workweek. It's free. You could sign up for it right now@jordanraynor.com devotional. So if you're not already on the list, make sure you subscribe to that one. All right, great question, Don. Let's move on to the next one.

Hi, my name is Michelle o'. Neill. I work government printing and I live in Northern Virginia, Leesburg, Virginia. So my question is this. I am now 43 years. I am starting my own business and have been doing it, have a lot of life experience. However, still teetering on what God has called me specifically to do. I have a lot of different talents, but I've always been very creative and I think I have an idea of what I'm supposed to do based on other people and dreams and all this stuff. But anyway, how do you find at this late in your life what it is that God is calling you to do? Or have you missed it? Thank you.

Hey Michelle. I hope all is well in Northern Virginia. Love the D.C. metro area. I'm missing it. Sad that I haven't been able to travel there because of COVID But two things I would say. So first I would encourage you to just start experimenting with this new business. Start small. I wrote a whole chapter about this in Master of One. And I talk a lot about this idea of little bets, right? So thinking about you've got this full time job, you can't spend a ton of time on this new venture. How can you, what can you do in an hour a day? What can you do with that constraint to start to validate that you can serve people really well with this new product or with this new service or whatever this business is going to provide. So for me, um, this is what I did when I was writing. So when I started writing, I was running a really high growth venture backed tech startup called Threshold360 and that was a very demanding job. I was CEO. We grew up from 5ish people to about 100 by the time I left in two and a half years. But you know, I knew that there was a chance that I would want to write full time. But instead of just taking the plunge and committing to writing, I placed a little bet. I took the first hour, hour and a half of every single day. I woke up early and I just wrote and I started sharing my stuff with other people. I would share it in the form of devotionals, I would share it in form of a chapter of a book. And then once people were like, this is great, this is really helping me, that's when I started thinking about pouring more fuel on that fire. So I would encourage you to apply that to your own situation, right? You got a full time job, you don't have unlimited time to spend on this new business. But think about what can you do with 30 minutes a day, what can you do with an hour a day to just start experimenting, to figure out if you're serving people really well. Again, I talk about this more. Master of One. I'd love to send you a copy for free on us. And so if you want to copy a Master of One, shoot my assistant Kayla an email and she'll make sure you get a copy her emails right here in the show notes. So that's the first thing I would say. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Michelle, here's the second thing I would say to encourage you and I wish I had spent more time talking about this in Master of One, but I want to encourage you to recognize that you have freedom to choose the work you're going to do in this life. You know, we, I think a lot of times we treat calling, vocation whatever the way The Hollywood treats Mr. Right, right. There's, there's, there's one thing in this world that God has called me to do and, and he sent me on this never ending quest, frustrating quest to find it. It's just not true. Right. The fact is God has created you, Michelle, created me with a lot of different interests, a lot of different gifts. And he's given us freedom to choose the work that we can do most exceptionally well in service of his agenda. Right. He's God's called all of us to the same mission. Right. Our mission in life is to glorify him, to bring him glory. But he's given us a ton of freedom to choose how exactly we will do that through the various callings in our life, through our work. Right. So yes, spend some time experimenting but at some point I hope you just feel the freedom to just make a choice and commit to something long enough to be really, really great at it. By the way, I, I have a devotional on this topic on YouVersion's Bible app. It's called Stop Waiting for Peace. So the title comes from this idea that I hear from a lot of Christians. If I'm just praying, I'm waiting for a sense of peace before I step out into this particular venture. And yeah, I just not sure that's biblical. Right. In this whole devotional, I think it's four days long. Unpacks that idea at length and looks at what scripture has to say about a number of people, including Abraham, that stepped out in faith even when they probably didn't have the greatest sense of peace about their circumstances. So I would encourage you to read that devotional. I think it'll be incredibly encouraging to you. It's totally free and there's a link to that devotional right here in the show notes for this episode. All right, let's move on to the next question from Benjamin.

Hi Jordan, this is Benjamin Long. I am a pediatrician and currently studying sleep medicine in San Antonio, Texas Love your podcast and the work that you're doing. DS Lewis is quoted as saying, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books, but if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. So in light of this, my question to you is, what are the top three to five old books you would suggest? Can't wait to hear your answer.

Hey Benjamin, first let me say I want to learn more about your work. Seriously, shoot me an email. Jordanrayour.com I'm very curious. I believe sleep is counterintuitively one of the most productive things that we can do. Getting a full eight to nine hours sleep opportunity. As Dr. Matthew Walker writes in his excellent book why We Sleep, I came across this quote recently from the theologian D.A. carson. Here's what he said. I love it. Quote, you are morally obligated to try to get the sleep you need. Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night's sleep. Not pray all night, but sleep. End quote. So I love the work you're doing. Thank you for doing it. So let me make a quick comment about that Lewis quote and then I'll get to my book recommendations. So, as you guys know, I love Lewis. He's one of my great heroes. I've studied his really closely and I actually came across this quote, Benjamin, when I read about Lewis's refusal to read the newspaper. So he famously hated the newspaper. He would never read it. He felt the information that appeared important in print today would look really unimportant tomorrow. Of course he's right. And listen, Lewis said this in the 1950s. Can you imagine what he would say about our non stop news today? It's part of the reason why I consume almost no news and confine myself almost exclusively to the medium of full length nonfiction books. So I disagree with Lewis's assertion to only read old books, but I do completely agree with the sentiment behind it, which is that we need to filter content. One way you do that is by only reading stuff that's been around for a while. But that's not the only way. Another way is just by waiting to read something until it's been recommended by a bunch of your friends. That's typically how I find books. I wait until multiple people have recommended the same title before I buy it and read it. So back to your question. Top three to five books that I would suggest. Yeah, this can be a frustrating answer. It all depends on what you're looking for. I have My top recommendations for a bunch of different categories@jordanraynor.com bookshelf we also have every book that's ever been recommended by a guest of this podcast there, but forced to recommend only three to five books to all of my listeners across a bunch of different vocations and stages of pain, their career. And you're saying old books? Oh man, these aren't super old. But whatever, I'll give it a go. Every good endeavor by Tim Keller, his book on work and how the Gospel influences our work is magnificent. It changed my life years ago and I recommend it frequently. Number two Would be Surprised by Hope by NT Rights. I think the implications of that book and the Theology of Heaven for our work today are immense. And N.T. wright does a magnificent job of breaking that down in that title. And then this one isn't as old, but whatever, I'm going to go with it because I read it, I don't know, once a year, once every 18 months. Shoe Dog, the Story of Nike. So my favorite genre of books, I love Christian living books, but my, my favorite genre, the most entertaining for me are business biographies. I love stories of ventures from startup to launch to scale. And Shoe Dog is just inimitable in this category. I don't, I'd be shocked if I ever find a book that's better written than Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. It's just poetic, it's beautiful. And you know, I, I don't, I don't have any reason to believe that Phil Knight is or is not a Christ follower, but there's a section at the end of that book where he's talking about just the good the business can do that. I just think that single paragraph is one of the most beautiful articulations of a theology of work from somebody who, you know, again, I'm not sure as a Christ follower, but it's a great book. I used to recommend 11 or 12 time management books, including Getting Things Done by David Allen, which about 20 years old, and Deep Work by Cal Newport. But in this book I'm going to be releasing next year, this book, you know, roughly on time management, I've actually done the work of distilling, Getting Things Done, Deep Work and a bunch of other titles, about a dozen titles down to their essence, to save you all loads and loads and loads of time. So stay tuned for that book. All right, next question.

Hey Jordan, it's Keela D. Down here in Texas. I am a writer. I've actually taken your writing and we've corresponded a little bit on Social media. So I just really appreciate all the stuff that you've done, not only for me, but all of your fans and readers and listeners. My question is about social media. I've been trying to build up my platform just a little bit in order to get publishers interested in maybe wanting to buy one of my books. And I've heard many of your guests say that they are not fans of social media. They try to limit their social media time. I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about the balance of trying to build up your social media platform a little bit just to gain some traction in trying to sell books or whatever your vocation is. You have to have some sort of audience, right? And so how do you build that up without spending too much time and wasting too much energy on social media and finding your identity in that? Thanks again for all you do. Hope to hear this on the episode later.

Bye. Hey, Keela. Texas, man, Texas is somehow got way overrepresented in this ask me anything episode of the podcast. But whatever, I like it. So Keela is one of the most enthusiastic students in my course on how to land a book deal with Dale platform. That's the course that she was referencing. So glad that you called in with this question because I know there's a lot of people in our audience, we know this from past surveys, who really want to land a book deal. They've got something, They've got some message that God has placed on their hearts and they want to see that book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble everywhere. So we got a lot of aspiring authors who want to get their book published, but they go and do their research and they find time and time again this conventional wisdom that, you know, you have to have a huge quote unquote platform before you get a book deal. Guys, this is not at all true. I'm living proof that this is not the case. You know, when I landed the book deal for Called to Create, I had less than a thousand Instagram followers. I had no email list. Our email list today, I don't know, 125,000, something like that. We had nothing when we got the book deal for Called to Create, and we still landed two offers from serious publishers for that book. Now, you do need a platform eventually, but not when you sign your book deal. So let me answer your question directly. Your question is essentially, given that you need to build a platform before, after you get a book deal, how come me and my writer guests talk so much about spending less and less time on social media? How can both be true. Okay, first let me say that I would argue that you absolutely do not need a social media following specifically to have success commercially as an author. So for called to create, only 8% of pre orders for that book came from social media. 8%. We had something like, I don't know, 50,000 Instagram followers and 8, 8% of our pre orders came from social media. So where did the other 90 plus percent come from? Email. Our email list. Email is the indisputable king in marketing books. So much so that it's the only thing my team really focuses on when promoting books. You know, we may post content on social media to promote a book like we do with Master of One, but that's really only to support what people are getting via email. We see very little conversions from social. By the way, Cal Newport, who wrote Deep Work Digital Minimalism, phenomenally successful best selling author, he's another good example of this. Cal has zero social media presence. You know what, he has a huge email list, right? That said, if you are going to spend time building a platform on social media, if you believe that's important to the brand you want to build, to the books you want to promote, I would give you two pieces of advice. Number one, spend 10 times the amount of time you're going to spend building social, building your email list. And secondly, confine the times that you're going to spend on social media. This is critical. As an author, deep work is one of the most important skills you can learn. The ability to sit in front of a manuscript, in front of a Google Doc and write an outline with zero distractions is critical, right? So you gotta confine the times you spend on social. When I was building the platform for Call to Create, I actually did spend time building an email list and social media because I just at the time wasn't sure which one was gonna work, which one was gonna perform. But even during those times, I confined my time on Instagram to a 30 minute sliver in my calendar every day. And outside of that block, there were no push notifications, nothing in the meantime. And that allowed me to stay laser focused on my work throughout the day, which is critical for doing any sort of creative work, whether you're a writer, an entrepreneur or doctor, whatever. So hey, listen, if you're like Keela and you want to land a book deal, you're trying to understand how to build a platform, you know, is it emails? Social is a podcast, whatever. I would encourage you to check out my course, Shameless Plug, right on how to Land a book deal with no platform. And listen, the first lesson of that course is totally free, completely free. I don't even ask for your email address. You can watch it right now. And that first lesson is going to help you decide if self publishing or traditional publishing is the best path for you. We got a link to that right here in the show notes for the episode. Okay, I think we have time for one more question, so let's take one last question before we wrap up this Ask Me Anything episode at the Call to Mastery.

Gordon hi, this is Terrence Barkless. I am the owner of a cleaning company here in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Question is very simple. What is the toughest decision, personal or business? Effectively business, that you've ever had to make? And how does your faith or Christian values impact that decision? Again, what's the toughest or biggest decision you've ever had to make, either personal or business? And how does your faith or Christian values impact the decision that you made? Thanks for what you're doing, really appreciate and enjoy the podcast and look forward to hearing more content from you in the near future.

Hey Terrence, thanks for the kind words. I'm so glad you're enjoying the podcast. We love making this show for you. So it didn't take me long at all to come up with an answer to this question. Very, very easy. The hardest decision I ever made, personal professional, was the decision to replace myself as CEO of Threshold360 so I could focus full time on the work I'm doing right now. So a little bit, a little bit of background to give some context to this decision. So from October of 2016. Yeah. Until March of 2019. So two and a half years, guys. I had the entrepreneurial dream job. That sounds ironic, but I was the second CEO of this tech startup called Threshold360. It. I was. And I continue to be incredibly bullish about the mission to allow anybody to virtually step inside of any location on Earth via 360 Media. It Listen, 360 content's been around forever, literally for like 25, 30 years. But nobody's ever figured out how to do it at scale, especially in public locations, hotels, restaurants, shops, attractions. And we figured out how to do it in a sensible way in a sensible business model. And we built the world's largest library of this content. Right. So I'm running the venture for two and a half years as CEO. I'm having the time of my life. We grew it from about a half dozen people to about a hundred employees and contractors. When I left we had this dynamite customer list, great investors. It was amazing. There was just one problem. While all of this momentum was building at Threshold, I also had all of this momentum building behind my faith and work content. Right. So Called To Create was released in November 2017, so about a year into my tenure as CEO of Threshold. And when the book came out, everything just took off around my content. You know, the book hit a couple of national bestseller lists. The email list was growing like a weed. You guys were demanding more content. You were asking me for a podcast. And so, you know, both my work as CEO of Threshold and my work as a writer, I honestly saw them as expressions of my one thing. Both were expressions of entrepreneurship. You know, one, that Threshold was tech entrepreneurship, but my work as a writer, I've always viewed essentially as. As content entrepreneurship. But I knew, even though those were expressions of my one thing, I knew that I couldn't. They were different enough to where I couldn't keep pursuing mastery of both. I knew I could never be the best CEO or the best author if I kept doing both. And, Terence, I got a lot of advice at that time that was essentially, hey, if you love both, do both, keep doing both as long as you can. It just didn't compute for me. You know, if you asked me how my faith factored into this difficult decision, you know, here's the answer. I believe work is service. That's what this whole podcast is about. I. I believe that work is service. And I knew that focusing exclusively on one of those two great opportunities would allow me to serve much, much, much more effectively. And so I chose the work I'm doing now, and I'm glad I did. You know, I spent a year recruiting my replacement as CEO of Threshold. I have stayed on and continue to stay on as executive chairman of the board of that company. And, you know, that move has just freed me up to spend the vast majority of my time focused on bringing you all content like this. And I'll tell you what. I talked about this with Jeff Heck in my interview with him on the podcast. Jeff Heck, the CEO, Monday Night Brewing. You know, he was in the season of choosing between working on staff at a church and leading this brewery. And we talked about how, you know, let's pretend you're spending 20 hours a week doing two things. When you go to make the leap to doing one thing full time, it's not the difference between 20 and 40 hours of focus. It's the difference between, like, 20 and 80 hours, even though you're only working 40 hours a week, the impact. It's like you're working 80 hours a week because there's so much value in mentally being completely in one place, focused on one vocational thing at a time. And that's what I'm doing. That's why I decided to make that decision. This, what I'm doing today, right now, this is my life's work. I envision a world in which every single Christ follower deeply believes that the work they do, whether it's running a cleaning company in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, or writing novels or waiting tables or creating art, all of that work is eternally significant. All of that work is a means of glorifying our great God, loving our neighbors as ourselves, extending the kingdom, making disciples of Jesus Christ. And because of that, my vision is that every Christ follower would be motivated to do that work exceptionally well, to follow the call to mastery on their lives. Right? That's a big, hairy, audacious mission. It's a huge mission that I've set before myself and my team. And big missions require big, big, big focus. And, yeah, I'm committed to staying focused on that mission and serving you and others with that message for many decades to come. Hey, guys, thank you for your questions. I'm praying you all have a wonderful Christmas. Hey, one last thing. Speaking of Christmas, this Christmas, I want you to remember this. I wrote about this in Called to Create, but I like to remind myself of this frequently. God could have chosen to send Jesus to earth that first Christmas into the home of people of any vocation. He could have chosen to send Jesus into the home of a priest, into the home of a Pharisee, whatever, but he didn't. He sent Jesus into the home of a carpenter. Why? I don't think it's far flung to conclude that at least part of that reason was to remind us of the dignity of work. Work that others might view as secular. Jesus spent 85% of his working life doing creative, entrepreneurial work like you and me. May that remind you of the significance of the work that you're doing every single day. I love you guys. Thank you so much for allowing me to serve you with this podcast. I pray that me and my team are serving you exceptionally well.