Jeff Goins (Bestselling Author of The Art of Work)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and for the good of others. Each week I host a conversation with somebody who is following Jesus Christ in their life, but is also pursuing world class mastery of their vocation, of the work they believe God has called them to do. We're talking about each guest's path to mastery, their keystone habits, daily routines, and how their faith impacts their work. Today, I am really excited to share a conversation I had in Nashville recently, or Franklin, to be more specific, with Jeff Goins, the best selling author of five books including the Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve. I'd be shocked if you guys hadn't heard of at least one of Jeff's books. Jeff is an exception. Exceptional author, not just a masterful writer. Jeff is also really great at building an audience around his ideas. Jeff was very generous and kind to endorse my newest book, Master of One, which you guys know is coming out in January. But we had actually never met until this podcast conversation. So he endorsed the book. We just corresponded via email and I shot him an email afterwards. I was like, hey, next time I'm in Franklin, let's grab lunch. So we had lunch on the calendar before I even decided to launch this podcast. And then once we started the Call to Mastery, I just shot Jeff a note. I was like, hey, would you mind turning what would have been a very private get to know you lunch into a very public one as we record the Call to Mastery? And he agreed. He's like, yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. So you're gonna sit down with me and Jeff as we're eating lunch. So forgive any background noise of us chewing on the amazing Greek food. Yeah, shockingly, Franklin had pretty decent Greek food. But Jeff and I sat down, we talked about our habits for churning out great content, and I really interviewed Jeff hard here. I want to understand how he's able to churn out bestseller after bestseller. We talked about how great masters throughout time like Michelangelo and Da Vinci were actually able to master more than one thing in their careers, but they did it in different sense. Seasons. Right. So they would focus on mastering something for a decade, and then they would use that mastery to pivot to something relevant. And we also talked about why Jeff wants to hear President Trump on the call to mastery. That was a very interesting answer to a typical question I get. So, without further ado, please enjoy sitting down and having lunch with me and Jeff Goins. Jeff, how you doing?

I'm good.

You have a bite of chicken in your mouth.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I'm doing great. Thank you, Jordan.

So we've never met. You endorsed Master 1, which is very kind. We never met face to face. I was gonna be in town for this event here in Nashville, and we were gonna sit down for lunch, and I was like, hey, maybe we should record a podcast with food in our mouth the whole time. So that's what we're gonna do. So if you guys hear us chewing on some Greek salad Euros, because I screwed up the order and didn't get Greek salads, then that's. That's why you guys just have to deal with it.

Yeah.

So this will be fun. How is the Greek? Oh, you haven't even gotten to the gyro yet.

I finished it.

You finished it? Oh, you.

Oh, good.

Was it decent?

Okay.

I like Taziki's. We got Tzatziki's in Tampa. So I'm excited to get to know you. So, but you have kids, right? How many kids you have?

Three and seven. A girl and a boy.

Three and seven. All right, so we're in relatively the same stage of life. I have a five year old Ellison and a three year old Kate. But you're really out of the craziness then?

Well, when our daughter was 2, she was an angel. Well, she's a little devil.

Is it a three year old?

Three year old? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She can do no wrong by me. But three has been, for a girl, has been a whole bag of crazy. She gets up about 11 times every night with a different. Different story, different reason. I want to hug you. It's dark. You should get 11. You know, she's got 11 different nightlights, including a little mini glow in the dark thing that she sleeps with now. So every nap time is a battle. Every. Every bedtime is 90 minute process.

Kate, my 3 year old, she sleeps very well through the night, but she's up at 4:30 every day.

Like forget Amelia. So get up out of bed in like a creepy poltergeist kind of way. I saw an event with Steven Pressfield yesterday where he, he was talking about storytelling, he was talking about thriller stories. And one of the conventions of a thriller story, thriller slash paranormal story, is the devil, whoever's the villain. You know, the villain of a story is always sort of a devil adversarial kind of character. And that character, the bad guy, is always ushered in by a female. That's a convention of the thriller genre. So he talked about like the Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby. Exorcist is brought about a little girl.

Right.

Rosemary's baby is Rosemary. And so Steve was like, I'm not saying this is not like, this is not about women not making any sort of implications about that. But I mean, not like that, frankly, goes back to even, you know, Adam and Eve. That's just a convention of that storytelling is that. Again, I'm not saying anything about women.

We're getting into tricky territory.

All I'm saying, all I'm saying is that I understand it now that I have a three year old daughter who like, you know, get up at all crazy hours of the early morning and whenever I am, I put her down and then I'll go to the kitchen, I'll like turn around, she's standing right behind me and she will scare the crap out of me. So I feel a little bit of demonic presence.

Yeah. So I hope this podcast is long gone before our kids are old enough to listen to it. But yeah, I used to tell people all the time that Kate, my 3 year old, was sent here by a terrorist group to invade our family and destroy.

To wear you, just wear you down.

Just wear a stand. Yeah, she's relentless. Like if there was one word to describe Kate Everly Rayner, she's relentless. She never stops talking. She wakes up mid sentence. But that also makes her like the Coolest, most fun 3 year old in the world. I love her. So, hey, I was prepping for lunch and just trying to get to know your story a little bit. I saw in your bio you spent part of your junior year in college in Spain.

Yeah. So you got in Seville, Spain.

Where'd you go to school, by the way?

I went to a small liberal arts school in Illinois called Illinois College. First college in Illinois.

Are you from up there?

Yeah, I'm from Chicago and this is in central Illinois.

Okay, so I gotta ask because I write about this in Master of my next book. Did you go visit Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona?

Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did? Yeah, yeah, in the Gaudi Museum and lots of parks. And stuff. Yeah, you can't miss it.

Do you know his story behind, like, his relation to the cathedral and his, like, focus on this?

I just know it's a project that will never end. Basically. 150-year-old project kind of thing, or however long it's taken. Crazy.

So, like, everyone listening knows the title of the upcoming book is Master of One. It's how do you find and focus on the work that God's created you to do Masterfully well. So Gaddy's story is, like, fascinating because he built Park Wall, he built all these amazing attractions around Barcelona and, like, started dabbling with the church, but then basically said, for the last decade of his life, this is the only thing I'm going to do. He stopped taking on projects and poured himself fully in the church. He lived in the church while he was architecting it. It's still not done.

Yeah, right.

But according To Time magazine, 2026, this thing is.

I heard about that.

Yes.

It's beautiful. It's amazing.

It's incredible. It's amazing. It really is spectacular.

A lot of people don't realize Michelangelo did that. The last of his life. From like, 50 to 90, he lived to almost 100. Michelangelo did, yeah. He lived to his 90s. Last 40ish years of his life, he managed a team of about 400 people. He was a construction foreman. He was an architect and a foreman, and they were building a cathedral. It's called the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Florence.

Really?

Yeah. It exists today. Yeah. There's a book called Michelangelo, Artist and Entrepreneur, something like that. And it's about his. The multiple disciplines, because he kind of did that, but he did it three different times in his life. He mastered a different craft.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He started with sculpture. He started with sculpting and became a master sculptor. And then he got into a public debate with Leonardo da Vinci about the best art form. And Leonardo said it was painting because you can paint the sky. You can't sculpt the sky. You could do anything with painting. Michelangelo said, you know, no, because of the constraints of sculpting, it's a finer art. And so, you know, these two artists, and Leonardo was his elder, they got into this big public fight about it. And Leonardo dared Michelangelo to try to paint better than him. And it was this big public contest, and they painted these two murals, and it was commissioned by some local politician or something that was goading them into doing it. And whoever won the contest is gonna get this commission. So Michelangelo loses the contest. Leonardo wins. He gets A commission. But now everybody knows Michelangelo as a painter. And then he got the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel.

That's wild.

And so he always wanted to be a sculptor. And then he got sort of goaded into doing these other things. And he was a bit of a curmudgeon as we, you know, the best that we know.

Right.

And then the same thing happened with architecture where he got into painting and he kind of became known as this really great painter. Paints the Sistine Chapel for the Pope and then he gets into architecture after that because the Pope says, you know, I want you to design this square around St. Peter's Cathedral. And he ends up doing that.

I'm fascinated by these guys who throughout their careers do end up mastering more than one discipline. Like, I think that's really interesting.

Right.

So for you, what's your one thing? I mean, is your one thing's writing? That seems pretty clear to me. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, I believe in mastery. Especially in an age where we kind of. We're endless dabblers. We can dabble in all the things. And it's actually with technology and social media, it's really difficult to focus on one thing as, you know, and most people aren't masters and aren't on the path to mastery just because of the amount of time and discipline and focus it takes. However, I believe in what I call the portfolio life, that mastery is not necessarily becoming a jack of all trades, but becoming a master of some. And what that means is you get to sort of create your own category. You get to decide what your art or your craft looks like. And one of the best ways to do that these days, I think, is to take two disparate areas of study or work and combine them. Right. And when you do that, you essentially create a new category. Robert Greene talks about this in his book Mastery. Like one of the book. One of the best ways for you to become a master at something would be to take these two things that are not like each other and combine them. A great example of that would be Apple. You know, Apple basically took products that are really well designed and well engineered and just work, and they made them beautiful. And so they took sort of two groups of people, artists and engineers, products for artists and products for engineers. And they said, we're going to combine this, right? We're going to make really well made, expensive products at a time where everybody was kind of racing to the bottom in the personal computer world. And we're gonna do something different, you know, think different. So for Me, my circle that I call my craft continues to expand, and I keep bringing new things in, but I do sort of think of it as one thing.

Yeah.

So.

So for those that don't know who are listening, what's that circle look like?

I mean, I write books. I teach courses for writers and artists and creatives, and I speak. And so for me, there's sort of the subject of the work and there's the medium. The subject would be what people call their message. And I think I've always only been talking about identity.

Yeah.

Which is the big question for me and most people. Who am I? Who am I really? And then the medium, the way that I do that really, is by connecting ideas to people, and that's it. And I'll do it through speaking, I'll do it through writing, I'll do it through a business. But it is the connection of an idea to a person that some way transforms them. Now, the way that I've been doing that the longest is writing.

Yeah.

But I'm doing a lot of speaking now, and I realize that that comes from doing a lot of performances. I did a lot of public speaking in college as part of a literary society, which is sort of like a frat, but we didn't live together, and we did public speeches and debates and stuff. But then I did have a lot of background in theater and music, and.

So we share that.

I think there's. Although I agree with the idea of mastery because we live in an age where everybody wants to be a master but nobody's willing to be an apprentice, which is a whole other thing. I do find that everything from my story that I thought was like, that's over, keeps sort of getting resurrected and integrated into this thing that I call my craft.

Totally. So I love. One of my favorite stories to write about in the book was Fred Rogers.

So heard of him. You've heard of that guy.

So like, Fred Rogers, like, wildly talented, Crazy talented as a songwriter.

Yeah. A lot of disciplines.

A lot of disciplines. But he very much viewed his work as one thing. In his case, the show. Right. Mr.

But he integrated all those other things.

But he integrated all those other things. So he talks about how he basically came to this point where he realized, oh, all of these skills that God has given me, I basically collected and found one way to apply them. Yeah, it's like an interesting way of, like, finding that, like, I think of.

Your skills as investments. Yeah. That's time and energy. And then you think of a portfolio as like a 401k or something. You have your portfolio. Like every month I get a report from our wealth management company and I open it and I see some stocks, some investments have lost value, we've even lost money on them. And I've seen others that have made a lot of money, you know, and there's part of me goes, oh, I wish I just was invested in this one.

But you double down on those things.

But yeah, I mean, as most people who are familiar with investment, particularly investing in the stock market understand, you're trying to mitigate risk. You're going to see ebbs and flows, ups and downs, but over time, the overall value of your portfolio is going to grow, it's going to increase, which is what's happened with our investment portfolio and it's what happens with my portfolio of skills. And so I'm constantly trying to bring in new skills, new approaches to the thing that I'm doing. But I really do think of my work as a portfolio. And so at the end of the day, I'm not thinking, am I the world's best writer, Am I the world's best speaker? Same way, you know, Mr. Rogers wasn't the world's best singer or actor or sweater wearer. But I like that Jerry Garcia quote, don't be the best, be the only. And so when you master your one thing and your one thing is these things that I do my way that nobody else can compete with one, I think that's a calling, you know, that's you living out your vocation in a way that nobody else can do, you know, be yourself because everybody else has taken that sort of thing. And it's just really fun, you know, it's really fun to do something that nobody else can quite do the way that you do it. Warts and all I thought about.

So I came from tech startup world running venture backed tech startups and there's a lot of talk about like Blue Ocean strategy as it applies to businesses, right? So competition is overrated. It's like Peter Thiel and 0 to.

1, competition is for losers.

Competition is for losers. Like don't compete. I think a lot about that in terms of career, right? Like find a thing that's Blue Ocean that like nobody else is doing because they don't have that unique set of skills and experiences and backgrounds and narratives that you have. I think that's an interesting way to approach it. So. But you're doing something that I think a lot of people and a lot of people listening to this episode would love to do. Basically create content full Time, Write full time. How do you pull that off? What was your path to being able to make a good living writing books and speaking and producing content?

Well, that's what we're talking about here. I never assumed that I would make a full time living writing books.

Right.

Which I think is a good way to think about it. You know, whatever the thing is, because when you put it all the pressure on that one thing, it's hit or miss, sink or swim, and can kind of be feast or famine. That's the way I approach my work now, even though I could live off of just my writing income. I speak, I teach online courses, I run a mastermind, I do some coaching. And for me, all the work feels very integrated and comes from one place, which is me coming up with ideas and sharing them with people. And just depends on the media how I do that. But how I started was I saw other people in this space doing this, bloggers, and I saw that people were building an audience first. You know, the audience first model, as Brian Clark talks about it from Copyblogger, build the audience first and then figure out what you want to sell them. It's kind of the opposite of if you build it, they will come.

Yeah.

And this is actually how business has always worked. We just think that when you put something on the Internet, people should find it. But it's sort of like, you know, we're in a downtown area right now in historic downtown Franklin, and it would be like opening up a shop in some random side street in the back alley going, where are the people? You know, and it would be cheaper to do that than buying something on the corner of, you know, Maine and Columbia. But if you buy that spot, you're going to get some more foot traffic. And so the Internet works that way too. People just don't realize it. Like, you go where people are and you have a better chance of them paying attention to what you're doing. So when I built my blog, I started a blog, obviously, but I understood that other people already had communities, they already had people following them. So I befriended other bloggers and I started writing articles and creating content on their websites. This works pretty well today. A much better analogy would be being a guest on somebody's podcast and doing that over. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what blogging was in 2012 is what podcasting is, where it's like, not brand new, but, like every year it's doubling, tripling, quintupling, whatever. So it's on the rise. And so that's a pretty good bet. You know, even like moving to Nashville today, like every time we sell a house, the house, you know, increases in value by 25 to 50% every few years. But even if you come to Nashville now and buy a house, that's still probably gonna happen.

Pretty good investment.

The bubble hasn't burst yet. So that's what we're seeing with. That's what I saw with logging wasn't at the early stages where you got to take a ton of risk and hope that it pays off, and it wasn't at the late stages where everybody's doing it. And that's what's happening with podcasting now. So I went where people were and then I kind of invited them back to my place, as it were.

And you did the work, right? I think, you know, we have some authors, we're gonna have a lot of authors on the show and talking about building audiences and building tribes and like, it's not rocket science, but it is a tremendous amount of work and you gotta be willing to, like, put it in. Was that your experience?

I think it's a tremendous amount of work spread over a long period of time. And so another way to think about that is it's a little bit of work every day.

Yeah.

So it was in 30 minutes to an hour a day for two years.

While you had a full time job.

Yeah. So, I mean, I was working for a ministry at the time. I was a marketing director for a nonprofit mission organization. And I was helping other people spread their stories, which is what marketing is, spreading ideas, spreading stories. And I said, well, I have some ideas, I have some thoughts and things that I want to say. I understand marketing now. I understand social media, blogging, email marketing. What if I did this for me and my message? And the truth was I had tried. I tried for about nine years. I'd get an idea, I'd take a shower, get an idea, I'd buy a domain name. And after six weeks, when I didn't have a million people show up, I'd get frustrated and move on to the next thing. And so I had these nine failed blogs over the course of almost nine years. In my early twenties, all of my twenties, basically. And I got really frustrated with myself about that. And then one day I decided to start a blog. And I thought, what if I just don't do the one thing that I've always done? What do all these blogs, all these failed blogs have in common? I quit them when I started this new blog called goinswriter.com, which was just a Personal blog. I didn't even know what it was about. It was about me and my thoughts and ideas. But I said, I'm going to write on this every single day for two years. And if I can't get 250 subscribers by the end of two years, 2,50. I'm gonna quit.

Yeah, that'd be a good call. Yeah.

And that was it. So I had pretty low standards, low stakes, low goal. But it was like you say you wanna be a writer and I was calling my own bluff. Are you willing to do this for two years, basically, thanklessly, before anybody shows up? Learn to love the process. Learn to do the work. Cause in the early days, you're not measuring. You can't measure the outcome. Right. Like you're like, I'm going to play professional basketball and I'm going to measure how many games I win as a sign if I should keep going. No, it's like you should be measuring hours of practice. How many free throws can not even like, can you make, how many can you take? How many shots can you take? Over and over and over again. I'm reminded of that office ism where it's like, what is it you miss 100% of the shots you don't take? Wayne Gretzky. Wayne Gretzky. And then underneath, Michael Scott. Michael Scott is quoting Michael Scott, quoting Wayne Gretzky.

I love it. I love it.

Yeah, so it was that. It was like, I need practice. I'm not as good as I think I am. Because if I were, people would notice. I mean, that's a thing that I don't necessarily publicly say sometimes, but like oftentimes we think we're better than we are. Again, everybody wants to, most of the time, everybody wants to be a master and nobody's willing to be an apprentice. Apprenticeship was a 10 year process back in the day. So if you were that good, I would have heard of you.

Yeah.

And that's what I was saying to myself at 27 years old, if you were as good as you think you are, people would know who you are.

Right.

So let's just calm down. Let's set the ego aside and let's work on this every single day for an hour for two years and see what happens.

I love it. It's this. I talk about this in Master of One. One of the keys to mastery is just simply discipline over time. And I say simply because it's not rocket science. But it is hard to do. It's very, it's extraordinarily rare.

It's as hard as brushing your teeth. Yeah, but you've got kids. I've got kids. It is the last thing on their mind at 8 o' clock at night. Every night. Every night when I put my 7 year old to bed, I go, you gotta brush your teeth. He goes, my legs hurt every night. I go, that's fine, buddy, but I'm not reading you a story if you don't brush your teeth. And every night, you know it's a miracle. Hallelujah. It's a Pentecostal revival service. His legs start working again.

I love it.

You know, he's no longer crippled and he walks into the bathroom, brushes his teeth for a minute, sidetracked.

What do you read to your kids?

Our son loves Captain Underpants. That whole, all those books. There's dozens of them. Our daughter loves anything about a princess. My wife is not a girly girl. She was an athlete. And for whatever reason, Emilia came out a princess. She has every Disney princess dress. I came home yesterday and she was dressed as Anna from Frozen and had the braids and everything. Yeah, yeah, I love it.

So you, you are a masterful writer. I've loved your books for a long time. So as a nonfiction writer myself, I'm always interested to like deconstruct the process for you. So from idea to finish manuscript, what's your process for putting together a non fiction book? I realize that's a huge question, right? But like, do you start with like, how detailed do your outlines get? Like, what does that process look like?

You know, I'm trying to learn how to just trust myself better. One of my favorite quotes is by a guy named Parker Palmer who wrote a book called Let yout Life Speak, great book about vocation. And he says, before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I need to listen to my life telling me who I am. As somebody who's always been interested in the subject of identity and finding my calling, whatever that means, that's always resonated with me. And you know, there's that famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech where he says, you know, it's only when you look backwards the dots connect. Or that Nietzsche quote, life can only be lived forward, but understood backwards. And so I'm constantly looking back going, what do I know that I didn't realize I knew? What is my soul trying to say through my life? Which I really believe that your soul knows things that you aren't fully aware of and conscious of. And you can think of that as God communicating through you. However you want to think of that, but I think there are deep, unaware parts of us that are working on the next idea. And this was a practice of Hemingway. He would work on a story kind of in the morning to mid afternoon, and then he would stop right in the middle of a story and he would let his unconscious kind of work through the rest of the story. And so by the time he got back to his work in the morning, he was ready to go and he knew how he was going to finish the story. So I think that's how the creative process works. It's a bit of a mystery for me practically what that means is if I'm gonna write a new book, often I'm in the middle of a current project and I get distracted.

Yeah, me too.

And I get bored. It's very common, very common for a creative person, very common for an entrepreneur once things start to stabilize. So at 51% of the project I'm like, great, I'm bored. Can somebody else finish this? I wanna do something new because starting things and getting them going is what really excites me. And I finish things mostly as a discipline to allow me to start the next thing.

Yeah.

I finish it because I don't like not fulfilling commitments as best I can help it, and because I don't want to have a bunch of half written books in my sock drawer.

So do most of your book ideas come in the middle of writing another one? Yeah, mine too.

And so I write that down, I honor that, and I go, great, we'll come back to you when we finish this other thing. Yes. And what I have learned is that I am often thinking about ideas long before I'm aware that they're going to be a book.

Yeah.

And so I will look at the books that I'm reading, the things that I've been writing, and start to see connections, start to see theme. How does that resonate with what's going on in my own life? And does that connect with just my interactions with my audience, with my friends, with people in my life? Like, have I experienced something that I'm interested in and curious about that is interesting and helpful to other people? And at the intersection of those areas of like something that I have some authority on or have learned something about, or I'm just naturally curious about and it connects with the needs of somebody else? I go, okay, cool, that's a book. Let's chase that a little bit. So an example of that was I wrote a book called the Art of Work, which is about finding your calling Your purpose. And in the middle of that book, I started reading a lot of biographies because I was telling a lot of other people's stories in the book, and I started reading a lot of biographies of artists and creatives, you know, writers and such. And I wrote this book about finding your passion and purpose. And I realized, well, that's part of it, but the other part is, like, how do I make a living off of this?

Sure.

And out of that came the idea for Real Artists Don't Starve.

It's a great title, great book.

And I keep an Evernote file for a lot of these ideas. And I just clip articles in. My Evernote is a mess. There's no, like, mine, too. I have, like, notebooks and stuff, but it's all just dumped into one place.

I have an ideas for future books, blog post, slash podcast episodes. It's a mess.

I just search. If you've got a search function on a computer, on an app, there's no reason to file anything anywhere. Makes no sense. I just search for the thing that I want. You know, like actual physical filing cabinets don't have that. If they did, there'd be no need. Just search. So what's interesting is I am basically working on an idea two years before I start writing on it, Right? Unconsciously, yeah. So when I finished Art of Work, it came out. It did well. I was promoting it, and then I start working on the next book. I got a book deal right after that, and I start working on the next book. I just know that I want to write a book about how creative people make a living, because I kept meeting people who were writers, people like me, artists, musicians, living in Nashville who said, well, I could never. I love doing this, but I can never make a living doing that. And I knew, having succeeded as a writer, that there were other people like me, that what I'd experienced wasn't as rare as I thought. And anytime you experience success at anything, you're going to attract two different groups of people, people who are like you, who go, oh, I'm doing that too, and let's talk about that. And the people who want to do that that haven't done it. And I wanted to introduce these people to each other. We had the starving artists and the thriving artists, and one group didn't know the other existed. But I didn't feel like that was enough of an idea. And then I was going through Evernote, and I found this old article that I had clipped about the artist Michelangelo, that basically was about this art historian that had discovered these unnamed, previously unknown bank accounts belonging to Michelangelo that were under somebody else's name. And long story short, the article. And the researcher found out that he was the richest artist of the Renaissance and that he was worth $50 million when he died. I didn't know this. I never heard this in school. In fact, I'd heard the opposite, that he and everybody else like him were pretty much broke. And so I thought, what if you didn't have to starve as an artist? And what if some of the greats, artists and authors and people whom we revere as creative geniuses who are true to their art weren't broke?

Yeah.

And so that was sort of the. And I didn't know if it was true.

Yeah, right, right, right. But it was a good hunch.

It's enough to. It's a hunch. It's like, you know, you're a lawyer and you get a case and you go, I think we can win this case. I don't know if it's 100% true all the time, but my goal is to make a case. And so my goal with a book is to take something that I'm curious about that is exciting to me and interesting and presents a case for how this could be true.

I love it. So thanks again for endorsing Master of One.

You're welcome.

Very much.

Appreciate it.

And in your endorsement, you said, work is an opportunity to serve the world, but if we are to serve the world well, we ought to have the highest standards for excellence in our work. So I obviously agree wholeheartedly with that. Can you share some of your own thoughts on this idea of work as service to the world? How do you view what you're doing as service to the world?

I mean, I think, particularly when you're talking about faith, I think sort of the dichotomy between, like, work and faith, religion, spirituality, whatever you want to call it, as separate. It's just this weird false dichotomy. It makes no sense. Certainly you don't see that precedent in the Bible or any wisdom tradition. In fact, the whole point of having a spiritual worldview is this helps me see the world differently, live a better life, and make meaning out of the way I'm spending my life. And if you're like a lot of people, you're spending a good chunk of your life at a job. Right. Or working in some capacity as a homemaker, as a husband, as a daughter, as a friend. I mean, these are all forms of work in the sense that we're doing something so work, to me, is what you do in the world. Right? And I believe that we all have a contribution to make. And I believe that our work is meant to do two things. One, contribute something positive to the world. I mean that, like, just at a real basic level, like, the person who's taking your money at Whole Foods when you buy a banana is rendering a service. They're being helpful.

They're helping me get the banana.

Yeah. They're helping me get the banana.

Yeah.

And so that's what work is. Our kids are. Our son especially, is interested in business. And it started to get fascinated with money because you get money, you can buy things like toys. And so he's like, how do I get more money? I said, well, you've got to help someone. That's the bottom line. You make money by helping somebody, and if you help them enough, they pay you. That's it. That's all there is to it. So that's what work is. Right. And currency, money is just an exchange of value. I did this thing. It was valuable to you. You're going to give me this piece of paper that is valuable to me, and now I can go buy a banana. So that's the first purpose, is to render some useful service or product to the world. All of us do that. We all do. Okay. And then the other thing that I believe at a spiritual level about work is work is intended for you to better understand who you are. Who am I really? What am I here to do? So most people, and this is something that I'm realizing that I didn't quite know when I wrote a book about this five years ago or whatever, but it's sort of in there is. We think we have to find our calling to go do our work. And the truth is, you work your way into your calling. I believe that clarity comes with action. Most of us wait for clarity before we act. Most of life doesn't work that way. Most of life is you have a hunch, you have an intuition, a nudge, a still, small voice saying, this is the way. Walk in it. And in my experience, you only ever see a few steps in front of you. And so life is this winding path through the woods, and we're trying to figure out what's at the end. And all you see is, like, the tree in front of you, and then there's a bend, and you don't see what's beyond the bend. And the only way you find out what's beyond the bend is you start moving. I mean, what are you doing? In 12 years, you know.

Right, right, right. That's exactly.

You don't know.

Yeah. So I'm giving a keynote tomorrow, and it's based on this idea, and this theme shows up in Master of One. I cite this Yale researcher named Amy Rezneski, who's done fascinating research throughout her career, trying to discern what makes people describe their work as a calling as opposed to a job or a career.

Yeah, I love that.

So she's done it with doctors, clerical workers, but she had this one study with a group of college administrative assistants. Right. A job that all these people are doing the exact same job. She asked them to describe their work, and then she asked a bunch of demographic information, and she found that, you know, maybe contrary to conventional wisdom that tells you to follow your passions and follow your dreams, that was not the best predictor of whether or not somebody saw their work as a calling. It wasn't the people who said, I feel called to administrative work that felt that their work was a calling. The strongest predictor was how long they had been in the job, how long they had spent getting masterful at that craft. Right. So it's this idea that, like, passion follows mastery, not the other way around.

Calling.

This sense of, this is the work I was meant to do comes when you get really great at something, which, by the way, jives really well with Jesus's command to serve others before we serve ourselves.

Right, Yeah. I mean, you look at any sort of story in the Bible, if you want to use that as sort of a precedent, you don't have people who, like, go, oh, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm going to go do it. Or an angel told me this, or God told me this. Because even when that happens, there's all kinds of doubt and trials and questions and so calling, whatever that means to you, literally means there's a voice calling you externally, internally, some mix of both. There's circumstances that seem to align in such a way, but you never just know. Right, right. There's always doubt and questions. And so the knowing comes with the doing.

Yeah.

And I think that's really interesting. There's no other way to get through life than to take some chances, try some things and learn.

I've never met somebody who even, like, the most masterful people I know who are like, oh, yeah, I know for sure this is the thing that I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.

And I'm done.

And I'm done.

Like, even.

Even Fred Rogers in his late years was writing letters in his journal and to his wife that was like, I don't know if this is what I'm supposed to do. After he's reaching millions of kids every day, he's like, I'm not sure this is it. So I came across a really interesting podcast interview in which you said, quote, while faith inspires my creative work, it's not the main theme. I don't believe that's the point of faith. It should fuel the work you do in the world, not be an end in itself. So question for you. How does your faith fuel your work?

I mean, it's such an interesting thing and a loaded thing. I remember one time writing this blog post about the Lord of the Rings and these deep spiritual, metaphorical lessons in those books and movies. And somebody, like, emailed me or commented about it, and they were like, why don't you share the gospel? And I was like, I thought I just did.

Did you. Did you not read it?

I mean, it's like, imagine saying to Jesus when he's telling the story of these two sons, he never says the word God in that story. Jesus, can you talk about God? He said, what?

What do you think I'm doing? Did you not listen? Yeah.

So that really is, I think, the problem. I live in the Bible Belt in the south, and you know how that goes a bit. And so there is this sense, and it is very. A very religious sense, that if you don't say our truth with these words this way, that we have trained everybody to say it, you're not talking about the same thing. And so when you're talking about God, which is just a word, by the way, and you're talking about an invisible thing, at least in regards to my experience, God is invisible. What else can you use but metaphor and story? Because you're painting a picture, right? Can I say, God has red hair? Does that help you understand? And so when we're talking about the ground of all being, the essence of all things, it's okay to be creative. And I actually think there's no way to have an unspiritual conversation. So for me, Madeline Langel wrote this wonderful book called Walking on Water, and it's based on a series of lectures she did at Wheaton College. And she says, there's no such thing as Christian art. Just because art invokes the name Jesus does not mean it's Christian.

Amen.

And just because it doesn't, you know, did Beethoven create Christian art? They never say God. They never say Jesus. They don't communicate the gospel. But she says, if art is good, if it is naturally creative, if it's beautiful, if it's true, how could it not reflect the beauty and truth of a divine creator? And so that's how I think of these things. I want to make good things. And those things will necessarily carry with them themes of faith and hope and.

Love, because that's what fuels you. We talk a lot about this on the podcast, you know, the Ministry of Excellence. Right. Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, period. That was the end of the sentence. He didn't say, love your neighbor as yourself so that you can scream about me necessarily. And that is a byproduct of getting masterful about our work. But serving others well by creating great things, beautiful things, is good in and of itself because we're serving others. Are you familiar with the CS Lewis quote? He said, we don't need more Christians writing Christian books. We need more Christians writing good books. We come across that.

Yeah, but that sounds right. I love it.

I mean, I think that's the way he approached his work. I mean, he. It's very famously written that he didn't set out to write this allegory in Narnia. He sat down to write the best book he possibly could. But because he was walking with the Lord, because he was studying scripture on a regular basis, Aslan kind of came bounding in the story and pulled it all together. Because it's truth, right, that like pulled this whole work.

Yeah. I think if you dig deep enough and you search earnestly enough for truth, you can trust what you find. And yeah, I mean, Lewis was a true literary man. And he and his friends JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield and all these guys in the Inklings, they would make fun of allegories and they thought of it as kind of the lowest form of literature. And they all set out to write great stories. But if the universe is bound by a true story, then you're just naturally going to come back to certain elements of good versus evil. Some sort of king or creator or something that binds all this together. I mean, there's certain things that just keep popping up. It's like Joseph Campbell's a hero with a thousand faces, the monomyth idea, hero's journey. You can't get away from it because it is maybe how things work. And I find that very fascinating. Some people get uncomfortable with that, even with interfaith or inter religious discussions. But there are certain true truths that keep popping up in every culture, in every society. And I think we can trust some of those things.

You're wildly productive. You got a lot going on. What are some of your kind of keystone habits and routines that you've done for years that you swear by make you productive?

I try to write first thing in the morning. Before kids, it was like, you know, five, six o' clock in the morning. Now with kids, they're up at like 5, 6 o' clock in the morning. Our daughter woke up at 4 the other morning and just I'm up, I'm like, oh my. She came in my bedroom and it's just like, oh, go away. The Taliban say just to wear me down. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. I believe it now. Now. So I get up, make the kids lunches and breakfast with my wife and then take them off to school. You know, I usually take our son and I drop him off and I try to get to a coffee shop as quickly as possible. So my office is about half an hour away from his school, but I drive five minutes to the closest coffee shop so I can just start writing.

Yeah, I like that.

And at that point, it's like 8 o' clock in the morning and I need coffee. So I mean, most mornings it varies. And I think it's. I know some people have this militant, you know, morning routine. For me, it doesn't quite work that way. I need space to create. So I have a big block of time in the morning for creative time. All morning, eight to 12 straight, with no breaks. Yeah, I mean, I may take a break, but there's no phone calls or anything.

Yeah, right, right, sure, yeah.

And then in the afternoon is like admin, work interviews, email correspondence with my team, whatever it might be. So I go to coffee shop and I have sort of a routine. I drink a couple cups of coffee, usually read something, I'll meditate, might go for a little walk. I try to do a walk at least once a day, usually in the morning sometime. It just. It takes me a while to get into a good state. And I used to sort of feel bad about that. Like, just start writing, man. You know? But the writing, the work is much better If I take 30, 45, 60 minutes to, like, get into a good state of mind.

So much of the work happens there too. Right. And making creative connections between things like that is a huge part.

It's a biological thing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about it in flow. It's the concept that, like, when you are in the zone, you know, call it deep work or whatever, you might want to call it. It takes a while to get into this space where you're humming along. It makes sense, right? If you're an athlete, you would have to warm up so you don't hurt yourself and you play at sort of this optimal state of being. And same thing's true with creative work. So I spend the first hour of the morning kind of getting ready for that, and then I write for an hour or two, as little as 30 minutes if I have stuff to do, because there are days where I just have to go take care of something. But most days I write for an hour or two and give myself some time to edit the previous day's work. So I write and then I edit. I never write edit at the same time, because that's not good. Those are two different things, two different kinds of states of mind. And now I've been thinking about this thing for 24 hours at an unconscious level. And so I edit yesterday's work or the day before. And I'm always kind of doing that. I'm writing something new, editing something old, and then capturing ideas throughout the day. So I never run out of ideas to work on. And this is a system that I call the three Bucket system. And my goal is just to keep all three buckets full. Ideas, drafts, and edits.

Where are you physically when you put the most ideas in the idea bucket?

Anywhere. Yeah. So I just write them down on my phone. Because ideas. Ideas are. I would write it down in a tool called Bear.

Yeah.

Evernote. I just clipped articles and things for book ideas. Bears B E A R is just an iOS tool. My favorite writing on the Go app.

Really?

Yeah.

What is it? What makes it great?

You know, I'll show it to you. I'll show all the listeners.

Show all the listeners. Right, right.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah.

I mean, so this is my little, you know, doc or whatever.

It's just text messages you've got in your home.

Doc. Yeah, text messages, phone, calendar. I don't even have email on here. And Bear.

Yeah.

And it's just. It's super simple, you know, And I'll just put notes on here, and then you can use. You write and mark down. People are familiar with that. And then it's all based on, like, a tagging system. So if I'm writing something for the blog, I'll just tag it Blog. And I put a little hashtag, and it automatically files it under these different categories. So now I've got my blog posts that I'm working on.

It's beautifully designed and it's beautiful. I'll make sure we put a link in the show notes, too.

I like beautiful tools. I think it's bearwriter.com I think. Or bearriter.com I love it. So I'm just capturing ideas all the time. I actually believe the worst way to come up with an idea is to sit down and go, come on, idea. Come on.

Absolutely.

And the second worst way to come up with an idea is to tell yourself you're gonna remember one that you. I'll remember that. I'll remember that. I do that sometimes. I'm making dinner. I totally remember that. You feel it. You feel the excitement of the idea, and you will not remember that.

Yeah, I'm obsessive compulsive about writing ideas down, but also things to do. So I'm a big believer in David Allen's getting things done shape my work more than anything else. It's kind of why I bought an Alexa, honestly. So I could just dump ideas into my inbox when I'm washing dishes. And I can't physically get to my phone because I know I'll forget it every single time. So. All right, three questions I love to ask anyone who sits down and has a lunch with me or just sits down for the podcast. What books do you either recommend the most or purchase for others the most?

I just saw Steven Pressfield at an event, which he rarely does. And I mean, the War of Art is a great book for any creative person. I think the subtitle for that is like winning your creative battles or breaking through your creative block, something like that. It's about how to daily do the battle of making things, particularly for writers and creatives. But it's a good book for anybody who is going to get stuck at some point trying to start a business, trying to paint a painting, write a song, write a book. So the War of Art is a book that I recommend and would get for anybody, a book that I just keep recommending to people because the concept is. Is really good, really simple, and it's something that a lot of people struggle with. Is a book called the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I haven't read it, but yeah, I highly recommend it. It's basically about limiting beliefs. And there's two key takeaways in the book. One is we basically have these four quadrants of living and working activity. The first quadrant is there's zones. It's the zone of incompetence. The things that you're terrible at, you know, I'm, you know, terrible at cleaning the bathroom. Right. And so I can try? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can try. I'm actually pretty good at cleaning the bathroom. You know, like, you can try to get really good at that thing, but that's a waste of your time. You should just not do it or pay somebody to do it, or, you know, get somebody to do it for you.

Then there's all things handy in my world, fall into the incompetent bucket.

Let's just call somebody to do that and I'll go send an email, you know, we'll pay for that. Zone of competence, things that you're good at, Zone of excellence, things that you're world class at. And then there's the zone of genius. And the point of the book is it's not that hard to go. I'm gonna stop doing zone of incompetence stuff. Zone of competence is like the middle class world. I came from Midwestern middle class. Make, you know, 20, 30, $40,000 a year. Don't complain, you know, and just salt of the earth. Work real hard and make an okay living and just do that. Do what you're good at and don't try to be better than anybody. Zone of excellence is, you know, upper middle class, upper class kind of lifestyle. It's a good life. And it is the worst place to be because you can stay there forever and you can die with the song still stuck inside you. The thing that you came to do that you never did. So it's a dangerous place to be. And so the big leap is moving from zone of excellence. Stuff that you are world class at, you're the best at, but there's other people who are really good at that too. And to move from zone of excellence to zone of genius is called the big leap. And the big leap means all of your success, all the things that everybody thinks you're great at, and you secretly inside know that you're fake, that there's something, you know, you're the world's best doctor and you want to be a pianist, right?

Yeah.

You've got something inside of you that you're scared to death this will fail and I'll be an idiot. But it's like, you're genius. It's a difference between being the best and being the only. Like, if I don't do this, I didn't realize my mission here on earth, that zone of genius stuff. And so it's scary because you're like all the things that I thought I was, which is ego. All the things that everybody thought I was great at and that I thought I was great at that has to die, right? So that this new thing can be born.

That's interesting. I'm gonna read that. Sounds great.

So there's two ideas. One is that. And the other is the upper limit. And so anytime you move in a zone of genius, you reach what's called an upper limit problem. And an upper limit problem is any time in your life where you say, I can't make any more money, I can't have any more happiness, or I can't be any more creative. Anytime you say that, it's an upper limit problem. The upper limit problem comes from some shame based belief that you usually got from childhood that essentially equates to I don't deserve. So it's not that you're entitled to millions and billions of dollars, but anytime you say, even if you say nice things like this is enough, if deep inside the belief system guiding that is, I really can't make anymore. This is the happiest my marriage is ever going to be. This is the best work I'm ever going to do. That's an upper limit problem. It's not true. But you've got to dig into the belief behind that.

Who would you most like to hear? Sit down and talk about how their faith influences their work or how their.

Yeah.

Either on this podcast or somewhere else.

I want to hear Donald Trump talk about yes.

Oh, man, that would be. We haven't had that answer yet.

I love that. I mean, you know, that'd be interesting. Is this for real? What is this? Yeah, I want to hear.

That's a great answer. All right, last question. We have a lot of aspiring authors who listen to the show. What one piece of advice would you give to somebody who, like you, is pursuing mastery of that craft?

The answer is always the same, the easiest thing to say, the hardest to hear, which is keep going. There's no shortcut. I mean, obviously it doesn't take the same amount of time for everybody. I don't even think it takes the same amount of hours or anything like that. We all start kind of at different places in the race of life. It's just how things go. But it seems to me that the one common theme that successful people have is that unsuccessful people tend to lack, because I have been on both sides of this, is that the successful people just develop the discipline to keep going in spite of adversity, in spite of self doubt. If you keep going in anything, you're eventually probably going to figure something out. You're either going to Figure out you don't actually love this, which is great. That's wonderful. Now you know you don't have to do it anymore. Right. If the passion doesn't follow the discipline, the mastery, as you said, then, you know, you got great at something that you don't want to do. Cool. Go do something else.

Right? Take those learnings and pivot to something else.

Yeah. And one of the things we didn't talk about that I think is true is mastery begets more mastery. There's a reason why John Lennon started painting. He actually was a painter. You know, an artist his whole life. Right. There's a reason why one kind of artist can easily pivot into another art form, because all of the basic disciplines of studying under other people, dabbling in different art forms, disciplining yourself to do it every day, like, you can easily transfer that from painting to music to writing, etc. So keep going. At worst, you'll learn some great skills that you can apply to a different medium.

I love it. Jeff, just want to commend you for the work you're doing. Thank you for serving your readers well through the ministry of excellence and not feeling the need to preach the gospel explicitly everywhere you go. Thanks for helping other authors find their tribes. You're doing fantastic work. To that end, a number of my friends have gone through your course and have found it tremendously valuable. Thank you for just doing exceptional work and revealing the character of a creative God. Hey, Jeff has got some amazing resources for aspiring authors. You can find them all at that same domain name that you've registered, what, 10 years ago? Goinswriter.com that's it. Yeah. So G O I N S writer.com Jeff, thanks for having lunch with me.

Thanks, Jordan.

Again, I can't thank Jeff enough for joining me on the Call to Mastery. I had so much fun in that conversation. Actually, after the mic went off, Jeff was so generous with this time. We sat there for another 30, 45 minutes talking about publishing, talking about speaking. Those off the record conversations are a lot of fun, and maybe someday I'll package them up into a blog post with people's permission and share them with you guys. Hey, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I really love this episode. If you're enjoying the Call to Mastery, go ahead and subscribe to the show to make sure you never miss an episode in the future. And if you're already subscribed, do me a huge favor and take 30 seconds to go review the podcast. Wherever you do that. Most of you guys, that's Apple podcasts, according to our analytics. So go review the show right there. If you have no idea how to subscribe to or review a podcast, no worries. Go to jordan ranger.com podcast where we have really easy instructions for you to follow. Hey, thank you guys so much for tuning in this week to the Called Mastery. I'll see you next week.