Mere Christians

Jeff Goins (Bestselling Author of The Art of Work)

Episode Summary

Finding your flow

Episode Notes

Jordan Raynor sits down with Jeff Goins, bestselling author of The Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve, to talk about how great masters like Michelangelo and da Vinci were able to master more than one discipline in different seasons of their careers, Jeff’s habits for churning out bestseller after bestseller, and why Jeff wants to hear President Trump on The Call to Mastery.

Links Mentioned:

Episode Transcription

[00:00:05] JR: 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 our life but is also pursuing world-class mastery of their vocation, of the work they believe God has called them to do. We talk about each guest’s path to mastery, their keystone habits and 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 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 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. Then once we started the Call to Mastery, I just shot Jeff a note. I was like, “Hey, would you mind turning what would've 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 going to sit down with me and Jeff as we’re eating lunch. So forgive any background noise of us chewing on the amazing Greek food. Yes, 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 wanted 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 seasons, right? So they would focus on mastering something for a decade and they would use that mastery to pivot to something relevant. 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.


 

Without further ado, please enjoy sitting down and having lunch with me and Jeff Goins.


 

[INTERVIEW]


 

[00:02:50] JR: Jeff, how are you doing?


 

[00:02:54] JG: I’m good.


 

[00:02:54] JR: You have a bite of chicken in your mouth.


 

[00:02:56] JG: Oh my gosh! Yeah, I’m doing great. Thank you, Jordan.


 

[00:02:57] JR: So we’ve never met. You endorsed Master of One, which is very kind, and we never met face-to-face. I was going to be in town for this event here in Nashville and we were going to 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 going to do. If you guys hear us chewing on some Greek salad gyros, because I screwed up the order and didn’t get Greek salads, then that’s why. You guys just have to deal with it.


 

[00:03:24] JG: Yeah.


 

[00:03:25] JR: So this would be fun. How is the Greek? Oh! You haven’t even gotten to the gyro yet.


 

[00:03:29] JG: I did. I finished it. I just took –


 

[00:03:32] JR: Oh! Good! Was it decent?


 

[00:03:34] JG: It was great.


 

[00:03:35] JR: I like Tzatziki. We got Tzatzikis in Tampa. So I’m excited to get to know you. You have kids, right?


 

[00:03:40] JG: Yeah.


 

[00:03:41] JR: How many kids do you have? Two kids?


 

[00:03:42] JG: Three and seven, a girl and a boy.


 

[00:03:43] JR: Three and seven. All right. So we’re relatively in the same stage of life. I have a five-year-old, Elison, and a three-year-old, Kate. But you’re really out of the craziness then.


 

[00:03:54] JG: Well, when our daughter was two, she was an angel. Now, she’s a little devil.


 

[00:04:01] JR: Is that the three-year-old?


 

[00:04:02] JG: Three-year-old. 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 story, different reason, “I want to hug you. It's dark.” She’s got 11 different nightlights, including a little mini glow-in-the-dark thing that she sleeps with now. So every naptime is a battle. Every bedtime is a 90-minute process.


 

[00:04:32] JR: Kate, my three-year-old, she sleeps very well through the night, but she's up at 4:30 every day for good.


 

[00:04:39] JG: Amelia, she’ll get up out of bed in like a creepy poltergeist kind of way. I saw an event with Steven Pressfield yesterday where he was talking about storytelling. He was talking about thriller stories, and one of the conventions of a thriller story, thriller/paranormal story, is the devil, whoever is the villain, the villain of a story is always sort of a devil adversarial kind of character. 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. Rosemary’s baby is Rosemary. Steve was like, “This is not about women. Not like any sort of implications about that.” I mean, that frankly goes back to even Adam and Eve. That's just a convention of that storytelling is that – Again, I’m not saying about women.


 

[00:05:41] JR: We’re getting in a freaky territory here, this one is just public.


 

[00:05:45] JG: All I’m saying is that I understand that now that I have a three-year-old daughter who like, get up at all crazy hours of the early morning and whenever – I put her down and then I’ll go to the kitchen and I like turn around. She’s standing right behind me and she will scare the crap out of me. I feel a little bit of demonic presence there.


 

[00:06:05] JR: Yeah so I hope this podcast is long gone before our kids are open to listen to it. I used to tell people all the time that Kate, my three-year-old, was sent here by a terrorist group to invade our family and destroy us.


 

[00:06:18] JG: To just wear you down.


 

[00:06:19] JR: Just wear us down. She’s relentless. If there was one word to describe Kate Everly Raynor, she’s relentless. She never stops talking. She wakes up mid-sentence, but that also makes her like the coolest, most fun three-year-old in the world. I love her.


 

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? That’s pretty awesome.


 

[00:06:42] JG: Yeah. [inaudible 00:06:41] in Seville. Spain.


 

[00:06:43] JR: Where did you to school by the way?


 

[00:06:44] JG: I went to a small liberal arts school in Illinois called Illinois College. First college in Illinois.


 

[00:06:49] JR: Are you from up there?


 

[00:06:49] JG: Yeah, I’m from Chicago, and this is in Central Illinois.


 

[00:06:52] JR: Okay. I got to ask, because I write about this in Master of One, my next book. Did you go visit Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona?


 

[00:07:02] JG: Of course. Yeah.


 

[00:07:02] JR: You did?


 

[00:07:03] JG: Yeah, and the Gaudi museum, and lots of parks and stuff. Yeah, you can’t miss it.


 

[00:07:07] JR: Do you know his story behind his relation with the cathedral and his focus on this?


 

[00:07:12] JG: I just know it’s a project that will never end. A 150-year old project kind of thing or however long it’s taken.


 

[00:07:18] JR: It’s crazy. 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 has created you to do masterfully well. Gaudi’s story is fascinating, because he built Park Guell. He built all these amazing attractions around Barcelona and then 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 into the church. He lived in the church while he was architecting it, and it’s still not done.


 

[00:07:47] JG: Yeah. Right.


 

[00:07:48] JR: But according to Time Magazine, 2026, this thing –


 

[00:07:51] JG: I heard about that. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing.


 

[00:07:54] JR: It’s amazing. It really is spectacular.


 

[00:07:56] JG: A lot of people don’t realize Michelangelo did that. The last 40 years of his life from like 50 to 90, he lived to almost 100.


 

[00:08:04] JR: Michelangelo did?


 

[00:08:05] JG: 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.


 

[00:08:21] JR: Really?


 

[00:08:21] JG: Yeah. It exists today. There’s a book called Michelangelo: Artist and Entrepreneur, something like that, and it’s about the multiple disciplines, because he kind of did that, but he did it three different times in his life. He mastered a different craft. 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 this guy. You can’t sculpt this guy. You can do anything with painting. Michelangelo said, “No, because the constraints of sculpting, it’s a finer art.”


 

So these two artists – And Leonardo was his elder. They got into this public fight about it, and Leonardo dared Michelangelo to try to paint better than him and there was this big public contest and they painted these two murals. It was commission by some local politician or something that was goading them into doing it. Whoever won the contest is going to get this commission. Michelangelo loses the contest. Leonardo wins. He gets the commission, but now everybody knows Michelangelo is a painter, and then he got the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel.


 

[00:09:38] JR: Yeah, that’s wild.


 

[00:09:40] JG: So he always wanted to be a sculptor, and then he got sort of goaded in to doing these other things and he was a bit of a curmudgeon as the best that we know. 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, “I want you to design this square around St. Peter’s Cathedral,” and he ends up doing that.


 

[00:10:08] JR: I’m fascinated by these guys who, throughout the careers, do end up mastering more than one discipline. I think that’s really interesting. For you, what’s your one thing? Your one thing is writing. That seems pretty clear to me. Is that right?


 

[00:10:22] JG: 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. It’s actually with technology and social media, it’s really difficult to focus on one thing as you know. 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 necessary becoming a jack of all trades, but becoming a master of some. 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. 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?


 

When you do that, you essentially create a new category. Robert Greene talks about this in his book Mastery.


 

[00:11:15] JR: Yeah, great book.


 

[00:11:17] JG: 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. Apple basically took products that are really well-designed and well-engineered and just work and they made them beautiful. 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. We’re going to make really well-made, expensive products,” at a time where everybody was kind of racing to the bottom, the personal computer world, and, “we’re going to do something different. Think different.”


 

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.


 

[00:12:00] JR: For those that don’t know who are listening, what’s that circle look like?


 

[00:12:03] JG: I mean, I write books. I teach courses for writers and artists and creatives, and I speak. 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. I think I've always only been talking about identity, which is the big question for me and most people. Who am I? Who am I really? Then the medium, the way that I do that really is by connecting ideas to people. 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, 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 have a lot of fun background in theater and music.


 

[00:13:01] JR: We share that.


 

[00:13:03] JG: 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 today.


 

[00:13:23] JR: Totally. One of my favorite stories to write about in the book was Fred Rogers.


 

[00:13:28] JG: Heard of him.


 

[00:13:30] JR: You’ve heard of that guy?


 

[00:13:30] JG: Yeah.


 

[00:13:32] JR: Fred Rogers is like wildly talented, crazy talented as a songwriter.


 

[00:13:37] JG: Yeah, a lot of disciplines.


 

[00:13:38] JR: A lot of disciplines, but he very much viewed his work as one thing, in his case, the show.


 

[00:13:44] JG: Yeah, but he integrated all those other things.


 

[00:13:45] JR: But he integrated all those other things.


 

[00:13:45] JG: Yeah, I love that. I love that.


 

[00:13:46] JR: 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.” That’s like an interesting way of like finding that thing.


 

[00:13:59] JG: I think of your skills as investments. You invest time and energy in them and you think of a portfolio as like a 401(k) or something. You have your portfolio. Every month I get a report from our wealth management company and I open it and I see some stock, some investments, have lost value. We’ve even lost money on them, and I've seen others that have made a lot of money. There’s probably goes, “Oh! I wish I just was invested in this one,” but you doubled down on those things, right?


 

Yeah. I mean, as most people who are familiar with investment, and 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.


 

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. 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 Mr. Rogers wasn't the world's best singer, or actor, or our sweater wearer. But I like that Jerry Garcia quote, “Don't be the best. Be the only.”


 

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 calling. That's you living out your vocation in a way that nobody else can do. “Be yourself, because everybody else is taken.” That sort of thing. And it's just really fun. It’s really fun to do something that nobody else can quite do the way that you do it, warts and all.


 

[00:15:44] JR: I thought about – So I came from tech startup world, running venture-backed tech startups and there's a lot to talk about blue ocean strategy as it applies to businesses. Competition is overrated. It’s like Peter Thiel in Zero to One.


 

[00:15:58] JG: Competition is for losers.


 

[00:16:00] JR: Competitions is for losers. Don’t compete. I think a lot about that in terms of career. Find a thing that’s blue ocean that nobody else is doing it because they don't have that unique set of skills and experiences and backgrounds and narratives that you have. I think it's an interesting way to approach it.


 

So 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 you pull that off? What was your path to being able to make a good living writing books and speaking and producing content?


 

[00:16:35] JG: Well, it’s what we’re talking about here. I never assume that I would make a full-time living writing books, which I think is a good way to think about it. Whatever the thing is, because when you put 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 how 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. 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. 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. 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 we’re in a downtown area right now, in historic downtown Franklin, and it would be like opening up a shop and some random side street in the back alley going, “Where are the people?” It would be cheaper to do that than buying something on the corner of Maine and Columbia. But if you buy that spot, you're going to get some more foot traffic.


 

So the Internet works that way too. People just don't realize it. You go where people are and you have a better chance of them paying attention to what you're doing. 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 crating content on their websites. This works pretty well today. A much better analogy would be being a guest on somebody’s podcast.


 

[00:18:28] JR: Yeah, welcome.


 

[00:18:30] JG: Yeah. 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. Even moving to Nashville today, every time we sell a house, the house 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 going to happen for a while. The bubble hasn't burst yet. So that's what we’re seeing with –That’s what I saw with blogging. 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. 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.


 

[00:19:15] JR: You did the work, right? I think we have some authors – We’re going to have a lot of authors on the show and talking about building audiences and building tribes. It's not rocket science, but it is a tremendous amount of work and you got to be willing to put it in. Was that your experience?


 

[00:19:30] JG: I think it’s a tremendous amount of work spread over a long period of time. Another way to think about that is it's a little bit of work every day. It was 30 minutes to an hour a day for two years and I –


 

[00:19:44] JR: While you had a full-time job.


 

[00:19:45] JG: Yeah. 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. 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 in my message? The truth is I've tried. I’ve tried for about nine years. I get an idea. I take a shower. Get an idea and buy a domain name. After six weeks, when I didn’t have a million people show up, I’d get frustrated and move on to the next thing. I had these nine failed blogs over the course of almost 9 years in my early 20s. All at my 20s basically, and I got really frustrated with myself about that. 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 failed blogs have in common? I quit them.


 

When I started this new blog called goinsswriter.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, 250, I’m going to quit.


 

[00:21:01] JR: Yeah, that’d be a good call.


 

[00:21:03] JG: Yeah, and that was it. So I had pretty low standards, low stakes, low goal, but it was like, “You say you want to 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. Because in the early days, you're not measuring. You can’t measure the outcome. 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 –Not even 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 its like – What is it? “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. - Wayne Gretzky,” and then underneath, “Michael Scott.” Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky.


 

[00:21:55] JR: I love it.


 

[00:21:56] JG: Yeah. So it was that. It was that 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, often times we think we’re better than we are. Again, everybody wants to be –


 

[00:22:12] JR: Most of the time.


 

[00:22:13] JG: 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've heard of you, 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. 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.”


 

[00:22:38] JR: I love it. 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. It's extraordinarily rare.


 

[00:22:49] JG: It's as hard as brushing your teeth. 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 seven-year-old to bed I go, “You got to brush your teeth.” She’s goes, “My legs hurt,” every night. I go, “That's find buddy, but I'm not reading you a story if you don't brush your teeth.” Every night, it's a miracle. Hallelujah! It’s a Pentecostal revival service. His legs start working again. He's no longer crippled and he walks into the bathroom and brushes his teeth for a minute.


 

[00:23:20] JR: Sidetrack. What do you read to your kids?


 

[00:23:23] JG: Our son loves Captain Underpants. All those books. There're dozens of them. Our daughter loves anything about a princess. My wife is not a girly girl. She was an athlete. For whatever reason, Amelia 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.


 

[00:23:47] JR: Yeah. Interesting. I love it. You are a masterful writer.


 

[00:23:51] JG: Thanks


 

[00:23:52] JR: I've loved your book 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 finished manuscript, what your process for putting together a nonfiction book? I realize that’s a huge question, but do you start with – Like how detailed your outlines get. What is that process look like?


 

[00:24:12] JG: I'm trying to learn how to distrust myself better. One of my favorite quotes is by a guy named Parker Palmer, who wrote a book called Let Your Life Speak, great book about vocation. 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's who’s always been interested in the subject of identity and finding my calling, whatever that means. That’s always resonated with me. There's that famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech where he says, “It's only when you look backwards that the dots connect,” or that Nietzsche quote, “Life can only be lived forward, but understood backwards.”


 

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 believe. That your soul knows things that you aren’t fully aware of and conscious of. 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. This was a practice of Hemingway. He would work on a story kind of in the morning to mid-afternoon, and that 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. 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. 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 going to write a new book, often I’m in the middle of a current project and I get distracted and I get bored.


 

[00:25:42] JR: Yeah, me too.


 

[00:25:42] JG: 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, “Can somebody else finish this? I want to do something new.” Because starting things and getting them going is what really excites me. I finish things mostly as a discipline to allow me to start the next thing. I finish it because I don't like not fulfilling commitments as best I can help it, and because I don't have a bunch of half written books in my sock drawer.


 

[00:26:09] JR: Do most of your book ideas come in the middle of working on another one?


 

[00:26:11] JG: Yes.


 

[00:26:12] JR: Yeah, mine too.


 

[00:26:12] JG: So I write that down. I honor that and I go, “Great. We’ll come back to you when we finish this other thing.” 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. 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 themes. 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? Have I experienced something that I'm interested in and curious about that is interesting and helpful to other people?


 

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 connects with the needs of somebody else, I go, “Okay. Cool. That's a book. Let's chase that a little bit.”


 

An example of that was, I wrote a book called The Art of Work, which is about finding your calling, your purpose. 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. I started reading a lot of biographies of artists and creatives Writers and such. 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?” Out of that came the idea for Real Artists Don't Starve.


 

[00:27:32] JR: It’s a great title. It’s a great book.


 

[00:27:36] JG: I keep an Evernote file for a lot of these ideas and I just clip articles. My Evernote is a mess. I have notebooks and stuff, but all just gets dumped into one place.


 

[00:27:46] JR: I have ideas for future books/blog posts/podcast episodes. It’s a mess.


 

[00:27:50] JG: 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. Actual physical filing cabinets don't have that. If they did, there’d be no need. Just search.


 

What’s interesting is – I am basically working on an idea two years before I start writing on it unconsciously. So when I finished The Art of Work, it came out, it did well. I was promoting it and then I started working on the next book. I got a book to write 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 love doing this but I can never make a living doing that.”


 

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. 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. The starving artist and the thriving artist. One group didn’t know the other existing. 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.


 

Long story short, the article and the researcher found out that he was the richest artist of the Renaissance and that he was worth $50,000,000 when he died. I didn't know this. I never heard this in school. In fact, I had heard the opposite that he and everybody else like him are pretty much broke. So I felt what if you didn't have to starve as an artist and what if some of the great artists and authors and people whom we revere as creative geniuses who were true to their art weren’t broke? To that was sort of the – I didn't know if it was true, but it’s enough –


 

[00:29:55] JR: It was a good hunch.


 

[00:29:56] JG: It’s a hunch. It’s like you’re a lawyer and you get 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. My goal with the 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.


 

[00:30:17] JR: I love it. Thanks again for endorsing Master of One. I very much appreciate it.


 

[00:30:21] JG: Sure.


 

[00:30:22] JR: In your endorsement you said, “Work is an opportunity to serve the world, but if we are to serve the world well, we got to have highest standards for excellence in our work.” So I obviously agree wholeheartedly with that. Can you share some your own thoughts on this idea of work as a service to the world? How do you view what you're doing a service to the world?


 

[00:30:42] JG: 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.” If you're like a lot of people, you're spending a good chunk of your life at a job, or working in some capacity as a homemaker, as a husband, as a daughter, as a friend. I mean, these are all forms work in the sense that we’re doing something.


 

Work to me is what you do in the world, right? I believe that we all have contribution to make and I believe that our work is meant to do two things. One, contribute something positive to the world. I mean, just at a real basic level, like, the person who's taking your money at Wholefoods when you buy a banana is rendering a service. They’re being helpful.


 

[00:31:49] JR: They’re helping me get the banana.


 

[00:31:49] JG: Yeah. They’re helping me get the banana. So that's what work is. Our son especially is interested in business, and starting to get fascinated with money, because when you get money, you can buy things, like toys. 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.” If you help them enough, they pay you. That's it. That's all there is to it. That’s what work is, right? Currency, money is just an exchange of value. I did this thing that 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. 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.


 

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 to our work. 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.”


 

In my experience, you only ever see a few steps in front of you. 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. The only way you find out what’s beyond the bend is you start moving. I mean, what are you doing in 12 years?


 

[00:33:26] JR: Right. That’s exactly right.


 

[00:33:28] JG: You don’t know.


 

[00:33:29] JR: Yeah. 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 Wrzesniewski, who has done fascinating researcher throughout her career, trying to discern what makes people describe their work as a calling as apposed to a job or a career.


 

[00:33:47] JG: Yeah, I love that.


 

[00:33:48] JR: So she's done it with doctors, clerical workers, but she had this one study with a group of college administrative assistants. A job that all of these people were doing the exact same jobs. She asked them to describe their work and then she asked a bunch of demographic information and she found that 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. 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.


 

[00:34:45] JG: 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, or God told me this.” Because even when that happens, there's all kinds of doubt, and trials, and questions. Calling, whatever that means to you, literally means, there is a voice calling you externally, internally, some mix of both. There are circumstances that seem to align in such a way, but you never just know. There's always doubt and questions. So the knowing comes with the doing. 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.


 

[00:35:25] JR: 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.”


 

[00:35:36] JG: And I’m done.


 

[00:35:36] JR: “And I’m done.” Even Fred Rogers in his late years was writing letters in his journal 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 am not sure this is it.”


 

I came across a really interesting podcast interview in which you said, “Well, faith inspires my creative work. It's not the main theme. I don't believe that's the point of faith. That it should fuel the work you do in the world. Not be an end in itself.” So a question for you; how does your faith fuel your work?
 

[00:36:07] JR: 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. Somebody like, emailed me or commented about it and they were like, “Why don't you share the gospel?” I was like, “I thought I just did.” Did you not read it?


 

[00:36:37] JG: I mean, imagine saying to Jesus where he’s telling the story of these two sons. Never says the word God in that story. “Jesus, can talk about God?” He said, “What? What do you think I'm doing?”


 

[00:36:48] JR: Did you not listen?


 

[00:36:50] JG: That really is I think the problem. I live in the Bible Belt in the South, and you know how that goes a bit. So there is this sense, and it is 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. 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. Can I say God has red hair? Does that help you understand?”


 

So when we’re talking about the ground of all being, the essence of all things, it's okay to be creative. I actually think there's no way to have an unspiritual conversation. For me, Madeleine L'Engle 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.”


 

[00:38:03] JR: Amen.


 

[00:38:04] JG: Just because it doesn't – 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? 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.


 

[00:38:34] JR: Because that's what fuels you. We talk a lot about this on the podcast. The ministry of excellence. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Period. It 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 C.S. Lewis quote? He said, “We don't need more Christians writing Christian books. We need more Christians writing good books.” Have you come across that?


 

[00:39:07] JG: Uh-uh. No. But that sounds right.


 

[00:39:09] JR: I love it. I mean, I think that's the way he approached his work. I mean, he had 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. They pulled this whole work.


 

[00:39:34] JG: Yeah, I think if you dig deep enough and you search earnestly enough for truth, you can trust what you find. Yeah. I mean, Lewis was a true literary man and he and his friends J.R. 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. 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, something that binds all this together. I mean, there are certain things that just keep popping up. It's like Joseph Campbell's The 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.


 

I find that very fascinating. Some people get uncomfortable without even with interfaith or interreligious discussions, but there are certain true truths that keep popping up in every culture and every society and I think we can trust some of those things.


 

[00:40:39] JR: You're wildly productive. You’ve 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?


 

[00:40:50] JG: I try to write first thing in the morning. Before kids, it was like 5, 6 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 mornings, which is I’m not – She came in to our bedroom and it’s just like, “Oh, go away. The Taliban sent you just to wear me down.” Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. I believe it now.


 

So now, I get up, make the kids lunches and breakfast with my wife and then take them off to school. I usually take our son. I drop him off and I try to get to a coffee shop as quickly as possible. 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. At that point, it’s like 8 o'clock in the morning and I need coffee.


 

Most mornings, it varies,  and I think it’s – I know some people have this militant 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.


 

[00:41:50] JR: How big?


 

[00:41:51] JG: All morning, 8 to 12.


 

[00:41:54] JR: Straight. With no breaks?


 

[00:41:55] JG: I mean, I may take a break, but there’s no phone calls or anything.


 

[00:41:58] JR: Yeah. Right. Sure. Yeah.


 

[00:41:59] JG: Then in the afternoon is like admin work. Interviews, email, correspondence with my team. Whatever it might be. I go to a coffee shop I have sort of a routine. I drink a couple cups of coffee. Usually read something. I'll meditate. I might go for a little walk. I try to do a walk at least once a day, usually in the morning sometime. It takes me a while to get into a good state, and I used to sort of feel bad about that. “Just start writing, man!” But the writing, the work is much better if I take 30, 45, 60 minutes to like get into a good state of mind.


 

[00:42:35] JR: So much of the work happens there too and making creative connections between things. That is a huge part of writing.


 

[00:42:41] JG: It’s a biological thing.  Mihály Csíkszentmihályi talks about in in The Flow. It's a concept that like, when you are in the zone, call it deep work, or whatever you might want to call it, it takes a lot to get into the 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. Same thing is 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 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 sometime to edit the previous day's work. So I write and then I edit. I never write and edit at the same time, because that’s not good. Those are two different things, two different kinds of states of mind. Now I’ve been thinking about this thing for 24 hours at an unconscious level. So I edit yesterday's work for 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. This is a system that I call The Three Bucket System. My goal is just to keep all three buckets full; ideas, drafts and edits.


 

[00:43:51] JR: Where are you physically when you put the most ideas and the idea bucket?
 

[00:43:54] JG: Anywhere. So I just write them down on my phone.


 

[00:43:57] JR: Yeah, you never know.


 

[00:43:59] JG: I write it down in a tool called Bear. Evernote, I just clip articles and things for book ideas. Bear is just an iOS tool. My favorite writing on the go app.


 

[00:44:09] JR: Really? What is it? What makes it great?


 

[00:44:11] JG: I’ll show it to you. I’ll show all the listeners.


 

[00:44:13] JR: Show all the listeners. Right.


 

[00:44:15] JG: Yeah. I mean, this is my little dock or whatever.


 

[00:44:20] JR: You’ve got it in your home dock.


 

[00:44:20] JG: Yeah, text messages, phone, calendar. I don’t have email on here, and Bear, and it's just – It's super simple, and I’ll just put notes on here, and then you can use – You write and mark down, if people are familiar with that. 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. I've got my blog posts that I’m working on.


 

[00:44:47] JR: It’s beautifully designed.


 

[00:44:49] JG: It’s beautiful.


 

[00:44:50] JR: We’ll make sure we’ll pull in a link in the show notes.


 

[00:44:51] JG: I like beautiful tools. I think it’s bearwriter.com, I think, or bear-writer.com. I’m just capturing ideas all the time. I actually believe the worst way to come up with an idea is to sit on go, “Come on idea! Come on.”


 

The second worst way to come up with an idea is to tell yourself you’re going to remember one, “I’ll remember that. I’ll remember that.” I do that too when I’m making dinner. I’m like, “I’ll totally remember that.” You feel it. You feel the excitement of the idea and you will not remember that.


 

[00:45:18] JR: 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 shaped 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.


 

All right. Three questions I love to ask anyone who sits down and has lunch with me, or just sits down for the podcast. What books do you either recommend the most or purchase for others the most?


 

[00:45:52] JG: I just saw Steven Pressfield at an event, which he rarely does. 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 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. 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 really good, really simple, and it’s something that a lot of people struggle with, is some a book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.


 

[00:46:36] JR: I haven’t read it, but yeah.


 

[00:46:37] JG: Oh! I highly recommend it. It's basically about limiting beliefs, and there're two key takeaways in the book. One is, we basically have these four quadrants of living and working activity. The first quadrant is – There are zones, and it’s the zone of incompetence. The things that you’re terrible at. I’m terrible at cleaning the bathroom. So I can try to –


 

[00:47:03] JR: That’s convenient.


 

[00:47:04] JG: Yeah. I’m actually pretty good at cleaning the bathroom. 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 some somebody to do it, or get somebody to do it for you.


 

[00:47:16] JR: All things handy in my world. Falling to the incompetent bucket. Yeah.


 

[00:47:19] JG: Let’s just call somebody to do that, and I’ll go send an email. I’ll pay for that. Zone of competence, things that you’re good. Zone of excellence, things that your world class at. Then there's the zone of genius. The point of the book is it's not that hard to go, “I’m going to stop doing zone of incompetence stuff.”


 

Zone of competence is like the middle class world. I came from Midwestern. Middle-class. Make $20,000, $30,000 $40,000 a year. Don’t complain. And just, salt of the earth, work real hard and make an okay living, and just you know, do that. Do what you're good at and don't try to be better than anybody.


 

Zone of excellence is 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 the never did. It's a dangerous place to be. So the big leap is moving from zone of excellence, stuff that you are world-class at, you’re the best at, but there're other people who are really good at that too. To move from zone of excellence to zone of genius is called the big leap. 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 a fake, that there's something – You’re the world's best doctor and you want to be a pianist. 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 a genius. It’s the difference between being the best and being the only. I don't do this, I didn't realize my mission here on earth, that’s zone of genius stuff. 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 so that this new thing can be born.


 

[00:49:13] JR: That's interesting. I’m going to read that. That sounds great.


 

[00:49:15] JG: So there're two ideas. One is that, and the other is the upper limit problem. So any time you move in the zone of genius, you reach what’s called an upper limit problem. 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.” 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.” 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. You’ve got to dig in to the belief behind that.


 

[00:50:03] JR: Who would you most like to hear sit down and talk about how their faith influences their work or how their – Either on this podcast or somewhere else?
 

[00:50:15] JG: I want to hear Donald Trump talk about –


 

[00:50:17] JR: Yeah! Man! That would be – We haven't had that answer. I like that. That’d be interesting.


 

[00:50:25] JG: Is this for real? What is this? I want to hear.


 

[00:50:27] JR: 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?


 

[00:50:41] JG: The answer is always the same. It's 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 how things go. But, it seems to me that the one common theme that successful people have 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 don't have to do it anymore. 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.


 

[00:51:41] JR: Take those learnings to pivot to something else.


 

[00:51:43] JG: Yeah. 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, an artist, his whole life. 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. You can easily transfer that from painting, to music, to writing, etc. So keep going. At worst, you'll learn some great skill that you can apply to a different medium.


 

[00:52:17] JR: 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. Takes 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 had found it tremendously valuable. Thank you for just doing exceptional work arguing 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?


 

[00:52:48] JG: Yeah.


 

[00:52:48] JR: Goinswriter.com. Jeff, thanks for having lunch with me.


 

[00:52:54] JG: Thanks, Jordan.


 

[END OF INTERVIEW]


 

[00:52:55] JR: 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 is so generous with his 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. Maybe someday I'll packet 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 loved 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. 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 podcast according our analytics. So go and review the show right there. If you've no idea how to subscribe to or review a podcast, no worries, go to jordanraynor.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 Call to Mastery. I’ll see next week.


 

[END]