Eminem, Sean Connery, and embracing your dirt
Jordan Raynor sits down with Mary Marantz, Author of Dirt, to talk about her story going from a trailer in West Virginia to Yale Law School, how we can celebrate white collar work without demeaning blue-collar work, and how Eminem has served as an inspiration to both of our work.
Links Mentioned:
[00:00:50] JR: Hey, everybody! 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 the good of others. Every week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today's guest is Mary Marantz. She's the bestselling author of Dirt. She's an exceptional writer and communicator. We recently sat down. We talked about her story going from a trailer in West Virginia, growing up as a kid, all the way to Yale Law School and how in that journey she's been able to celebrate white collar work without demeaning the God-given dignity of blue collar work, work God did in gardening in Genesis 2. We talked about Sean Connery, surprisingly. I don't know how he made his way in here and how Eminem has served as an unlikely inspiration to both of our work. This is a fun episode. It's a rich episode. I think you're going to love this episode with Mary Marantz.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:02:13] JR: Mary, we were just talking. Our mutual fans have been telling each other that we need to interview each other, so we're finally making it happen. Thank you for being here.
[00:02:21] MM: Oh, my gosh. Thanks for having me, and I can't wait until you come on my show. I feel like, pretty much weekly, I hear from somebody like, “You guys have to meet.”
[00:02:30] JR: All right. I've heard that your secret talent, you know where I'm going, is an epic Sean Connery impression. So, this is the only logical place to start. Please live on air. Sean Connery please.
[00:02:45] MM: Well, I feel like you need a tiny bit of backstory, which is that we have two dogs, two golden retrievers, Atticus and Goodspeed. People always ask if Goodspeed is named after the opera house in Connecticut called the Goodspeed. Most of the time, we just say yes because it's easier, or just like, “Oh, that's one of them or whatever.” But truly, he's actually named after Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, Nicolas Cage in the movie The Rock. Not because we love his character so much but because Sean Connery's character says to him, “I'm sure you're familiar with the etymology of your surname, Goodspeed, as in Godspeed.” Thus, the dog's name was born.
[00:03:21] JR: It’s the best first two minutes of a podcast episode in the history of The Call to Mastery. That's a great backstory for your dog. I love it. All right, so you grew up in a trailer in West Virginia. You ended up being the first in your family to go to college, immediate family, with Yale Law, not just any law school. What's the short version of this story for those who have yet to read your memoir?
[00:03:43] MM: Well, I mean, I feel like that's sort of like the elevator pitch version right there is this idea of Appalachia to Yale Law. We know that that story has been told before, this idea of humble beginnings to Ivy League or some sort of other form of what would like the world would instantly see as success. I mean, that story has literally been told in the form of Hillbilly Elegy, Appalachia to Yale Law.
This story for me, while that is the overarching, the instant hook, it’s much more about how do we stop running from these muddy parts of our story that we have believed for most of our life disqualify us from most of the rooms we want to walk into, from most of the tables we would like to be invited to sit down at, or from the places we feel like God is calling us? We think, “Oh, my gosh. Who am I to go do that when I came from a trailer, when I didn't grow up with a lot, when I’ve had failures or mistakes in my life?”
A huge journey of this book is giving up this idea that there's any amount of success or achieving that's going to fill a hole in your heart you might be walking around with. We have to go back and make peace with that part of the story. Make peace with what made that hole in the first place, if we're truly going to lean into the places we're being called.
[00:05:04] JR: That's beautiful, and it's just a reminder of what scripture says, that God chooses the humble things of the world, the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. I'm curious if throughout your journey, you've found – I can think of no better word than inspiration in the stories of scripture and the characters and the people in scripture that God used in these humble beginnings to do great things on his behalf? Are there any stories that stand out to you there?
[00:05:31] MM: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I think like the one most people probably would go to first will be just the idea of Moses, somebody who literally has a speech impediment and is being asked to go speak to Pharaoh on behalf of God's people and this idea of like God doesn't call the equipped. He equips the called. I think that that's important and beautiful. But for me, some of the scripture that's really jumping out to me as we're talking is there is a place where it talks about it is up to God who he decides to call up. It is up to God who he decides to promote.
So many times, we feel like, “I'm not worthy. Who am I? Who am I to share these gifts?” We really get into our own head, thinking about how the world is going to respond to us using what we've been gifted with, when the bigger question we need to be asking is but who can it help, right? Who can it serve? We only tend to just kind of want to hide these things away like the light under the basket. It is – In the world we're living in right now, this social media spotlight, this social media nastiness, it can be really tempting to go, “Life will be a lot easier if I just don't speak up, if I just don't put that out there, if I just don't raise my hand and say, ‘Pick me. I have something to offer.’” It feels a lot safer hidden under a basket, but that is not what lights were created for.
[00:06:56] JR: One of the things I really loved about Dirt, about your story is this idea of embracing the dirt, embracing humble beginnings. It reminds me of Paul in 1 Corinthians 1, where he tells his listeners, “Hey, not many of you are wise when God called you. Not many of you were influential or have noble birth.” It’s kind of the anti-self-help movement message, right? The self-help movement, it would be ignore your past, ignore your dirt. You choose who you want to be. You be you. Paul is saying, “No, embrace your inadequacies because the whole point of that is that God would be glorified.”
That's what I really appreciate about your story because I feel like I struggle with books with memoirs that fit in your genre because so many times they are “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps." Yours was much more grace-filled. It was like, “No, no. In spite of dirt, in spite of these humble beginnings, look what God did through me.” Were you intentional about telling that story?
[00:07:55] MM: 100 percent. 100 percent. I will say, Jordan, that had I written this book – I mean, I wanted to write a book since I was five and I sort of even knew when I was little that it was going to be my story in some way. But when I really was getting serious like, “I want to write this book,” it was more like right after I was graduating law school at 27. I did not actually write this book until it came out a few months after I turned 40. I think there is a lot of wisdom that comes with time. I'm definitely not saying you have to be in your 40s or late 30s to write a book that matters. I know many people who've written books younger but, for me, I needed that time because if I'd written it right outside of law school, it would have been one of those, “Look what I did. Look what I rose up out of.”
When we first revealed the cover and the title, there were a lot of people at home who took it to mean I'm going to dish the dirt. I'm going to throw people under the bus. With time and wisdom and just being an adult for another 13 years, you start to realize just being alive, it can be hard. It can be hard to be an adult. It can be hard to have responsibilities. There's an empathy and a softening that starts to take root, where you understand. My parents – my mom was 17 when they got married and 20 when they had me. When I now can remember 20 and that being two decades ago and trying to think about raising a child with what little bit they had in a trailer and my dad working in the woods, anything that was “lacking” you really start to see.
But look at all that was and look at for what they did. It’s like the launch pad. What they did, from where they started versus what we’ll hopefully be able to one day do for a family if were able to have one, I stand on the shoulders of giants, and there’s recognition there that comes with time. It was very important to me. When I look at that genre, I see a lot of books that end in estrangements and I ask myself, “Can a book like this be written and it actually bring a family closer together? Can there actually be healing?” The crazy part, and once people read Dirt and maybe we'll talk about it a little bit more, I actually have a better relationship with my mom. My dad and I were already pretty close, but my mom is back in my life because of this book, because of calls I did with her to tell the story fairly.
[00:10:11] JR: That's beautiful. A big part of – You talk a lot about your dad in the book, this ninth generation logger in West Virginia and started working when he was 12. What I loved about this was just this very old story of the previous generation where work wasn't primarily a means of making him happy. It was a means of serving his community, serving his family. It was sacrifice. I'm sure there's joy in there, even though it's hard work. But work is primarily service. I'm curious how his example has shaped your perspective on your work throughout your life?
[00:10:49] MM: Jordan, it's a really great question because I think for most of my life, I assumed this story that it's sort of been painted for me from different family members of – My grandfather passed away when my dad was 25, very suddenly in the night. Suddenly, it was on him to run this business that not only his mom and his sister and his wife and his daughter were counting on to survive but the other 10 families that worked for the business, the other 10 loggers. I assumed my entire life that he kind of got thrust into this thing he didn't want to do, and he got stuck in this thing that he didn’t want to do. That he wanted to go to college. He wanted to study history. He's obsessed with history.
One of the things I had to kind of come to grips with throughout my life as I got older is this tension that he actually also loves it. Even on days when he hates it, he loves it. It is it is a craft to him and it is a legacy to him, and it's something he sees that he's carrying on. Like I've heard him say, “If I retired now, I feel like I would be letting my ancestors down.” There's a tension there as a child to watch a parent struggle so much with something and try to make a living doing this thing that they love and always come up short, and the family to be impacted by that, and then not want to give it up because it is truly something that gets into their blood and their bones, and it courses through them. If he quit, there's not a question in my mind that that would be the death of him, probably. He wouldn't know what to do without that legacy, without that craft.
I think that's really hard and I think a lot of people listening will understand that, especially if you're at a point in your career, I know we have some entrepreneurs listening, in your business where times are lean the last year. It’s probably been the poster child of that when times get hard, when it's not working the way that you want, and you wonder if you're letting your family down for it to be such a hard road. But to watch him do something, not for the glory, not for the attention, not for the praise, and to do it diligently day in and day out, that taught me work ethic. It taught me integrity and it taught me that the way you do anything is the way you do everything.
I think that's been hard to come to grips with because like I want that easier story of, “Man, what would have happened if he just went to college and studied history and became like a history teacher or professor or what have you?” But the truth is, sometimes, the things we love lead us to hard roads.
[00:13:21] JR: Yeah. That's very, very well said. I love that the way you do anything is the way you do everything. That's really well said. Did it ever cross your mind growing up like, “I’m going to be in the logging business?”
[00:13:32] MM: Yes, 100 percent. 100.
[00:13:35] JR: That was the path.
[00:13:37] MM: Well, not because I was being told. I have that like entrepreneur drive, and I wanted to take it over and make it successful when it was going to be this giant logging business in West Virginia. I mean, I talk about this in the book. In 1990, my dad was named the West Virginia Logger of the Year.
[00:13:52] JR: That’s amazing.
[00:13:52] MM: He was like the grand marshal of the hometown parade. This was a huge deal. In a lot of ways, it's a really interesting precursor to social media, where it's like he is working really hard and getting these awards and getting this recognition and riding in the parade. But at the same time, the business was always a struggle. You never truly know what goes into it. But, yeah, I wanted to take it over. I wanted to make it a huge success. My dad basically said, “Over my dead body.” Like, “You will not have – This legacy of labor ends with me. You'll go to college. You'll get an easy job. You'll get an indoor job.” But I think like the little entrepreneur in me was born from that.
[00:14:32] JR: I think it's really easy with these stories to paint an unbiblical divide between white collar work, blue collar work, right? You went to law school. You did the opposite of a West Virginia logger. You went to law school at Yale. You became a lawyer. How have you been able to celebrate the gifts that God has given you as a writer, through law school, without diminishing or demeaning the God-given dignity of blue collar work? How have you thought about that?
[00:15:05] MM: That's such a beautiful question. I feel like everybody should just pause and like soak in that question because we all need to be reminded of that a lot more. There is this perception of hierarchy of importance or value that people tend to equate with how many zeros are in the salary. From a biblical perspective, everything is so intentional, and I think there's a reason Jesus was a carpenter. He could have been king. He could have been spinning silk and doing trades and making the equivalent of millions.
But I think something that all of us have to remember and have to get back to is like this good work of our hands, and that can take us to different places. But I know for me, and I would say I'm in a season of this right now, when I start to get a little too caught up in the gold stars or the check marks of success or going down that list of things, and writing books provides a whole new list of like checkmarks to work on, I feel like God very intentionally brings me back to, “I need you to be faithful in the little things. I need you to diligently show up every day. I need you to plant seeds without instant growth. I need you to tend to things over the long haul.”
On my show, when you come on, you'll hear our tagline is slow growth equals strong rates. I feel like anytime I start to get a little too untethered to the divine, God brings me back to that with some planting like, “I need you to just come back. Get rooted in me again. Let's see what we can grow together. But stop chasing all this stuff the world says matters.” So I 100 percent love that question and I like appreciate that question on behalf of my dad and all the people who – There’s a great Alabama song that says, “The 40-hour week, here’s to the people who keep this country running.” They mentioned West Virginia coal miners, which we also had a lot of in our family, and it's beautiful, and it's true. I don't know. It's so easy to want to follow the people who talk about having seven figures in their brand or how quickly they did something.
Actually, in my new book that I just turned in, I talked about this analogy of weeds, flowers, and trees. Like weeds pop up overnight, and it's so tempting to go, “Man, overnight, they spread like wildfire. There are so many of them. They're six-feet tall. It feels like they just – There’s nothing. Then, boom, they’re there.” It’s so tempting to say I want to grow like a weed. I want to shoot up out of nowhere. But everybody listening has probably had that experience, of you go over and you pull a weed, a six-foot weed. We had a whole field of weeds behind the trailer, so maybe you don't have six-foot ones, but we did. But like giants. I just pulled one out of our front yard here in Connecticut that was a good three or four-feet tall. Then you pull it out. It’s got like half an inch of roots.
I think that's that temptation is we want to see what's growing on the surface. But at the first push, it knocks right over. So to grow like a tree over the long haul, it takes a while. The timetable of what it takes to become a milkweed versus a redwood giant is very different, but look at what they get to become.
[00:18:07] JR: I love that imagery and obviously pointing back to being connected to the divine and the roots of Jesus and also the Parable of the Sower. I love that you pointed out Jesus as a carpenter. Yeah. I think there's a lot we can glean from that. But first and foremost, Jesus did humble work. I see this in Genesis. When we talk about the creation account, we almost always just talk about God speaking things into existence in Genesis 1 but, flip the page, Genesis 2 tells us God planted a garden with his own hands. He got his hands in the dirt and then He called Adam and Eve to do the same thing, right? So, it's just this celebration of God-given – he also told Adam and Eve to give names to animals, what we call knowledge work. But it's a celebration of both ends of the spectrum, just this recognition that all work matters because it's a means of serving others and glorifying our great God.
You mentioned your second book. I saw your Instagram post where you turned it in. I want to read it. I got it right here. It says, “If Dirt was a love letter to the girl in the trailer, this book, the second book, is a love letter to the girl after. This is a book for every person who really struggles with,” and here it is, I love this, “achieving for their worth.” Man, that's my challenge. It has been my challenge. My whole life, I think it's something I'll always battle. What are you saying to yourself on this topic with this next book about achieving for your worth?
[00:19:45] MM: Yeah. Oh, man. I think that's the funniest thing about book writing. I'm sure you will agree. It’s like you set out to write books because you think you're going to help other people and you do. But first, it's the book you need to hear.
[00:19:56] JR: 100 percent, yes.
[00:19:57] MM: It’s painful work. There's a reason that passion also means suffering. It’s the reason – it’s the thing you're willing to suffer a little bit to bring into the world, this birthing of something. For me, I have 100 percent always lived my life as I put that mask on that, if you get into the enneagram or what have you, like that, “Oh, got it. The mask I need to wear in order to be loved is gold stars. It's achieving things.” I talk about in book two, I actually got paid for grades when I was little. There was this payment scale of like an A+ was $5, an A was $4.50, A- was $4, B dropped off a little bit. By C- territory, I had to start paying my parents. So, it became this very clear – It was wildly effective, wildly, wildly effective. The entrepreneur in me was like, “Amazing. So give me the $35 because I will go get all the pluses.”
What it says is there's a cost to being average, and there's a worth to achieving. Man, I don't follow my parents for that at all because they needed something to – They saw education and good grades as my way, my ticket it out. I'm so thankful in that respect, but it will be probably a lifelong journey for me. There's a part in Dirt that I think you'll really resonate with, Jordan, where it's talking about if I were going to make a joke here, I would say that my running from my story and stumbling my way into success is like Forrest Gump, where they just hand them the football, and they're like, “Run Forrest run.” But nobody tells him when to stop, so he just keeps running into the end zone, victory after victory.
But it is not like that, and I wanted people to understand how primal, visceral survival, like oxygen, achieving can become for people like us, where I said my running is much more like the girl in the red cape, making her way out of the deep dark woods, branches clawing and scratching at her clothes, leaving a trail behind her like breadcrumbs, the big bad wolf ripping at her heels. She runs because she knows if she stops, it just might kill her. But when I look back over my shoulder, breathless and wild eyed, at last, I can see it. I am the girl in the red cape but I am also the wolf. That voice in my head telling me to run and not stop running, that voice is my own.
We start with the girl in the red cape in book one. That’s just recognition that in trying to escape your story, you have forgotten how to stop running. In book two, we start to get some perspective from the wolf, this version of you that was created to help you survive, that was created to keep you safe. It's roaring because it has a thorn in the paw. At a certain point, we become the one twisting the thorn because we don't know how to exist. The girl in the red cape does not exist without the wolf chasing her. We keep the wolf in pain so that at least we can keep running.
[00:22:51] JR: As a Christ follower, how does the gospel specifically give you resources to stop running and achieving for your worth and kind of your very sense of self, right?
[00:23:03] MM: Yeah. The first thing I'll say for everybody listening is that achieving for your worth and giving that up to a certain extent is a lot like burnout in business. You start a business and you hear from these seasoned entrepreneurs or business owners. It doesn't have to be entrepreneurs. It could be somebody in your law firm. It could be somebody at your construction site, whatever, who says, “Man, if you keep burning the candle at both ends like that, you're going to burn out. You're going to hit the wall hard. You got to rest. You got to build the rhythms of rest.” Then you go, “You don't know how much drive I have. Maybe that was true for you old-timer.” But I’m like, “You don't know how fast I can run.” Then you experience it yourself. When you experience burnout, you realize it's not coasting to the side of the road because you ran out of gas. It’s more like hitting a brick wall at 90 miles an hour. It’s a hard stop.
I think it's a lot like that for achieving your worth. You, to a certain extent, can hear my voice and hear me saying there's literally no amount of achieving that's ever going to make it feel like – There’s no amount of more that will ever make you stop feeling less than. If the number one law school in the country, Yale Law, couldn't do that for me, if all the stuff we did in our business couldn’t that for me, I had to reach this point of, okay, so none of it is ever going to be enough. There is no thing I can acquire. There is no white kitchen island. There is no house update, no wardrobe, no car, no amount of recognition in my industry. It not only doesn't satisfy. It's hardly even numbing anymore, and the dopamine hits are having to get closer together and be bigger in order to have the same effect.
To a certain extent, people listening will have to start to hear me say all of that and go, “Oh, man. That's what I've been feeling. It really is never going to be enough, is it?” Then, the good work can begin. So for me, with God, that's been a story I think a lot of us have where it's like something comes along. We're like, “I need to God. Show up.” He does and He holds us. We get back on our feet and we're like, “Okay, amazing. I got it,” off and running again, right? “Let go. Let go. I need to fly.” So there's a line in Dirt that talks about this vine started to feel like shackles. It felt like a tether, when all I wanted to do is leap and fly. Fly on my own.
I think there is like this journey of recognizing we are going to do it. We are going to do beautiful things in this life. If we want it to last, if we want it to have meaning, we're going to have to do it with Him, and that that is a power source, not a shackle.
[00:25:30] JR: Yeah. I've mentioned this on the podcast before every night without fail. When I put my girls to bed, I ask them, “Hey, Ellison, Kate, and Emery. You know I love you no matter how many good things you do.” They say, “No matter how many bad things I do.” I'm like, “Right. Who else loves you like that?” They say, “Jesus.” I think, especially ambitious professionals, we need to hear that with regards to productivity and accomplishments. It's like Christ died for us, regardless of how productive or unproductive we are in this life. That gives us security, ultimate rest for our souls.
Ironically, I think it's when you grasp that that you can be of the utmost ambitious for your work. Not for fame and fortune but for the good of others because you've got nothing to lose now, right? Like now you can really run fast and leave it on the line in service of others because I don't have to get something from the work that the work was never designed to give me, the sense of self, identity, right?
[00:26:34] MM: Yeah. My friend, Nicole Zasowski, I think in her book, From Lost to Found, she says, “We work from our identity, not for our identity,” and that's so beautiful. Also, I would add to everybody listening because I would raise my hand, and, Jordan, you probably would too, that, sometimes, the way we're wired, people like us, the last thing we feel like hearing is somebody going, “Oh, just slow down. Oh, just once.” It’s like, “And then what? And then what? What do we do?” We are people who need something to do with our hands. So, what I would want everybody listening to hear is that just because you give up achieving for your worth, just like you said, does not mean you have to give up achieving. More importantly, you move from that place of chasing success to what I would call chasing significance, where you're working for a purpose. You're working for something that is beyond just you.
When I talk about that tree analogy, I talk about the fruit that it bears that can be given away and the shade and shelter that it provides for others. That's far more gratifying than just building this flower life for yourself, this beautiful life that's just sort of – it's beautiful, but that's it. Beauty is important in the world. The world needs more beauty, but there's something beyond that.
[00:27:45] JR: When C.S. Lewis was a kid, they grew up in the coast of Ireland, and it rained all the time, right? They didn't have a ton of money, and so he and his brother would just make up stories. That was the genesis of Narnia. It was like making up stories inside on rainy days. I do think there's a beauty to this simple life, poverty, whatever you want to call it. Obviously, there's a lot of darkness to that but this beauty of, yeah, just being free to be creative and make up your own stories.
I mean, you said you wanted to write when you were five. It’s probably because you were born to sit around like, “Ah, I want to write a book one day,” right? Was that always the dream, writing? How did you fall into this?
[00:28:30] MM: No. It was 100 percent the dream. I don't I don't know if this is normal or if it’s real. Some people are or what have you, but I 100 percent knew. I'm not exaggerating when I say five that that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Then there's this big long deviation in the middle. But it was not like I had ever changed my mind. It was like, “Oh, I'm going to go finish school first. I'm going to do law school first. We're going to start this business first. Oh, hey. This is really working. Let's keep doing this.” But I was always being tugged back to write books.
Actually, I want to say 2015 or 2016, I actually hired a goals coach named Kim Butler from The Whiteboard Room who's amazing. I still work with her to this day, because I said I have built my life so full of good things, and I talked about this analogy in a Candace Cameron Bure movie about a country will overproduce until it splits itself right down the middle, trying to hold on to all the fruits. I was like, “I'm a pecan tree. I'm about to split myself right now in the middle. My life is too full of good things to go do the truly great ones that I'm feeling called to.”
I spent years just cleaning out my calendar, cleaning out my responsibilities, figuring out what the 80 percent was or the 20 percent that was giving me 80 percent of my results and getting rid of everything else. It was a long journey. But now, it's like there's something really nice about being on this side of it where I do have the book contracts and I do have the deadlines. It is, to a certain extent, a very large extent, my job now. I can't just sit on it anymore. There's something like very relieving about that.
[00:29:59] JR: Yeah. This is so hard for so many people, and I think it is one of the keys to mastering anything vocationally. Recognize that you have a lot of good things and choosing to kill some of them in order to focus on the great. So what advice do you have for people sitting there right now who have their hands in 10 things vocationally? They're all good. They really want to focus on one of them. What advice do you have for them?
[00:30:27] MM: I do think that one of the things that really helped, something that’s a very driving force for me beyond achieving things like that, is that I never wanted to live a life of regret. I had this idea planted in my head that for the sacrifice both of my parents made so that I could get out and I could do something with my life, if I settled, if I ever did something like halfway, then it would be to dishonor their sacrifice. That has the good side of it motivates you not to live with regret, but the bad side of feeling like if you ever do anything below A+ delivery, then you're dishonoring their sacrifice, so just acknowledging that right off the bat.
But what I would say to people listening is to start to ask yourself, if I never got the chance to do this, if I never got around to doing this, and I'm on my deathbed, what would it look like for me to like look back at the end of my life and live with no regrets? There's a great quote from Anne Lamott where she talks about like how heartbreaking it's going to be if you never get around to writing that memoir, if you never end up splashing in the ocean with your kids because you were afraid you don't have the like right body or what have you. I think that was it for me.
For me, in particular, what happened was that I had wanted to write a book. I thought, okay, fine, it's time to start looking for an agent. I felt like God said to me, very specifically, not in an audible voice but just in a prompt like, “That’s fine. But I don't want you seeking or striving for an agent. At the right time, I'm going to make that connection.” I was like, “Okay, God, if you're sure. Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you really sure?” I was like, “Well, okay. That's fine. But just so you know, like if you could work on that, this is the agent I would really love to have,” because that's how that works, right?
12 months later, 12 months later, I was on a podcast, and somebody heard me. They sent an email and they were like, “I just really feel like you should write a book, and my family's in the literary agents world. My husband's dad owns an agency.” It was that agent, so I end up signing a contract with them. But two more years go by before I actually get on to this because we have this really insane ability to put off our biggest dreams and our biggest callings because they feel too big. What happened is I got really afraid that if the time ran out, they wouldn't bring it up. They had never said that to me. It was all in my own head but it was enough to get me motivated, this fear of regret, this fear of losing the chance.
Fun fact, that I don't know if you're going to resonate with our not, every single morning of writing Dirt, I would play Eminem’s Lose Yourself because it says, “You get one shot. Do not miss your chance to blow.” It says, “Mom, I love you, but this trailer’s got to go.” It reminded me daily that I get one chance to tell this story in book form the first time.
[00:33:01] JR: My version of Eminem is ‘My Shot’ from Hamilton. It’s the same gist, which he got from Eminem. He stole it from Eminem. He's like very transparent about that, so I love that. All right, you signed a five-book deal. I've never met somebody else who signed a five-book deal, went to the five-book deal club. Anyone else out there, come join. Let's all hang out.
[00:33:21] MM: T-shirts, wearing your t-shirts.
[00:33:23] JR: Dirt’s a good book. It’s sold really well. What’s the delta between good and great as a writer, as a content creator, from your perspective? Because very few people achieve what you've achieved on the literary front here.
[00:33:35] MM: Some of my highest values, when you think about personality tests or things like that, they consistently come up as authenticity and originality, both of which I think lead to excellence. What I mean by that is I have an academic background, right? I have a master's in – I have my undergrad in political science and philosophy, a master's in philosophy. Then, I specialized in the philosophy of law when I was in law school. In each of those stages, we had to write papers in order to graduate. In the academic world, the standard is you have to add something new to the marketplace of ideas. You first have to survey the marketplace of ideas to understand what arguments exist. Then, you don't get your degree, you don't graduate, unless you have moved that conversation forward some way.
When I think about this genre, when I think about just the genre of books in general, even the sub-genre of Christian books, I think there is a tendency for people to want to write books but not to be authors. For me, the difference between those two, this good to great or this pursuit of excellence, is are you actually innovating? Are you originating ideas? Are you looking at the conversation and saying something new? Or are you just like taking a bunch of different inspiring things out there, calling them your own, and putting them in paper format? I hold myself to that, and that's a much harder, longer road. It's a slower road I think.
But ultimately, I have to hold onto and believe that excellence compounded upon excellence, originality compounded upon originality, over the long haul, that leaves a legacy to be proud of. That leaves something behind that people will reference and talk about, versus here's a bunch of people saying the same thing.
[00:35:18] JR: Everybody, go back, rewind this podcast three minutes, and re-listen to that. There's so much wisdom in what Mary just shared. I cannot agree more. It's this aspect of like knowing the. You have to know that – People ask me all the time, “How do you write great nonfiction?” You better read a ton of great nonfiction, right? That's step one. You just have to read a ton in the medium that you love, which is why, for me, I pretty much confined myself exclusively to full-length nonfiction. But that's my core craft. That's my medium and then, yeah, like finding something relatively original. I don't think anything truly original. I think everything at the end of the day is derivative but figuring out a way to innovate, to tell it in a different voice, and to move the conversation forward. I love that parallel to academia. When academia lets you do that.
[00:36:09] MM: You not only don't win. I would just add. You not only don't win. You can fail that. You get kicked out of the program. If some of the stuff that went down in – I had a photography business before this or the author world. If that happened in academia, you would not get your degree.
[00:36:22] JR: Yeah. They just kick you out. That doesn't happen in book world. They let you keep publishing. All right, you just released the 100th episode of your podcast, right?
[00:36:32] MM: Yeah, I did.
[00:36:33] JR: All right, so if you had to pick writing or podcasting, which would you pick?
[00:36:38] MM: It would be writing, for sure. But I got to say I love podcasting. I, in the beginning, called myself the reluctant podcaster because my husband –
[00:36:45] JR: Yeah, me too.
[00:36:46] MM: Oh, my gosh.
[00:36:47] JR: That’s so funny, yeah. I did not want to do it.
[00:36:50] MM: Yeah. He was like, “I feel like you'd be good at this.” It was one year before Dirt came out. He was like, “I feel like it'd be a good way to build the audience and meet other authors.” I very, very reluctantly did it and then I started doing it. I was like, “Oh, wait. I get to be an introvert and have deep conversations right off the bat. Totally skip the cocktail party talk with one other person and ask questions with – Lean in with curiosity and intelligent questions. This is my dream job.” So, I feel like the two together are great. But if I had to choose one, it would be writing.
[00:37:22] JR: I 100 percent agree. We really are the same person. I was thinking the other day, I feel like people who just want to get better at their craft, who want to master whatever their craft is, should just start a podcast. Don't worry about the audience at all. Just use it as an opportunity to network and interview really, really smart people in your discipline. Like that's so much of the value of podcasting, and you'd be amazed at who will show up for your podcast. I promise.
[00:37:53] MM: Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. It's like having a master class every week. Sit down and ask your heroes those questions.
[00:37:59] JR: Exactly. It's amazing. Hey, so I'm curious. What does your day look like these days? From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what is your routine?
[00:38:07] MM: I would say that no one day compared to the other is routine because we have a few different – We’re entrepreneurs. We have a few different businesses going. It would be more like a week by week. We have it kind of blocked off which days we're working and which ones. But one of the things, working with Kim Butler from The Whiteboard Room that was very important to me, and she has pushed since day one, and I resisted since day one, is this idea of the rhythms. That even if things are crazy, even if you have like times when you're traveling a lot or times when you're really deep in like a deadline work, you’re just like in sweat pants, working at the laptop for hours, whatever, she has really continually and faithfully shown up in my life to remind me of these rhythms of exercising, eating well, having quiet time, getting in scripture, sleep.
I have a Hatch machine by my bed, which is like one of those sound machines for sleeping and a weighted blanket and just good sleep routines and all of that because I am a person who, left my own devices, I don't take very good care of the health plant that is Mary. I forget I need sun and water and whatever else plants need. I don't know. I kill most plants, which is not a good sign. She has been really faithful, and we just had a call. I wish like five or six years in, I wish I would have learned this by now that she just said, “Mary, I feel like you will stop going into these like extremes of super, super on, super, super deep work, super, super showing up on social media or whatever, and then like weeks of just like, ‘Oh, I got to go hide for a while because I'm burning out,’ the second you start getting into much more like these regular rhythms of work, these regular rhythms of rest.”
I feel like one of the things when I say what has become nonnegotiable, what is a part of every day, it’s really trying to be intentional about building that stuff. It’s taking my vitamins. It’s trying to get – I mean, it's been like a while because we just did a big photo shoot for book two, and that was really insane. That sounds very glamorous, but what it really meant was getting people in to paint our house because people were going to be in our house. It all started to slide, and I finally got a workout in yesterday. I was like, “Oh, right. I really do feel better when I do these things. Why do I keep forgetting that? It’s like I have taken care of myself amnesia.”
I’d say, daily, the thing we're working on to really try to be consistent about is waking up, having a quiet time, spending time with God. That’s another thing. I treat that as an option when really it's more like air or food or water. It’s go just a little while without that and you're going to fade. You're going to starve. You’re going to thirst to death. Trying to work out, and trying to do the vitamins, trying to do the water, and then really trying to wind down. We've been watching like [inaudible 00:40:45] Mary's town, so we have not been like winding down as much. I do like, “Give me the next episode. It's so good.”
I just continually to come back to if I want to do this for the long haul, if I don't want to crash and burn and completely flame out by book two because I'm so burnt out, I cannot treat rest like a reward or an option. It's got to be part of the work.
[00:41:08] JR: I'm obsessive about eight hours sleep. My wife thinks I'm crazy, which is like I'm always experimenting with temperatures in the house, with weighted blankets, with earplugs, with everything. We have three young kids, so it's more challenging. But I'll say, by the grace of God, we're somehow able to do it. We have very busy lives but we get – We log seven to eight hours of sleep at night, seven and a half to eight hours a night, which is critical. Al right, three questions we wrap up every conversation with. Number one, other than your own, which books do you recommend or gift most frequently?
[00:41:46] MM: Yes. Okay, I got three. I got three for you. One of them is called Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, and this is more for the entrepreneurs listening. It's written by Kevin Roberts. He was the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising. The whole theory is that in the beginning to start a business, all you needed was a trademark just to make it legitimate, and then it evolved. You needed a brand. You needed a logo and some colors, so you're recognizable. That gave rise to like these big box brands where you would sit on customer service for hours, trying to get a hold of a human.
That became very personal and very withdrawn. He said that has led to the pendulum swinging back to – It went trademarks brands. Now, we're back to lovemarks where it's like this company where you are, he has this phrase, loyal beyond reason to, where you will drive past three for me, Dunkin’ Donuts, which is very popular in the northeast to go to a local coffee shop or Starbucks, whatever the case may be. You tell everybody about it. You're their biggest champion. He said they have a lot of these different characteristics that he goes through in the book. But one of them is just that there's this like mystery about them. There's something that makes you want to lean in and learn more. Lovemarks is number one.
Then for the creatives of any variety, I recommend Bird by Bird from Anne Lamott, especially for the writers. To go along with that, The Art of War. Nope. The War of Art.
[00:43:00] JR: Yeah, The War of Art.
[00:43:01] MM: The Steven Pressfield. I’ve got that backwards. That’s like –
[00:43:03] JR: Yeah, Pressfield. Yeah. It’s one of the most popular recommendations on the podcast. Those are really good. I've never heard of Lovemarks, but it sounds really good. I loved Superfans by Pat Flynn, which is kind of in this vein. Another good one is Never Lose a Customer Again. It’s really interesting in this vein. We don't just want readers. We don't just want customers. We want raving fans of the brand.
There’s something gospel-driven about that, at least for me. We want to serve people so extraordinarily well. Go over the top and loving others and blessing others through our businesses. So I love that answer. All right, who would you most like to hear on this podcast, talking about how their faith influences their work?
[00:43:44] MM: Yeah. I googled this, so I don't think she's been on, Shari Rigby. Shari Rigby is an actress, and she was in the movie Overcomer. She has been in a few other movies but she's also an author. She released Beautifully Flawed, and then her most recent book was Consider the Lilies. In it, she talks about this idea of lilies forming kind of a colony of lilies, a network of lilies because their roots bound around one another, help hold them up. She has this like one exercise called mapping where you make a bull's eye in the middle, and you put your name and Jesus's name in the middle. Then you start to draw out these bull’s eye branches coming off of it of people God has started to bring into your life in recent months, weeks, whatever the case is. You start to pray for those people. You start to pray for the friendship, the relationship, for favor upon them, for like ways you can work together or support one another.
When I started doing that and just seeing like even from like January 2020 to right now, like the explosion of a bull's eye that God has been bringing into my life, and your name will now get added to this, she says like it kind of can help connect some dots of where God is leading you. Anyway, it's just a beautiful book and it talks about like the different aspects of not spinning your [inaudible 00:45:00]. But she's just a beautiful human, and we literally just met when she was on my show. She, after we hopped off, ended up praying for me and praying for Dirt at a time when I was just like, “I don't know if I can do this.” I would love to hear the conversation between the two of you.
[00:45:15] JR: That lily analogy is dynamite. That's really good. All right, Mary, what's one thing from this conversation that you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off? What do you want them to hear one last time?
[00:45:29] MM: It feels like a little bit of a cheat because it is like the tagline. But I always say be careful like the mantra you choose for your life because God has a funny way being like, “Okay, here we go.” But this idea of slow growth equals strong rates. Just because it's taking longer than you thought it would does not mean that God is not moving, that it’s a failure, that you're a failure. Just embracing that the things that are built over the long haul are probably the things that are being built to last, to be built to last for the long haul.
I mean, it's so tempting to go, “Why didn't we make our mantra overnight success is super easy, and everything we touch turns to gold? That would have been so much smarter.” But I really do feel like going back to that when I'm on my deathbed analogy, looking back on a life that was built faithfully, and showing up day by day, and planting even when it was in the darkness, and trusting that just like that whole analogy of like every fall, the trees are going to show us: it’s beautiful to let things go. I think there's just something really incredible about trusting the rhythms of growing on God's timing and not your own.
[00:46:34] JR: Yeah. All throughout scripture, right? We are called to just be faithful and do work as unto the Lord. We're not responsible for results at all because God produces results through us, and that's freeing, right? It's like I can just be faithful to the craft. I can continue to follow The Call to Mastery on my life and my vocation. Whatever results come, blessed be the name of the Lord because it is His grace to dole out. I love that. Hey, Mary, I want to commend you for the great work you're doing in the world for the recognition of God's grace in your life, in your story, and for reminding us of the God-given the dignity of all work today. Thank you for doing that.
Guys, you can learn more about Mary, her podcasts, her books at marymarantz.com. Mary, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. This is a blast.
[00:47:23] MM: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, and now we get to turn the tables pretty soon and have you on my show.
[00:47:28] JR: It's going to be a blast. See you soon.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:47:30] JR: Man, that was good. I totally understand why Mary's listeners and my listeners have been asking us to get together. It's awesome. By the way, I will be on Mary’s podcast soon. Make sure you go subscribe to her podcast, so you can listen to that interview there. Hey, if you're enjoying The Call to Mastery, do me a favor and go rate it four stars, five stars, three stars, whatever you think is fair on Apple Podcasts. You guys would be shocked at how impactful those ratings are to helping us get guests on to the program. That's what people look at. When they're deciding whether or not to come onto a podcast, they're looking at who's the audience and is this podcast legit. To answer that question, they're looking at ratings. Go rate the podcast right now, so you can help us get better and better guests onto the show. Thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. I'll see you next time.
[END]