Episode 114 - Making Collectibles Profitable with Jim Beckett
If you grew up collecting baseball cards, you’re going to love today’s show. We sat down and talked with Jim Beckett, creator of Beckett magazine, the gold standard for valuing trading cards.
He shared with us his personal story, gave us some insight into the memorabilia collected in his office, and also told us about how he stewarded his influence to be a further encouragement to aspiring Faith Driven Entrepreneurs.
Our time with him was fun, interesting, and educational, and we think you’ll enjoy it!
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Episode Transcript
*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDE movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry Kaestner: Jim. Thank you very much for being on the show today.
Jim Beckett: Thank you, Henry and friends.
Henry Kaestner: We're excited to hear your story and want to start by letting our listeners know a bit about who you are. One of the things I had known, a lot of things I do know about Jim. Jim's been a great host to me and to some of my friends over the time, has been a great leader in the larger Faith Driven Entrepreneur community, particularly in Dallas, where he's got the gift of hospitality. Many of you don't know that Jim is the founder Beckett Publications, which is the world's largest sports and entertainment collectibles publisher. I bet you that 25-30 percent of our audience has picked up a Beckett Guide at some point in time in their life. So he's a legend in a trading card world. And what a lot of you don't know is something I didn't know until five minutes before we started our podcast is that Jim has actually recorded more podcasts than we have. He does one daily! We do weekly and think that's a big production and pat ourselves on the back all the time. But this is old hat for Jim. Jim does them daily. Jim, tell us about it.
Jim Beckett: Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. Got feedback from a lot of good friends. And I thought, how do I wanna tell my story? When I went through halftime with Bob Buford, I don't know if you've done that, but they ask you what your life's going to look like, what your life of significance will. This was 20 years ago, and the only thing that I had not done on my long term list was write a book. And I had inertia about that. And what I realized is that podcasting can be the new form of telling your story. Instead of if I were blogging, I'd still be working on that first blog and making sure the punctuation was just right and that I said exactly what I wanted to say perfectly. Whereas with the podcast, you turn on the mike, you get 15 minutes of talk about a topic and close the door, send it out. And it's less than perfect, but it's, you know, an opportunity to do it again the next day on a different topic.
Henry Kaestner: And so before we get into just the story about how it all started, cause I very much want to hear it again. I want our listeners to hear it. Tell us about your favorite collectible. Who's your favorite player? What's your favorite part of memorabilia?
Jim Beckett: My favorite player since being a kid who group grew up in Pittsburgh is Roberto Clemente He passed away on New Year's Eve, 72.
Henry Kaestner: On a relief mission down to Panama in Nicaragua. Yeah.
Jim Beckett: So, you know, I have a lot of stuff of his and I've collected a lot. One of the secrets when I was doing all these price guides is not to be too enamored of any one player to avoid bias. But I've been pretty public about growing up and seeing Roberto Clemente as a great man and a great player,.
Henry Kaestner: Well, he's a great humanitarian. That's, of course, how he died and adds so much to the legacy, which is why a lot of our listeners, even though this a guy died almost 50 years ago, people know who he is. So tell us the story, though. Tell us about how you got started growing up as a kid, what sports meant to you? I think everybody wants to be able to make a business out of things that they truly enjoy. And it seems to me that you figured out how to do it. To tell us how it happened.
Jim Beckett: Well, as you said, I've got a podcast, Dr. James Beckett's Sports Sard Insights. And I deal with that over a period of several episodes over the days. But I'll give you the highlights. You know, I'm seven years of age. We're driving down the road. My dad pulls over to get gas with our family. I'm the oldest of five, although there are probably three of us at that time, four of us at that time. And he pulls in this gas station, said, I don't think he said, hey, son, here's a penny, you've been great. But he bought a penny pack of cards for me.
And in that pack of cards was the politically incorrect name of Spook Jacobs, the utility infielder. Now, I could have gotten Willie Mays. I could have gotten Mickey Mantle. I could have got Duke Snider. They were all in that series of Topps in 1956. But no, I got Spook Jacobs. I did not start collecting that year. Don't remember any more cards. And I don't remember really any the next year. But in the following year I started collecting and I'd save up my nickels and cards were a nickel a pack in those days.
Henry Kaestner: Do you still have that Spook Jacobs card?
Jim Beckett: Yes. Yes. It's on my wall.
Henry Kaestner: Cool, OK. So continue on please.
Jim Beckett: OK. So I collected as a kid that was a lot of fun. We moved a lot. And every time I moved, it was one of the unifying elements and socializing elements of my childhood. At least during that pre-teen period and then teenage years, like not everybody, but most people, I stepped out of that hobby. My younger brother, though, so that helps. My dad had been a collector when he was a kid. So he saved his cards. I got his cards. And then in college I was hurting for money and thought about selling my cards. Answered an ad in the paper from a guy wound up being a very close friend of mine who did not buy my cards. Otherwise, history be different. But then I broke up with my girlfriend, who was the reason I was trying to raise money. My goodness. Not an issue. But then later in grad school, I got back with this guy and we together started first collecting clubs and conventions in this area. And it was just off to the races. After that. I had a hobby that you could pick it up when you wanted to put it down when you wanted to. But it was very dynamic. And I was in on the ground floor was something that I was finishing my PhD and I realized the scholarly articles I was doing that enabled me to get tenure early. There were less people reading that than people that read my first price survey on the first day. And I thought, the market is here and you need to fan the flames, which I did carefully was it wasn't overnight success, but from humble beginnings in 76 of doing these price surveys and passing them out for free. By 1979, I had the first book length treatment and annual price guide, and in 84 I started the monthly magazines.
Rusty Rueff: So how many people told you you were crazy back then?
Jim Beckett: They couldn't evaluate it enough to make the crazy determination, because when I'm doing my pro bono consulting, I ask, who are your wisdom figures? And most people come up with nothing. Well, I had some wisdom figures. I probably had less then than I do now. But it was again, you know, you have an audience of entrepreneurs. But I'm relatively risk averse. But for some reason, God also told me it was so obvious to me that this was a big opportunity and that it had my name on it. And so I just did I boldly step out? No, I burned my candle at both ends and did my full time job and did this on the side, did not draw any pay for a couple of years and it gradually got bigger and bigger and bigger. And a few years later I'm looking around. I got 200 employees almost and we're selling millions of magazines and obviously I had dropped the other job. Which was very lucrative enough for me to bootstrap.
Rusty Rueff: I want to get into the science of how you valued the cards back in those days, but I have to I'm never gonna get a chance to ask anybody else this question, so I'm going to ask you this question? So I've got a Kentucky Derby glass collection because back to the late 1930s. Is that worth anything?
Jim Beckett: Sure. Everything is worth something.
Rusty Rueff: OK. In a minute, I'm going to have my wife come in because she needs to hear this.
Jim Beckett: And it's probably useful.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, exactly. I got them all at that. You know, as you said, memorabilia and collectibles. I know that feeling. But talk to us about the science. I mean, when you were deciding to value trading cards, this is long before you had an algorithm that told us how many were out there and supply and demand. How did you do it back then?
Jim Beckett: Well, there is no algorithm. There's some art and some science. And under my regime and even continuing on, there's as much science as we can detect. There's a lot of things in the world that we just can't completely figure out. But the science of statistics is decision making in the face of uncertainty. The uncertainty is always there, but there's a lot of data as well. And as much as possible, we were digging out the data that was less readily available in those days. We have employees traveling to the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest every weekend for these seemingly omnipresent card shows back in the day.
Henry Kaestner: Did you ever have a player that came to you and took issue with the fact that you weren't raiding his card hire?
Jim Beckett: I mean, they didn't come to me. They'd go to my employees.
Henry Kaestner: Any stories you could share on that? You don't have to. I'm putting you on the spot.
Jim Beckett: No, it's again, the correlation of pricing is very strong with on field performance. So if they complain about their card value, hit a few more home runs.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. Back in my video game days, they used to come to us at E.A. and complain all the time about their ratings. And, you know, I'm. I'm faster than that. I'm better than that. You know, I could jump higher than that. It was fascinating.
Jim Beckett: As much as possible. We're trying to analyze the empirical data. So if this is what it sold for, that's that's the current value. And, you know, it could go up the next month. There actually are players, though, who have tried to buy up their own cards.
Henry Kaestner: Really? Cornered the market on their cards.
Rusty Rueff: Yes. Maybe not corner the market, but to influence the market.
Rusty Rueff: Wow. I mean, I did that with my first business book, but that was only because I was the only one who was going to buy it.
Henry Kaestner: I want to talk about just you know, you got 200 employees. You've got challenges in starting and culture and a lot of lessons along the way about your relationship with God, your relationship with your employees and prepping you a little bit. But before I let you off of the celebrity of it all. Are there any details about some of the sports stars going out there and buying their own cars? But are there any that you know of that are just really known for being really avid collectors of sports memorabilia?
Jim Beckett: The current player that's most avid collector, I think is Pat Neshek, the pitcher. But again, if you're in the locker room there and you're trading jerseys at your jersey for somebody else, and then there's a lot of collectors who will trade cards for jerseys. There's a currency there. In fact, all along for 50 years, as long as I've been involved more than 50 years. Cash is not always king in the collectibles field. Sometimes having a better item is better than cash in terms of if I want something that you have. You may not accept my cash, but you might accept the trade off something that you really want. So if I can get something you want, that could actually be worth more than cash. And that's what some of these players do. They can procure things that are better than cash.
Henry Kaestner: All right. So now you've got this business you're leading. You've got employees. You're starting to get circulation at seventy nine, 80, 81, 82. As with any Faith Driven Entrepreneur, this had success over a long period of time. There are all sorts of lessons learned. And I know you well enough to know that you've taken pains to share those with others. Give us an overview of that. Give us some of the lessons that you've learned with time.
Jim Beckett: Well, when I meet with some of these ministries and businesses, as I said, I do a lot of this pro bono consulting. I try to take what appears to be a disadvantage and turn it into an advantage. One of the presenting disadvantages I had starting out is I couldn't hire employees with experience. I turned that into an advantage by hiring based on character, integrity, work ethic, ability, lifetime learners, you know. And then we formed our own team. And I had a fabulous team. If we would have been in an industry that was established.
You know, we never hired from other competitors. That was not on our radar. We trained our own and that built an esprit de corps. In fact, I have a podcast episode on nuanced nepotism, which is talking about the fact that nepotism is not all bad. When we were growing so fast, we hired a lot of people that were related to people that were already on the team and that worked out great because I didn't have to fire. The brother told his sister that came on board. Look, you're making me look bad up your game or I'm going to pull your plug.
Henry Kaestner: You didn't have to.
I didn't have to. And it's not nepotism if I'm hiring their sister or their husband or their mother or their daughter or whatever. So we had a lot of interesting relationships, not exclusively, obviously. But we didn't look the other way when we needed somebody. The next week, we could put an ad in the paper or one of the star employees could say, hey, my brother is not happy where he is. He's really good at X, Y, Z. Could we give him a chance? And that's what I said. Nepotism. If you're just giving somebody a chance, I don't mind that. If they're employees for life with no standards of performance, that's no good.
Henry Kaestner: I'm with you on that. So talk to us more about the people that you then hired and just the lessons that you learn in managing what it look like. So I'm an employee at Beckert back in nineteen eighty seven. What am I experiencing that might be different than another job that I'm going to?
Jim Beckett: You's have a sense that this was a very positive, wholesome family kind of company where people helped each other. Again, I think I was a really good boss when we were in an up market and when things were more nebulous, as we got bigger, it got a little more corporate. And when the industry leveled off, I don't think I was. I wasn't great. Let's put it that way. Terrible. But the things that make me an excellent husband, that's my loyalty and faithfulness, are not always helpful when you're running a company.
I gave people too many chances sometimes. And rather than tell you about if eight out of 10 of those chances didn't work out very well. I want to tell you about the two that did. And again, the odds are not with me. One of the things we did, I think I was really good, disruptive technology guy. So I kept coming up with new products. And our team came up with new stuff. And so we kind of out earned my dysfunctions as a boss. I was interactional without being inspiring. So I'm not an inspiring person. But what we were doing was inspiring and people were excited to be there.
Rusty Rueff: I'm glad you brought up the innovation, the disruptive piece of that, because you had to face that as well, right? You had to watch the digital world show up. And be prepared for that and manage through that. I'm curious in our entrepreneurs who are listening. You know, many of them run into the same kind of while the world's shifted on me and I wasn't really ready for it. How do I get ready for the next time?
Jim Beckett: We had online auctions before ebay did. That's how smart I am. I had a fabulous team and they said, you know, you need to get beckett.com Right away. You need to go digital. This was in the early 90s. And, you know, we did it, but we didn't go full speed ahead. We did it defensively, not offensively. If I had known then what I know now, we would have gone much more aggressively. But as most entrepreneurs know, it's very difficult to cannibalize your own business. It just doesn't feel very good when you take that first bite out of something that's really working in the interest of doing something that wound up being next century. But, you know, that's how smart I was as the innovator's dilemma, right?
Rusty Rueff: Christian Claytonson wrote about it. So I want to shift over the topic to how your faith has informed what you've done. And it's probably no one more uniquely qualified that I can think about to talk a little bit about what's the difference between storing up our treasures on Earth versus looking to our treasures, you know, in God's kingdom. And then I'm interested in that with you, because you have built a great business around this idea of collectibles. But I'm sure you've had to grapple with that yourself. So enlighten our listeners around that topic.
Jim Beckett: Well, I'm hoping that all along I've held things loosely. I think I have I mean, I have a lot of nice things, but they don't own me. I don't think. But what I like to tell the listeners about some of the ministries that I sold my company 15 years ago, I've been just as busy. I do this thing called Shine Advisory Foundation. And so I help ministries, but also individuals and businesses on a pro bono basis with some of their issues that they have. So I'm vicariously walking with them. And this is my spiritual gift of service in some sense, because when I was running the company, all anybody seemed to want for me was money. They wanted treasurer. And I said, well, what about. Can I get involved or can I do some due diligence? Well, no, we're not looking for that. We just we just need some money. And so you've heard of the three T's, the time, talent and treasure. They only wanted treasure, but I wanted to give time talent. But what I did was different that I think other of your listeners could do. Is that I now only give talented time. I don't separate out time and talent. I only give talented time, which means I do very little volunteer work. It's all expert level involvement.
It's being a consultant or an expert witness. And so that has been so much richer for me than just writing a check. So somebody will leave my office saying, no, come into my office, let me invite some peers and let's talk about why you need this money and this. Well, that's just obvious. Well, no, it's not obvious if you live in Dallas, Texas, or wherever you live in America. This is a generous city, a generous state, a generous nation. If you have a compelling business idea or ministry idea and it's well executed, you will not lack for funds. If you are lacking for funds, you're not marketing, right. You've not shaped your narrative. And what I found is that most people, when they go to their family and friends, just like the question you asked me, they either think you're crazy or they think you can do no wrong. There's usually nothing in between. They don't want to rain on your parade, but somebody needs to do the iron sharpening iron. And I am in groups that will do that, when somebody has a business idea or they have a ministry where they're stuck, if they hire a consult, the consultant has a vested interest in that engagement. I'm a free consultant. I have no reason to extend the engagement. No reason to mince any words. And I've now developed a pretty strong network of business guys in the area who love to come and weigh in, not as a board member, but as a board caliber person weighing in on board caliber issues. The ones that keep the ministry up late at night, not the board meetings that I go to where they spend 90 percent of time on what's working and then, oh, we don't even have time to talk about the long range plan or succession.
Henry Kaestner: Are you concerned about the many Faith driven entrepreneurs listening. tothis that might show up at your house in Dallas, Texas, and take you up on that offer?
Jim Beckett: Henry over twenty five years we've had five thousand meetings. Not all of them were big, but we'd get 5000 meetings over twenty five years. So it's four, five a week on average. And so they can get in line. I don't give them normally. They come here. It's not worth a special trip to fly to Dallas. Although actually.
Henry Kaestner: I did it. I did it.
Jim Beckett: I know, but I'm saying they're definitely empty seats on the airplane. But I don't think you want to get on an airplane right now for voluntary travel. But people are in town. They come by and like I said, it's trying to get the heart of the issue. And, you know, businesses need that, too. It's more on the angel level than private equity. These are mostly men. It's mostly a men's ministry. But there's women, too. But they come and they they have this idea. And what I've found is that the same kind of advice and questions are applicable to businesses and ministries. When they talk about fund raising, it's more it's marketing. There's just a lot of similarities.
Henry Kaestner: So I want to build on that, because one of the things that you've just talked about, of course, is that we live in a generous state. We live in a generous country, and that if you have a good idea, you're going to be able get funding for you and get ministry funding. You're going to get financial funding for your business. And that really comes from this kind of concept of we worship God of abundance, not one of scarcity. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs come at this from one of scarcity, which is there only a certain amount of venture capitalists. I'm competing against the next guy I've gotta outflanked them. And I think that you're coming at it by saying, no, no, no, you're just looking at for the wrong angle. And up until now, you have had people that are not speaking into your life, that are really making you sharp. And here's how you need to go ahead and convert. This problem you're trying to solve is something that has more broadstream appeal. And in the process of that, you're gonna get your financing. You're also going to be able to serve a larger population, your revenue is going to grow and all those things. So I think that that's really profound. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs miss that. It's a subtlety of mindset, but it's really important. Out of these 5000 meetings, what are some of the other things that you hear commonly from different entrepreneurs that just need to have that shift in mindset? They're just thinking about it wrong, whether it's hiring. You talked about capitalization. What are some of the other common mistakes you see Faith driven entrepreneurs, whether they're running a ministry or a business, make?
Jim Beckett: Well, one of the most common things is that they make their pitch and they get blank stares and they think that the other people have a problem because they just don't get it. So I could say no. It's your problem if I don't get it. You haven't articulated it very well. And so what's your secret sauce? What's your dynamic element that could go viral? What is something that makes you stand out from the crowd? They say, well, I don't know, I just I think I'm just supposed to do this. Well, that's again to go back to the inspiring, you know, if you're not an inspiring person, you know, the cheerleader kind of person. There's got to be some substance there that people want to come alongside and say, I want to be part of this. Yes. And again, it's like I said, I've messed up in the past. But like I said, when I hit some big opportunities, I was defensive rather than offensive. These guys are taking the offense, but they don't have blockers out in front. There's no holes to go through. If they say, hey, I'm going to start a restaurant. So what are you going to serve? And they say, I don't know. Well, why is your restaurant gonna be successful and nobody's there? Well, I love food. That's ridiculous. You know, what's your edge? And when I ask them that, they just don't they don't always have an answer.
So SHINE is an acronym S strategic H is hosting and hospitality I is interactive and intercessory and is networking and E is encouragement. In short, it's strategic encouragement. It's myself and others telling the person in the hot seat, you've got what it takes for your God given assignment, but you don't have clarity on what that assignment is. Things it's, you know, God's timing. You know, it's not ripe. You don't have everything in place. God may be waiting for you to assemble into the person for your team. You don't have all the skills and abilities you need for this enterprise to be successful. That could be a personal business or ministry thing. Three rules of. No long speeches. Everybody participates and no fundraising pressure before, during or after. The third one's really important. They're all important. But men, especially the men that don't like church. What do they say? It's a long speech. They just ask me for money. And I never get to participate. So if the meetings that when I invite a person to come and sit in, they're not gonna be hounded to be on the board. They're not going to be hounded to give funds. They're there for their pro bono expertize. And I put together what is like a cabinet, an instant cabinet for that ministry or for that business.
Rusty Rueff: You know, Jim, so many times people feel like they have to wait to this halftime moment in their life to start giving back and moving to significance. But we know we have young entrepreneurs that also have time. They have some discretionary time, but they don't think they can give it back yet because maybe I'm not knowledgeable enough. Maybe I'm not the expert yet. What advice can you give them? Because they're looking for purpose and meaning. They've got experience. Can they go begin giving their time back now?
Jim Beckett: Well, I mean, it's the same argument applied to why some people don't tithe until they make it. You know, I can't tithe because I don't make enough money. I can't tithe my time or my talent or my treasure. And so it's the same mindset. You need to be faithful. Little, little. I mean, I didn't start doing thousands of meetings that just when I was running the company, I dedicated a half day a week. So in those days, it was Thursday afternoon in my wonderful secretary would just line up meetings at, you know, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00. And sometimes we'd have a lunch, depending on whether something was applicable, would need to have more people and a better draw. And it was terrific.
Rusty Rueff: And that's encouraging. I hope our listeners are listening closely to that. There's a little time. That's right. Yeah. I love your tithing analogy. It's also the same as, you know, hey, if I lose some weight, I'll go to the gym. Yeah. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Jump in there now. Jump in there now.
Jim Beckett: The other aspect of that is that sometimes there's ministries that say we want to be with you because we've that you have some smart friends and we could really get some help. But we're not ready to meet because we don't have our act together. To which I say, if you had your act together, my friends would not be interested in meeting with you. What we're meeting about is the fact that you don't have it all together, and that is what is of interest to us. Oh, OK. Well, we don't even know the questions to ask. Well, you still got it wrong. You're not going to be asking the questions. We're asking the questions. Oh, OK. Then they come and they get some benefit.
Henry Kaestner: That's a great paradigm. You're 100 percent right. And I've heard that so many times. And actually, I say, OK, get your act together and come on back. That's the wrong thing. If I really want to serve them well.
Jim Beckett: Well, the reason we get so many meetings is because the private equity friends, the angel friends, they know that I'm a willing recipient of the not ready for primetime ideas. And so if you know somebody in Dallas that you've rejected. They don't have it together. I love meeting with those people. I think that I don't know what seeds are gonna germinate, that they're gonna be 30, 60, 100 fold. And what are gonna be duds. But I love spending time with people that don't quite have their act together. I don't want to meet with people that have low integrity. But if they're pretty sharp, they have a good heart. There's a good idea in there somewhere, but it's easily rejected all by somebody as savvy as you. I'm delighted to meet with them and hope that perhaps some of those and that subset of the not ready for prime time would be ready the following year.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, that's very helpful.
Jim Beckett: That's my sweet spot.
Henry Kaestner: So I want to ask you something I want to bridge and close, so I'm going to ask you about the I in your shine because you talked about intersession being a part of that I. I love for you to talk about that a bit. And then I'd also love for you to close this out by sharing something that you feel that God has spoken to you about, in his words, something maybe you're learning from your daily meditation time. Maybe something over the course of last month doesn't need to be today necessarily, but something that, through God's word, he is showing you about himself and the work he wants you to do.
Henry Kaestner: OK, let's start with the I start with the intersession. I don't hear that often as a framework. I think that if I'm going to assess myself and the different things I do as a business person, as an investor, intersession and diligent prayer is I'm not very high on that, but it's high enough to be at the center of what you do. Talk to us about that a bit.
Jim Beckett: It is in the middle of the acronym. Interactive, like we said, it's a different kind of interactivity. The intersession perhaps a little bit different, intercessory as well. We pray at the beginning of the meeting. We pray at the end of the meeting. My co-host, Joe Galindo who is a C12 chair now but he was my executive V.P. back and we've been longtime friends. And so in the beginning, he did most of the praying. And I would just observe. And then I realized I'm really missing out. I have so many friends that are high powered executives who can speak to a crowd. They can go up, take the microphone and commanding presence for any number of people, you know, dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands. But if you ask them to pray out loud in public, they say, I've got a sore throat.
And so I wind up being the guy that's praying now. So I went from not praying very much to praying a lot. So I prayed more than 5000 times. But all those meetings are bathed in prayer before and after. But again, the prayer is not...well, I have adage that same thing applies to people that you're in the presence of. It's good to pray with your wife. It's good to pray for your wife. But it's not necessarily good to pray for your wife with your wife. In other words, I don't want my wife praying. Lord, give my husband the courage that he needs to do what he's supposed to do. That doesn't feel like a prayer to me. That feels like a kick in the pants. Yes, I think so. Consequently, this intercessory at the end of the meeting, it can't be Lord help this person that we've been interacting with for the last hour, hour and a half to have the guts to follow through. You can see how it break down. We have to be affirming the person, but we're not necessarily affirming the plan that he walked in with. And we're more provocative and prescriptive, but we want to be strategically encouraging the person without telling him what he has to do. So that's the intercessory aspect. It's not. We're the oracle. This is what you have to do. It's we've expanded your thinking. You need to take this home. Do your own prayer for how you might act on this. There's always action steps, and most of them are good, but they're not all they need to have their own Praxis. You know, prayer leads to intimacy, which leads to self-awareness. And I can't tell you how many of these entrepreneurs and ministry leaders lack in self-awareness. And that self-awareness comes is sometimes can be proportional to your prayer life in your intimacy with God and intimacy with others.
Henry Kaestner: I like that prayer leads to intimacy which leads to self-awareness. When you're brought close to the Holy God and you come to understand...
Jim Beckett: Well you pray more when you're in a crisis, you know, Lord, what's going on may help me make sense of this. And many of the meetings are people coming in saying, why isn't this working? And I'll say, well, have you thought about this? Well, no, I never thought about that. So could that be a possibility of why it isn't working? They're either too much left brained or too much, right, pretty frequently.
Henry Kaestner: So tell us what God's word is saying to you.
Jim Beckett: I don't think I've ever been a perfectionist. The evidence to convict me of being a perfectionist would fall short when you look at all the publications that I've produced. I've done just so many pages of pricing and pricing and pricing, and none of them are perfect. OK, but they had to be really good or I wouldn't have had a following. So I have high standards. So to put that in scriptural terms, I looked at Philippians two three to consider others more important in myself. And as an entrepreneur, I really had difficulty with that. I don't know. I need to take care of myself, my family, my employees, not necessarily in that order. So I moved to Philippians two four, which says just do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also the interests of others. And I thought, Lord, that I can do. I know that I'm going to fall short but that's a standard I can aim for.
But the Philippians two three was a standard that I thought, you know, that's pretty tough. Maybe I can work into that. But Philippians two four, which follows right after, I thought, you know, I can go for that. And so my prayer life is not merely looking out for my own personal interests at all. And it really helps that I've got an amazing godly wife. That's worth, infinite worth. Proverbs 31
Henry Kaestner: Jim, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you for Shine. 5000 meetings is incredibly motivating. That's amazing. If we could endeavor to be able to love on other people as they are forming their ideas and trying to understand what God has called them to do, to be able to be invited that many times over, you know, what somebody is doing is a big deal. A lot of service for a long time. Thank you for that.