Episode 179 - The Ruthless Elimination Of Hurry with John Mark Comer
John Mark Comer, author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, a book that really should be a must-read for every Faith Driven Entrepreneur. As a reference, Scott Harrison, founder of charity:water and previous podcast guest has said “As someone all too familiar with ‘hurry sickness,’ I desperately needed this book.” Does hurry sickness sound familiar? Or maybe, you’re someone who knows that Sabbath is supposedly a great thing but can’t help but ask: who really has the time for that? Well, today, John Mark Comer is going to tell you why slowing down may be the only way to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.
Episode Transcript
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Rusty Rueff: Hey, everyone, from wherever you are. Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. If there's an episode that you do not want to hurry through, it is this one because today's guest is John Mark Comer. He's the author of the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. It's a book that actually it's a must read for every Faith Driven Entrepreneur and as a reference, Scott Harrison, the founder of charity Water, who's a previous podcast guest. He said, as someone all too familiar with Hurry Sickness, Hurry sickness. I desperately needed this book. Does hurry sickness. Sound familiar? It does to me. Or maybe you're someone who knows that Sabbath is supposedly a great thing, but can't help but ask, who really has the time for that? Well, today, John Mark Komar is going to tell you why slowing down may be the only way to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of this modern world we live in. Let's listen in.
Henry Kaestner: Henry, welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I am here with Rusty and William co-host great friends. How are you guys?
Rusty Rueff: I'm doing great. It's just it just feels like a great day, and I can't tell you why, but just feels like a great day.
Henry Kaestner: It is a great day, is a great day. It's it's crazy tonight. I shouldn't regard this episode so much. Tonight, our beloved Warriors play the Lakers. It's a kind of a big deal when you've got three boys in the house.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, the play in the play in game. The NBA couldn't have scripted it any better to kick off the whole idea of the playoffs having the Lakers in the Warriors
William Norvell: and be sure to tune in next week to see if we're sad or happy.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I want to make sure that everybody knows that God and we love Faith driven entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. And that's true. That's true. But today we may lose some of those folks, but come back, come back next week. So I'm finding myself, I'm looking at today and I'm look at my schedule and I'm thinking, I even have time for the game. I mean, I've got so much stuff going on and I don't know about you guys, but you know, I find that there are things that just are filling in that the spaces you'd think and I spent a lot of time on a plane and I'd feel like I've got all this time that I've gotten back. But I don't know about you guys, but I'm not really feeling that me either.
Rusty Rueff: And I know we're going to get to this. It feels like everybody's in a hurry. It feels like everybody's in a hurry, you know, because we've got to get going. We've got to get going. We've got to get going.
Henry Kaestner: Somebody should write a book about that.
William Norvell: Well, it really should. So I'm not a great writer, so I'm going to defer.
Henry Kaestner: So as it turns out, if you're listening to this right now, you've probably seen the title. You probably understand that we have an author who's written a book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry with us on the episode today, and we've all been really looking forward to this. This is something this is a book that William recommended to us, I don't know, six or seven months ago. And so I went out and I got it, and I've got a copy in my hand right now. And something about it is just really compelling to me. Now part of it, I think I get the theme. And of course, we won't be talking to John Mark today, but this is a book that has as its chapters in its topics. It starts off with here. I've got my finger on something is deeply wrong. I love a hint. The solution isn't more time I thought it might have been, you know, I'm always thinking, Gosh, if I only had four more hours, if I had four more hours, then I'd be able to be like completely like Rusty. If I only had to sleep two hours, I'd be completely set.
Rusty Rueff: Unless you're Tim Ferriss, four hours is enough.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. You know, I tell you, you hear Tim Ferriss enough. I've never felt so inadequate. I can't learn taekwondo in like three days. I can't. I can't do anything. Tim Ferriss does the secret of the easy joke. And then this is my favorite. Wait, what are the spiritual disciplines again? And so we have with us on the podcast, John Mark Karr, John Mark, thank you for joining.
John Mark Comer: It's an absolute joy to be along. And I'm not about to get in fights about over the Warriors vs. the Lakers, although I did grow up as a kid driving up to see the Warriors play. So maybe there is an inner
Henry Kaestner: ring or there is. There definitely is lean into it, but you're in Portland now. Do you follow the Trail Blazers at all?
John Mark Comer: You know, I don't much. They are demigods in the city at times, but no,
Henry Kaestner: you don't because the warriors are your team. OK, we're moving on. We like to hear from all of our podcast guests about who they are and where they come from. So before we went live, I understand a little bit more, as you just alluded to, that you grew up in California, but talk to us about your beginning. Talk to us about whether you grew up in a Christian home or not. What that look like. Bring us up until the time that you wrote the book.
John Mark Comer: Yeah, I grew up down near you guys, son of first generation followers of Jesus who came to faith in the Jesus movement of the 60s. My dad, I mean, classic story, was playing in a rock band in the Bay Area in the late 60s 70s. His girlfriend invited him to a Billy Graham crusade. He sat in the back of the arena, and I think he would say that he thought it was ridiculous. And at the end, he found his body walking down the stairs to the altar call. Type of thing. So they came to faith and made a decision early on to kind of prioritize raising followers of Jesus with their four kids and the oldest of four as kind of the driving priority. He became a pastor, ended up, you know, playing drums at his church and ended up as the worship pastor and then later as a church planter. But pretty much he would always prioritize kind of parenting over pastoring, and his view of parenting was very much like priority number one is not how do my kids get into a great university or make a lot of money or learn to play excellent piano or type window or whatever your thing is? But it was very much like, how do I raise up followers of Jesus? So really grateful for that legacy and grew up in the church behind the walls of the church my entire life. You know, in these increasingly kind of secular and more and more progressive cities and context moved up to Portland as a teenager church planted here when my early 20s church kind of took off and hit a spot, let's call it 30. It was sooner than that, but hit a spot where in my spiritual journey, I began to realize that something about the way that I was following Jesus was deeply off kilter. Because my experience of Jesus and my experience of discipleship, my experience of transformation was not what I was reading about in the New Testament. It wasn't what I was reading about from the Saints and Sages of church history. I discovered the writings of Dallas Willard. It sure as heck was not the life that he was writing about living, and my experience was basically, I think this is a lot of people in a kind of western Americanized church, and this is not. This will sound more critically than I mean it. There's no malice in my heart at all. But I think kind of through my early years of following Jesus because I've been with Jesus since a very young age, but through my teenage years through college, through my early 20s, there was this sense of let's just use progress, and I'm not going to nuance that where there's issues with that word, but a sense of forward motion or deeper motion. I felt like year over year. If the three kind of goals of discipleship are to be with Jesus, to become like Jesus and do what he would do if he were you. I felt like year over year I was more and more with Jesus more aware of him and in connection to him by the spirit, more of becoming more like him, more about the things that he was about and doing and saying the kinds of things that he was doing and saying when he was with us and the person. But that kind of hit a plateau, I would say, I don't know, mid-twenties, where I felt the moment my discipleship began to bump up against like deep issues of my personality. Whether you want to call that any graham stuff or whatever you want to call that or just want to call it sin like sin that had literally been habituated into my body, neuro biologically was in my body, at a at a cellular level, at an impulse level, pre conscious thought level. Like all of a sudden, the way I was following Jesus was just like banging my head against a concrete wall or family of origin stuff or wounds from my past experience or cultural assumptions that I was still living in my discipleship kind of rubric. Just it was I hit this plateau and year over year I was not becoming more like Jesus or more and more with Jesus. And then the iPhone came out in 07 or whatever it hits the airwaves, so to speak. And then you have adulting. At this point, I'm now leading a megachurch in my late 20s. We have a staff of ninety three people or something like that. I'm nowhere even close to emotionally mature enough or relationally proficient enough to do this job. And now I felt like I wasn't just on a plateau. I was actually like in decline. You know what I mean? I was like going in the wrong direction I was becoming, if you just take the fruits of the spirit as a basic, you know, metric for where you're at with Jesus, I was becoming less loving, less joyful, less peaceful, less patient with each passing year. And so there was just like this real kind of watershed kind of early life midlife crisis moment that I just knew something was deeply wrong. And that's when I was introduced to the saying from the philosopher Della Swiller. And I began reading his writings, and I was introduced with something he said to a mentee of his, where he said he called Henry the great enemy of spiritual life in our day and then said, this iconic line, you must ruthlessly eliminate Henry from your life. And the moment I came across that story, it hit my deep resonance in my spirit, like a tuning fork, like my inner soul, like bones started to tremor and a real sense of like that put language that put the finger on the pulse of what was wrong at some deep fissure of my life was just I was addicted to a life of speed, to the gospel of upward mobility that our American culture is so good at. Up into the ride, everything up into the right, faster, better. And that is a destructive ideology from the enemy. And so, yeah, it was a turning point in my life. When I began to make some radical changes, I resigned or demoted myself from the large church I was leading, made radical changes to my lifestyle, crafted a rule of life and digital rule of life, and kind of explored ancient Christian practices and kind of the deep way of Jesus down through church history, across time and space. And and it's been just it hasn't solved all my problems. Turns out, life is still hard no matter how you live it, but it has been a beautiful journey and this book was written out of that journey.
Henry Kaestner: Take us back to I'm Still Blown Away 93 staff is a lot for a company for anything, and it's a lot for church. What was that environment like for you? Because I think that that hurry and expectation and this kind of uncomfortable place of trying to celebrate success because it looks like all the KPIs are going in the right direction, everybody's kind of saying that things are going well, you're probably getting a lot of affirmation. Mm-Hmm. And you know where to go? I'm so proud of you or something like that, but maybe I'm imagining that. What was it like? Obviously, the Dallas Willard quote was something that really shook you. But just what was that environment like with these well-meaning people around you? Were they cautioning you along the way, or were they just kind of like, Wow, guys doing something great here? Never seen it. Probably this way, but we must be really special. So it's just let's just keep on going the trends our friend and the momentum is awesome. What was it like both?
John Mark Comer: You know, I had good people, including my dad, speaking into my life, saying, You are going way too fast, you're going to burn out. You can't do it all. But the problem was I was caught up in a system that was designed in such a way that there was no possible way for me to live a Jesus like life, in my opinion. Different people have different capacities. I did not have the capacity to be who Jesus was calling me to be inside that kind of system of responsibility. But then on the other side, it's exactly what you said. You know, that's the weird thing. And churches, even good churches can fall prey to, I'm sure what you guys see in business all of the time where you literally get rewarded for bad behavior. You know what I mean, whether it's workaholism or I'm sure at some point cut throat deals or whatever. But that's not the thing in the church as far as you don't get rewarded for that. But as far as man, you can be a raging success as a pastor and a failure as a human being and as a disciple of Jesus. The only one of the Ten Commandments that we brag about breaking is the Sabbath. We literally brag about on the first one of the office, last one to go. I work this many hours a week. It's been this many days since I had a day off. We brag about it's one of the Ten Commandments. Imagine, like, yeah, I had three affairs last month, you know, like bragging about sin by God. But we brag about it when it comes to rest life, rhythm balance. That's how far the culture has drifted from Jesus vision of human flourishing. It was both. There were people warning me, you know, like, are red lights on the dashboard? But I was in the system where a man, it's like, you're on the freeway. Do you ever like tried to drive slow on a freeway and a bicycle doesn't work. You're on a freeway. You have to drive at a certain pace down a certain road. And that's what it was like. That role was like for me. And then, you know, there's lots of people that want to reward you. So I just had this moment. You know, there's a really important moment that everybody hits at some point. For most people, I think it comes around 30 or 40 where you realize, you know, when you're young, you're human. Personhood feels really plastic. It feels really malleable, like 20 somethings. We're always asking that question. You know, who will I become? What's it going to happen with my life, my career, my marriage, my family? Who will I become? Well, you don't realize is that feeling goes away? And at some point? It's replaced by a wow. This is who I became. You know, you think of the saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Who says that old people, not young people, young people like, what are you talking about? I can be. I can just you do you be who you want to be? You do what you want to do. And because we have this totally erroneous and infantile view of human personality that says, we're like just this whiteboard that we can be whatever we want rather than what the ancients have always said, Christian. And not that you are the sum total of a bajillion tiny cumulative decisions that you have made over a lifetime. That habit is a form of character and characters, Destiny and C.S. Lewis said. At first, you have a choice and eventually you have a character. You live a certain way for a long enough period of time and you are forming the inner sense of who you are that inner part of you that chooses, you're forming yourself into someone or something good or bad. Lewis also said We're all becoming either immortal hoarders or everlasting splendors, which is why if you think about when I say this, a lot of sensitivity and no ageism at all. Trust me, my spirit. But if you think about elderly people, if you run kind of through your mental Rolodex of people in their 90s that you know, very few of them are like middle of the road character wise, like most 20 somethings I know aren't really evil or really good, they're just cool or whatever. They're just twenty five. Most 95 year olds I know are either saints. You know, they repent at church or they're weeping to the Lord's Supper. You're like, What are you repenting of your sins since 1987? I don't know what you would even repent of. Like watching too much TV guide? I don't even know, you know, or and we hesitate to say this, but most of us know these people. They are the most narcissistic, manipulative, unhappy, critical, impossible to please, you know, depressed people you've ever met in your life. There's very few in between. Whereas with most 20-somethings, most people aren't either extreme. They're more in the middle. And that's because you're becoming a person. The question is what kind of person are you becoming? That's why I don't think discipleship is a Jesus thing. I think it's a human thing. We're all, we're all discipline. We're all following someone or something. We're all becoming a person. The question is, are we becoming more like Christ? And in doing so, our true self? Or would becoming more like Tim Ferriss or whoever our hero of choice is? And this is why who we follow is the defining question of life. So I did hit that moment where I was old enough now that about 30, where I could kind of plot the trajectory of my character out a few decades and I can now imagine myself at 60, you know, 30 years down the road. And I can imagine, like, alright, if I stay on this trajectory over decades, what kind of sort of person will I become? And what I saw was terrifying. It was basically, I'm in a loveless marriage. My children want nothing to do with me because I was an angry, critical perfectionist dad who was at work all of the time. You know, I'm bitter about certain things. I'm miserably unhappy. You know, that happiness is the metric, but I'm not a well person in the I can chart myself. I was still theologically Orthodox. I was probably still the pastor, but I was not increasingly like Jesus through my personality. So that was a real turning point kind of wake up moment for me.
William Norvell: Wow. Wow, that's amazing. I just hope everyone listening entrepreneurs who are finding their identity and things that maybe aren't that and not trying to continue their character journey. Just listen to that and take that in. And Jim are going to dig into the book a little bit. As we discussed before we came on air. I'm that creepy guy that thinks I'm your friend, but I'm really not your friend, our church. And it wasn't
John Mark Comer: creepy until you said it was creepy. Now I'm like, I know I need to be worried. Do I need to get off this call?
William Norvell: I don't think so, but you know you can. Yeah, we've got mutual friends. You can ask them. But I've been a big fan. Our churches have had partnerships and done series together, and it's just amazing. I've read your books, your garden city, you know, we're not going to talk a lot about Garden City, but if entrepreneurs are listening, it's in my faith and work starter kit. I usually hand people every good endeavor with Tim Keller and Garden City by John Mark and say, Hey, start here. You know, this will tell you what work and Sabbath and life was supposed to look like in the garden. So grateful for that book and grateful for so many of your teachings. We're going to move to hurry. And as Henry mentioned, it's something that rocked me. It did rocked my marriage and it reoriented our Sabbath. It made me think about so many things we're about to talk about. So I'm excited for you to dove in a little bit and I would just ask you to jump in. I mean, for those that maybe haven't read the book, we haven't been convinced yet convinced them that Harry is not just a symptom, but actually a root cause for so many of the problems that entrepreneurs may face.
John Mark Comer: Yeah, you know, Carl Jung said, Hurry isn't of the devil, it is the devil. And there's, you know, that's just a pithy saying, but there's something in it. You know, when Willard said, Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. It's hard to even agree with that much less lived that way in a culture where hustle is a positive thing, not a pejorative, you know, and where the thought is, you know, do more, do faster. Go, go, go. And of course, you have great writers even from your neck of the woods, Greg Macfarlan and Cal Newport and others that are really pushing back on the myth of, you know, business equals productivity, you know, and that's obviously your space more than MySpace. I've read just enough to be dangerous, but is my clear understanding that God bless Elon Musk, but 80 hours a week of hustle is actually not the best way to make a meaningful contribution or even grow your business or whatever your thing is. There's deep work. There's meaningful contribution. That's a very different thing at a different pace. But again, I come at it more a little bit less through the angle of, you know, vocation or productivity, though I think that matters, and I think it matters for Christians to be thinking about that. I think, you know, you can make a very biblical case for work productivity because time is precious. You have the whole concept of redeeming the time in the New Testament, and life is like a vapor. But I come at it more again, just to the angle of spiritual formation of becoming more like Jesus of growth and maturity. You know, let's again, let's just take the fruit of the spirit as our metric Lovejoy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. Hurry is incompatible with that entire list. So just think about love, you know, pretty much all of my worst moments, my most unloving moments as a husband, as a father, as a pastor, as a neighbor, as a friend, or when I'm in a hurry and I don't have time to attend to my loved ones, to my family, to my community, or I'm there in body. But my mind's going a million miles per hour and I'm texting because I didn't get my work done for the day. And I'm not present to the person or I'm president, but I'm too emotionally exhausted to actually have compassion on them and connect with them on an emotional level. You know, I'm just I have three kids. I have a wonderful wife who's late for everything. God bless her. Trying to get anywhere on time as a family is just like a minor war, you know? And some of my most unloving moments are when we're late for something. Get in the car. I don't have time. Stop crying. Get in the back of the car. We'll talk about it later. You know, why do you always do this? Some of my most unloving moments, you know, and really most of life is interruption. C.S. Lewis again once said something to the effect of how you respond to an interruption is who you really are, which is like, Oh my gosh, you know, I respond terrible to interruption because I'm I don't have enough time. I don't have time for interruptions. This is not on my schedule and I have too much to do already. But most 80 percent of parenting is dealing with interruptions, and a huge chunk of life is navigating interruptions well. And so if we're so busy and such a speed and moving at such a frenetic pace, we'll miss these interruptions in these moments for love. We won't have the emotional capacity to sit with people, to listen, to attend to people with our full presence to have compassion. The Japanese theologian who's passed away now but he wrote this beautiful essay called Three Mile an Hour God and I had to Google that I had no idea what that meant. Apparently three miles per hour is the speed of walking, and he just has this whole short meditation on how God has his speed. And it's the speed of love and love is a walking speed. And if God could go faster, he would, but God is love, so we can't, and I really think there's an inner and outer speed. There's a pace to love, a pace to the way of Jesus. That is, when you look at the life of Jesus, he's unhurried. He's present to the moment. He's late for certain things on purpose. He has space. He has margin. He's just fully available to each person, prophetically aware of what God is doing in that moment and what God is calling him to do in that day. It's an extraordinary kind of model of human life. And then you could just go down the list joy. You know what I mean? All of the experts on happiness tie it to like presence to the moment the more like grounded in your body and your breathing and presence of the moment and gratitude for what is right now, the happier you are peace. I mean, had just imagine, you know, being late for a flight or something, that feeling in your body when you're late and you're stressed and you have too much to do, it's it is not peace. Whatever that's going through your body, it's not peace. It's anxiety and stress and all of that. So we can just go down through the list. And I just believe that hurry is incompatible with following Jesus and not just with following. Jesus had an emotional level like, Oh, you won't have the love and joy and peace. Some people are legitimately very much Type-A, active, busy people that can be really happy doing those things. But at the end of the day, our discipleship to Jesus is a form of relationship and relationships of intimacy. Take a lot of time and they take intentionality. They take disciplines, they take covenant and they're not efficient. My relationship with my wife is not efficient. My relationship with my three kids is wildly inefficient and it's time consuming, and I don't always enjoy it. And sometimes I really enjoy it, but they're deeply meaningful to me. And at the end of the day, many of us are just too. It's not that we don't love Jesus. Ronald Ro Heisserer has that great line where more busy than bad. It's just that we don't have time to have much of a relationship with Jesus. Or when we do set aside time, we're going at such a speed and our mind is so distracted by our phone and the digital age and apps and alerts and pushes that we can barely even pay attention to Jesus. And prayer becomes just a way of like trying to calm a wild mind. So at some point you reach a spot where in the same way, with my wife, if I said, I love you, babe, I want to be with you forever, no matter how many times I said that if I worked 100 hours a week, never came home, didn't have a date night with her, I didn't have touchpoints with her. At some point she would say, Honey, you actually you say you love me and you say you want to be an emergency, but you're not in a marriage. This is not a marriage. This is not a relationship or this is barely one. You're doing something else, and I'm just here on the margins of your life. And at some point you'd have to decide, do I actually want to stay faithful to the covenant I made? Am I ready to be married or not? And sometimes I wonder if that's what kind of what our relationship with Jesus is, and that's not to shame anyone. It's more just like a sobering moment of wake up, like, wow, is Jesus on the periphery in the margins of my life or at the center? Is this a relationship of intimacy with the father and the son and the Holy Spirit? Or is this just like a kind of how we feel about the warriors? Like I'm a fan? It's great. I don't know if I have time to go to the game tonight. Hopefully, they do good. I'll read about in the news tomorrow for minutes. Is that kind of more the relationship with Jesus? Are you a fan or are you a follower, a disciple, an apprentice of Jesus?
William Norvell: No, that's amazing. And I want to. What of the things we like to just kind of hit a complaint potentially that some of our entrepreneurs might they might be thinking, You know what? That sounds great, but you don't know my life. I've got 50 employees, you know, I've got shareholders. I told these investors things and you know, that's the bargain I made. I have to work 80 hours a week. I'm an entrepreneur like, that's what it is. Is this is this the way it's always been? Is this technology that caused this problem? Is that basically, like, is there a way out? You know, I mean, for those type of people is, you know, hey. Because I think what I heard you say is you're not telling you to sacrifice success. Actually, this will lead to success. But maybe go a layer deeper on that for our company leaders listening in.
John Mark Comer: Well, William, I mean, I'd love to have you answer that for me. I mean, of course, I could quote to you. You know, the Microsoft study from last year that found a four day work with our five hour workday was, you know, increased productivity by 40 percent. I could quote, do you study after study that says after fifty five hours a week of work, your productivity plummets and the difference between working 80 hours a week and fifty five hours a week is almost negligible, which is really interesting because that's basically a six day workweek. And Jesus said the Sabbath minimum is actually two commandments. It's for six days. You shall work, and the seven is a day of rest to God's Rusty commanded to work, and we're commanded to rest and work. It's a six and one rhythm six and one and six and one. So all that to say I could quote studies at you. I can tell you about my life and how I work. You know, I still work very hard, but I think you have to work smarter, not necessarily longer. But I think I'm more productive now than. I've ever been as a writer, as a teacher, as a leader, but I've also had to make major sacrifices that I thought would permanently damage my career is kind of a gross word for a bastard years, but has actually had the opposite effect. But I still think most people would write me off because I'm a pastor and a writer. What about you, William? What have you obviously ear habituating or attempting to habituate some of the stuff in your life? It's touched you at some heart level. How are you working it out?
William Norvell: Yeah. And I'll invite Rusty and Henry to. I mean, I think for me, I'm I'm in in the sense that I know it's right. And you know, some of the stories you tell in the book around, like, guess how long the average human used to sleep at night? That's right, 11 hours right from there to like the invention of the light bulb. Right. It's like so when you think about these titans of industry, John Rockefeller and some of these people, they weren't working 90 hour weeks. No, that wasn't true. And I've read Ben Franklin's diary and he basically had an eight to five schedule and this guy invented all kinds of things. And you know, and we, as Christians, have the gift of the Holy Spirit to move time and space outside of us if we submit to his will. And so, you know, this is an excited disciple working through it, saying, I see the light. I haven't put the light into practice, but the small pieces I've been able to. So one you convince me of a months ago as I turned my phone off every weekend, Saturday at five p.m. till Sunday at 5:00.
John Mark Comer: Well, then and
William Norvell: I tell you, I find myself, of course, seeing my children differently. I found myself seeing my wife differently. And you know what? The weird stuff I find myself just like staring at trees sometimes too, and being like, That's a pretty tree. I didn't know that existed, but you know, God called trees beautiful. So that's how it's working out for me. I mean, it's a it's an evolution, but I believe it. You know, it's kind of like the gospel. I believe it. I'm still working on trying to, like, capture it. Yeah.
John Mark Comer: You know, I'm not an entrepreneur. You know, the classical sense. But I planted a couple of churches and I'm starting a nonprofit right now, so I know a little bit of what that's like. Just that feeling of starting something from scratch. And, you know, I mean, a couple of thoughts one would be be careful how you build, be careful that you don't build yourself into a prison. You know, it's like you have read that book when you were kids, Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel. Anybody ever read that? OK, well, if you have kids, get it. It's a great read. It's about this back in the day when they had like bulldozers that were power. Yes.
William Norvell: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, there's
John Mark Comer: no opposition who can build the fastest, and he literally builds so fast that he digs this huge seller for like a town like library or city hall. I think it's a city hall in like small town America. It's an old book, and he builds so fast and he stirs up the dust and it's like, nobody's ever done it this fast. And then he gets to the bottom and he realizes that he didn't build a way out. And now he's stuck at the bottom of what's supposed to be the basement of the city hall. And it ends happy. It ends up like the steam engine becomes like the furnace and he becomes like the caretaker. So it has a happy ending. But there's something of that where sometimes he build so fast and so furiously that we build ourselves into a prison. And all of a sudden now we can't escape the building or the company or the organization that we start to be careful. How you build another thought would just be. Remember, there are seasons to life and don't let a season become normal. Sometimes there are just seasons where what's required of us as leaders is far outside of our kind of healthy rhythms of what we would say is a balanced life, you know, and balanced life can be a misleading thing. And like, you know, COVID has been that for me. Like, I went into coma, tired. I had scheduled six months. I wasn't going to travel at all. I thought really called to just be present to my family rests more exact a month long vacation that June and the week I got back from all my travel is the week that the world shut down. And as a pastor, unprecedented global pandemic. No gatherings now for over a year. That was an unprecedented experience for us. It was some of the hardest. It was one of the I haven't worked that hard since we started the church 18 years ago. I just worked might hill off. It was like up in the morning, morning prayer and Sabbath. Other than that, it was just like I was working till I was dog tired at night. Is that how I think we should live? No. But there's a season. There are seasons to life, like when you're trying to lead a church through a global pandemic in Portland, Oregon, of all places when the city was literally on fire and like anarchy, was roaming the streets. So there are seasons to life. But if I let that season, it's one thing to have a season for a year or three to six months. It's another thing to let that become how I live. And so now I'm having to intentionally alter my life, like even rebuild. You know that my body has this time of day when it's done work in, you know, over the last year, it's been several hours later than it should be. And so I'm having to rebuild that kind of muscle memory. All right. It's time to go home now and help my wife cook dinner. Third thing I would say is, you know, and this will only appeal to certain personality types. But if you're at all like me, I'm pretty duty base, pretty workaholic. I probably have more freedom as a leader than I let myself take advantage of. And I've met. A number of business owners, entrepreneurs, pastors, when you actually meet them and look at their life, they're not nearly as busy or stressed out as you would imagine they are. You know, they get that. Is that the paretta principle, whatever is called where, you know, 20 percent of your work yields 80 percent of your results. So they're all about that. Forgive me if I have the math off for the name of art, but they're all about that 20 percent you and they nail the 20 percent every week and then they kind of have a house and they, you know, a big golfer, whatever they do, and they live well because part of it is like, how do we be healthy human beings for decades, you know? So I do wonder, you know, if there's more flexibility, creativity, freedom as far as how we structure our lives as leaders, then sometimes we allow ourselves to.
Rusty Rueff: This really resonates with me. John Mark, I've always been a big fan of, and I think they say Napoleon said it, but I think he quoted somebody else, you know, dress me slow for my must ride fast today. Hmm. Right? You know, with the idea of preparation, you know, helping you at the time that you have to go fast. And you know, this idea of ruthless elimination of hurry also, isn't it also the ruthless elimination of the things that might make you hurry? Yes. You know, I was I was talking to an entrepreneur and I said, You know, why should you have your materials ready for your board four days ahead of time? Well, it's respectful. It helps them, you know, it helps, you know, it really helps you because if you don't do it well ahead of time, you're going to have to hurry at the end. Yeah. And then you're going to miss things and you're not going to have time to think. And so, yeah, I think we all need a dose of what you're talking about here. And I know in the book, you also go deeper into some practices you've got for practices. Sometimes we need to list. Can you give us a list of what those four practices are?
John Mark Comer: Yeah, I mean, again, these are these are practices or spiritual disciplines from the way of Jesus. But although I think there's broadly applicable at many levels, you know, to people that are not even followers of Jesus, but the four practices are one silence and solitude to Sabbath, three simplicity and for slowing.
Rusty Rueff: So those are great practices. But it's interesting. I mean, there's nothing and I want you to take this the wrong way. I mean, there's nothing new in those things, right? And we know those things. I'm a
John Mark Comer: pastor. When a pastor has something new to say, we have a word for it, it's heresy. So that's that's fine. I'm a part of something ancient that is anchored in thousands of years of tradition. That's my whole thing is there are these ancient human practices for flourishing that we've lost in very recent history. I mean, my dad, you guys in Silicon Valley, my dad's all tell stories about in the late 60s when 7-Eleven opened and it was the first thing ever open on a Sunday tell stories about Sunday in Silicon Valley before it was called Silicon Valley, where the entire city shut down. There was no shopping and you couldn't so much as buy a cup of coffee. He said. Basically, everybody went to church. It was just a matter of like Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, and whether it was, you know, serious or more mainline. And then everybody just would spend their afternoons napping with their family like it was just the Sabbath was built into the cultural art. Can you imagine that right now in Silicon Valley, of all places like cultural architecture of a whole that was in the 1960s, it was not for thousands of years that was normative to human experience. So yes, I'm all about the ancient.
Rusty Rueff: So it might well be that on the other side of history is having good timing because you've had, you know, these are hitting us at a time where they're resonating, you know, broadly. So are you seeing something in sort of modern society that, you know, says this might be why it's resonating or maybe even help us understand what you think, why their message is resonating with so many people?
John Mark Comer: Yeah. Well, I mean, gosh, I mean, there's hours of conversation there, right? Rusty, you know, and I think there's practical things just like the digital age, the iPhone app kind of social media, silicon world is literally built for distraction and addiction. It's manipulative technology for the most part that's designed to profit off of people's human vulnerabilities. So there's some very practical things like our culture no longer closes down on Sunday. People no longer go to church, or if they do, it's rare. We have iPhones in our pockets that are designed to distract us, addict us, manipulate us, behaviorally, modify us, you know? But there are much deeper, I think, cultural fissures. There's a German Korean philosopher named Byun Chul Han that's written a beautiful little book. It's dense, but it's really short. If you want to read it, it's called the Burnout Society. And he writes about the shift in the West from a previous kind of culture what he calls an honor culture. And what he means by that is a little bit less unashamed. He just means that you would accrue social capital by being a good person, specifically by fulfilling your role in society well, as a husband or father or mother or child or a merchant or a priest like a guardian of tradition. You had a role to play in society, and you accrued social capital by playing that role well and by being a good person of honor and dignity and character and community. But now we live in what he calls an achievement society where you accrue social capital by basically success, careerism, education, how much money you make, how famous you are, climbing the ladder up into the right beauty. All of these things, it's performative. It's driven. It's not rooted in who you are or your character or the people you're with, but an external kind of up into the right metrics. And he basically writes about how what's this done? It's created a generation wide epidemic of anxiety and burnout because your identity itself is performative. Whether identity is based on your racial makeup or your gender or your sexuality or your company that you founded or your political affiliation is all sorts of different forms of cultural identities and intersections of those identities. But many of them are very performative. You're only as good as your last performance of that identity. And that creates massive anxiety because you're not love for who you are, your love for who you're performing to be, you're not love for. You know how you are in the world, your love for how good your business is or what the bottom line is or what this quarter was or what your, you know, whatever metrics you guys would say in the end, massive just burnout becomes epidemic because I've read all the studies burnout among, you know, educated digital workers is like worse than it has ever been. It's epidemic levels. And then he writes about how that's giving the achievement society's actually now morphing into what he calls a doping society where whether that's literally through dope or microdosing LSD, or whether it's just through Netflix and Instagram and food and alcohol or whatever, people are trying to escape the anxiety and the burnout of their life. So I do think there are much deeper kind of Western fissures of this whole like identity matrix of secular culture, where life is the short thing. It's a chance accident. And so you got to go through social capital by killing it, whether it's at work or whatever a man that is performative, it is exhausting. That's so different than the biblical way of doing identity where identity is received. It's not a performance, it's a gift. Your identity is who you are loved by. The most important thing in life is not what you do. Even though that matters, it's who you're becoming and the people you're becoming that person with. It's your relational soul. You have all of eternity out before you. This life is just a just a not even a warm up. It's just a beginning for the soul that you will be forever with God. It's a radically different worldview that invites us into a whole different way of life. You know, one of my mentors and I quote him in the book says So well, hurry isn't just the sign of a disordered scheduled, the sign of a disordered heart. It's often a heart that says, I need to do more. I need accomplish more. I need to make more in order to be happy, be OK, have a stable identity, have a sense of self-worth. Who am I if my business fails? Who am I? If nobody comes to my church, who am I? If nobody listens to my sermon or reads my book, who am I? My next book totally flops. Do I have an identity that is happy and at peace? Good circumstances that are steadily improving up into the right is not an adequate foundation for life, right?
Rusty Rueff: So I'm going to ask you to return to the pulpit and use those altar call skills here. Speak directly to our entrepreneurs. Tell them what's on the other side if they, you know, can adopt this philosophy. Slow down. Eliminate hurry in their lives.
John Mark Comer: Mm hmm. Well, I mean, the gift is, I mean, gosh, just at a heart level, OK? Read the book. If you want to hear more about the heart level, let me just talk to entrepreneurs. I care. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about work. I care deeply about business. I have. I've written another book called Garden City. That's all about kind of a biblical theology of work and vocation of a very robust theology of work. Not just quote sacred work, but secular work in that bifurcation is not helpful. But man, there is such a difference. There is such a freedom and joy and greater courage and boldness. When work becomes not an ambition, not a God that you are looking to for an identity, for a sense of happiness that you need, but rather it becomes just an act of loving contribution. It actually enables you to have your work come from a place of deep courage because you can do what God's actually put in your heart, not just what you feel you need to do to make a certain amount of money or be liked or meet a certain criteria. You can actually be more bold, more daring, more faith driven, as you would say, more creative, more compassionate and more free when you get to the spot. So much of, I think, spiritual formation, discipleship, Christian spirituality, whatever you want to call it, is about coming to a place in our heart where we are detached in a healthy way from outcomes, where how we live really matters and the work that God's called us to do. The business is called us to lead or start or, you know, whatever my case, the you know, the book is called me to write the teachings is called me to do it all matters a lot. But man, my emotional well-being is not tied to the outcomes, you know? So for me, I'm not an entrepreneur, you know, I'm a writer. And so I have a new book coming out, and I'm really worried that it's not going to do very good. My last one did really good, and that's totally out of my control. And so if I can. Get to the spot where, man, I know what God's called me to do to write this book and I want to work my tail on an affair, I want to make it the best thing I've ever done and I want success to be man. This was born out of prayer and sweat and blood and tears in my life in our church. And here it is, and that success for the three people. Read it or 300000 people read it. I'm not in control of that. I abandoned outcomes and I'm not emotionally dependent on either outcome for me to be at a place of peace and love and joy. That is what has the potential to come, not just if you slow your life down, but if you actually recalibrate your metrics for success. We all live from metrics for success. We're all like playing a game against some kind of a scorecard. The question it's the you know, is it Stephen Covey who has that whole like, write your eulogy, exercise he has you. Do you know there's something really wise, guy? Go write your eulogy. What do you want said about you when you're 80? When you die? Just read a great study a couple of weeks ago on bereavement looking at death through COVID 19. And it said that when you die, the on average nine people are bereaved, meaning when you die, there's nine people that like they go into mourning, you know, they're literally grieving nine people, not
William Norvell: a lot of people. That's that hurts.
John Mark Comer: That's not a lot of people, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would come to the funeral, maybe or be like, Oh, I'm so sad that John Mark on that motorcycle accident died. That's really I'm really sad about that. What's for dinner? Nine people are going to be bereaved. That really puts things in perspective. You know, none of my book is not going to be around 10000 years from now. So some of that like, OK, what actually matters in life when I'm, you know, it's the whole What's your face? You did the lessons of the dying, the five top lessons of the hospice nurse. You know, the five top refrains that dying people said one of the top five was I wish I had worked less hours, and I just think, you know, you have to ask, what's your metrics for success? Some of the entrepreneurs that we look to as heroes, you know, Elon Musk. I was fascinated by his biography. His life mission is to turn human beings into an interplanetary species. Awesome. That's not my metrics for success. And, you know, selling this number of books or whatever, for me, that can't be my metrics for success that I would love it if that happened. But that's not what I'm going to grade my life against. When all is said and done, so it's good to have goals. It's good to have dreams for our career and our businesses and our vacations. That's all great. But we have to abandon outcomes and we have to clearly define what our metrics for success. And then we have to try to create and craft a lifestyle to execute against those long term goals. And more and more, I think about discipleship as crafting a lifestyle that is conducive to deep healing and transformation through abiding in Christ and living in his community.
William Norvell: Amen Amen, that is a great place to move your clothes, unfortunately, but we are out of time here, I do want to remind people to pick up the book. Of course, we'll link to it in the show, notes your sister podcast, The Jefferson Bakkie. And you know, did I think ten episodes where you went through a little deeper in some of the chapters? Maybe not a book reader in your podcast listener, which theoretically most of you are, that may be a better medium for you to go a little deeper on some of the lessons from the book, and it's amazing as well. Jefferson was actually kind of writing a book on to fight against Hustle. Unbeknownst to you, and you all teamed up for a podcast which really cool you guys. And he's a great hang. Yeah, we should. So everybody look at that. Our last question we loved to here, the Faith Driven Entrepreneur is we invite our guests to share our from the Florida scripture. Somewhere in God's word that may be coming live to you in a new way could be a season could be something, he told you this morning. We just love to invite you to to share a little piece of God's word and how it's impacting you.
John Mark Comer: You know, scriptures meditated on this morning. I taught it a few weeks ago and it's very applicable to my life. I'm transitioning out of the lead pastor role, and that's a very emotional experience going very well. But it's very emotional experience and a lot of deep into ego and entitlement and fear and power and letting go of control. Very interesting space for me right now, and I've just been meditating on Jesus line in Matthew. Twenty three, those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. And I think it's really interesting. Jesus doesn't state that as a command. He doesn't say go and humble yourself in order to be. He states it as just a statement of reality. This is just how the world works. Christian or not and purpose. This is just people who exalt themselves are eventually humbled and people who humble themselves as a general rule. Here there's something that God does. So, man, I've just been thinking a lot about what leadership looks like and the interface between leadership, humility, integrity and mercy and becoming somebody who humbles himself in order to really let my work be about others and not myself. That's aspirational. My heart is not there at all. My behavior is not always there, but that's that's something that I think is broadly applicable, that I'm today as we speak, meditating on.
Rusty Rueff: Thanks so much for joining us on today's show. We hope you enjoyed it. We are very grateful
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