74. Are You Obsessed With the Wrong Kind of Profit?
Mar 05, 2024
If you're tired and anxious more than you are spent and satisfied, it is likely you are stalked by the 3-Headed Monster of Worry, Fear, and Anxiety. Depending on the type of profit you are constantly striving for–it can either fuel this monster, or be the enemy to extinguish it. Which kind of profit are you striving for?
Scott Beebe gives the ultimate challenge for men running their own businesses: how to go after the right kind of profit. We are often riddled with fear... are we going to find the right amount of clients, how much do we owe to the IRS?, what happens if I don't make "more" than last year?
Key Takeaways:
How to punch fear in the mouth
Profit is an action that gains an advantage–which advantage are you going for?
How to go from "tired + anxious" to "spent + satisfied"
Today's episode is a recording from our ISI Live Event archives. If you're interested in more talks like this plus deep dives in mastermind groups, register to come to our April Live Event happening in Nashville, TN, April 19-21st: https://go.viewfromthetop.com/spring2024/guestinvite
Connect with Scott Beebe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottebeebe/ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/ Scott Beebe is the founder and head coach of MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and the author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. He also hosts the Business On Purpose podcast, where he shares real stories of how he and the BOP team are working with business owners and their key leaders. They help build systems, processes, and purpose using the Business On Purpose Roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working IN their business and help them get their lives back by articulating and implementing intentional Vision/Mission/Values, Systems, and Processes.
If you're tired and anxious more than you are spent and satisfied, it is likely you are stalked by the 3-Headed Monster of Worry, Fear, and Anxiety. Depending on the type of profit you are constantly striving for–it can either fuel this monster, or be the enemy to extinguish it. Which kind of profit are you striving for?
Scott Beebe gives the ultimate challenge for men running their own businesses: how to go after the right kind of profit. We are often riddled with fear... are we going to find the right amount of clients, how much do we owe to the IRS?, what happens if I don't make "more" than last year?
Key Takeaways:
How to punch fear in the mouth
Profit is an action that gains an advantage–which advantage are you going for?
How to go from "tired + anxious" to "spent + satisfied"
Today's episode is a recording from our ISI Live Event archives. If you're interested in more talks like this plus deep dives in mastermind groups, register to come to our April Live Event happening in Nashville, TN, April 19-21st: https://go.viewfromthetop.com/spring2024/guestinvite
Connect with Scott Beebe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottebeebe/ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/ Scott Beebe is the founder and head coach of MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and the author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. He also hosts the Business On Purpose podcast, where he shares real stories of how he and the BOP team are working with business owners and their key leaders. They help build systems, processes, and purpose using the Business On Purpose Roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working IN their business and help them get their lives back by articulating and implementing intentional Vision/Mission/Values, Systems, and Processes.
Hey everybody, welcome back to View from the Top podcast, where we help growth-minded Christian businessmen who desire momentum in their business, their family and their finance get through the valleys and up the mountain to their very own View from the Top. Hey, I'm glad you all are listening in today. My name is Wally and we're going to do something we've never done before in this week's episode. We're going to take a back row seat in a TED Talk style presentation by Scott Beebe entitled the Worry, fear and Anxiety of a Misguided Profit Obsession. I don't know about you, but, owning and leading a business for over 20 years now, I have always had a love-hate relationship with profit, and Scott hits a nerve with me in his presentation when he talks about WFA the worry, fear and anxiety that can wrap itself around our pursuit of profit. Scott's been a guest on this pod before and currently has the highest downloaded episode called Punch Fear in the Mouth. So I'd encourage you to grab a pen, a paper and buckle up as we jump right into Scott's talk. Here we go.
Speaker 2:
Everything that I'm going to be talking about comes out of two complementary missions. The first mission is for our family and we really do have this written down. We talk about it all the time, we've talked about it for years, and that's to be a light and to create space through adventure, wisdom and time around the table. That's why I love we're around tables right now. Now, that also feeds our business mission, and so this is our little business team. So, again, I'm getting all this out of the way early so we can dive in, and so this is the business on purpose team. We have the opportunity to spend every second of every day trying to liberate business owners from the chaos of working in their business so that they can make time for what matters most the family mission and the business mission, and we put those two things together. We have this saying that we say all the time that life and business necessarily intersect. Not a human in here. That if something happens to you at home, it does not affect your work. Not anybody in here that if something happens at work, it does not affect your home. If not, you're not a human. You're trying to bifurcate these things that were never meant to be separated. God created us all unique to bring those two things together, and I want you to see that these missions come together. This is the roadmap that we do. By the way, isn't it so crazy? David mentioned that there's no school for CEOs. Bop just happens to be a CEO school. I just wrote that down, by the way. So, anyway, this is the roadmap that we walk people through and that's how we start to liberate owners from chaos highly curriculumized, walking people through principal-based coaching. So that's what we do. That's my background, family, our business, and then I was going to do this before we did it.
Speaker 2:
We just found out that our book got posted to Audible a couple of weeks ago. That was only a four-month process, after it was recorded, by the way, to get it up there, and if you want, I'll pull this back up later, but if you want, it's free here. It's not on Audible, this is some other platform. Jesse has it on, but that QR code should take you to my full scope audiobook. I'm narrating it, so it's in my voice, which is always kind of interesting and fun. By the way, there's one whole chapter in the book that we don't use anymore, and I read the whole chapter and right at the end I'm like, hey, by the way, we don't use any of that. That I just told you. And so reading your own book is pretty fun because you can sort of narrate around that. So if you guys want it, you're welcome to have it. Are we ready, ready? All right, pins, papers.
Speaker 2:
Your obsession with profit is driving you crazy because the aim of your profit might be misguided. So the guy named Carl Lentz he was a pastor of Hillsong Church in New York City. Some of you all may have heard of him and it was a pretty influential church and he had some of the biggest names come through the door of that church Selena Gomez, bono, justin Bieber, kardashians those are some of the names that walked through the door of Hillsong New York City. Until they didn't, pastor Lentz was growing in his popularity and his influence and his opinion and his notoriety and then all of a sudden he wasn't. Now I'm not banging on the guy. He's actually the subject of a documentary on Hulu. You could go watch it if you want, and so I watched the documentary. I was keenly interested and on the documentary Carl Lentz actually comes and he begins to confess that he was obsessing over the profit of what he called the profit of the world, and he found it in the arms of another lady, and it began to inflict severe damage on his soul.
Speaker 2:
There's another guy named Ellick Murdoch, and, for those of you who may have followed that trial these past couple of years, ellick Murdoch's River House is one mile from my house. The 14th district is the district that he and his family, for the last 100 years, have held the solicitor's seat for, and the state of South Carolina. The solicitor's seat is one of the most powerful judicial seats in the state, and his family's held that, and so during his entire tenure, he had access to growing power and influence. Notoriety, capability and his hunger for more kept pushing him into behaviors and habits that started to drive him to a point where a jury convicted him early this year of murdering his own son. Just a couple weeks ago, he actually confessed to hundreds of more financial crimes. And so all of this? He was stealing money from clients, from banks, from bankers, from families, from friends, anybody he could steal, from all in the name to grab more profit.
Speaker 2:
Murdoch was obsessing over the profit of the world, and where he found it was in pills and in deals, and he was inflicting severe damage on his soul. Now, lentz and Murdoch I'm not trying to out these guys, these are real, albeit some pretty extreme stories that serve to shake us into a reality, to put us on notice that many of us, some of us in this room, are on a relentless pursuit of profit and we need to be really careful of what kind of profit we're going after. Are we going after the profit of the world? Are we going after a more meaningful profit? And if we're going after and stampeding after the profit of the world, we're at risk of inflicting damage on our own soul.
Speaker 2:
There were moments in Jesus's three years of what Dallas Wilde would call relaxed service that he offered, and it's interesting, and I'll dive into that a little bit later where his words created quite a stir. It was a bit of a scandal actually. And so to be a student of other rabbis during that time, what it meant was to start to jockey for prominence, to lobby for more position, because if I could get more position as a student of this rabbi, I gain more influence. More influence means more profit to whatever that means, and the profit gives me latitude to eat, drink and be merry, and I can coast to the end, as if that was the goal. In a uniquely terse statement, jesus said this Whoever wants to be my student must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to save their lives will lose it. Whoever is willing to lose their life for me and the good news that I bring will be able to save it.
Speaker 2:
So this is the meat and potatoes of Jesus's memo to us. Whatever you see is the norm. The truth is likely antagonistic. It's upside down East. Stanley Jones actually called it the upside down kingdom, but that wasn't the real bomb drop.
Speaker 2:
The real bomb came next. Jesus said hey, what does it profit a man to gain the entire world and yet to inflict damage on his own soul? There may be no bigger celebrant of profit or margin than the one who is presenting this message to you right now. With every heroic business owner we work with, we follow the methodology that Rocky laid out for you earlier today. It's almost to a point where it's now criminal not to because of the diversification of something that comes in whole that we need to split up. That's our priority, that's what we need to be doing. But why do we do that? Why do we talk about and obsess over profits so much with our clients? Well, it's because of what profit is, because profit is far more than profit. And so when you actually break the word down this is where I want you to start writing down notes when you break the word down pro and fit, so put those two words side by side and what you get are two Latin roots that have been combined together. And the pro on the front side of it means to move up position. So if you're in position number 15, to be pro in the Latin means to move up to position 14 or 13 or 12. And the fit, or the fasciari in Latin, literally means an action, to take action, to do something. And so the concept of profit is very simply an action that gains an advantage. That's all profit is. But the question is for who? So I've taken action that's gained an advantage, but the advantage for who Profit is positioned? You've simply gained an advantage in front of where you were currently See, profit affords opportunity, but opportunity is neutral.
Speaker 2:
You get to decide what to do with opportunity, just like money. Money is simply a neutral tool that you have the opportunity to deploy in a way that's healthy or deploy in a way that's going to hurt other people. Well, opportunity is the same. It's a neutral tool. Profit is actually a non-monetary combined word that we in the West have obsessed about and turned it into a money-centered concept. But profit is beyond money. Profit builds stages for other people to be able to perform on. Profit offers others opportunities they may not have.
Speaker 2:
Profit is where you're standing in whatever line you're standing in a business, or whatever line you're standing in at home, and you willfully allow somebody to come in front of you, taking over the advantage that you have. Profit adds value to other people. Profit is the Southwest Airlines flight attendant who is sitting in the jump seat and, halfway through the flight, comes back, sits back down, pulls out some homemade snacks, looks at me and says do you want one? Profit is an action that gains an advantage, and that advantage can either be used for your sole benefit or can be used for the mutual benefit of the people around you, especially those who don't deserve it. But instead, what we do is we are encouraged to cheer on and to vote for the people who step on and destroy other people in order to gain an advantage and enrich themselves. But it's okay as long as they'll hold up a Bible and as long as they'll vote against abortion, even though they really don't care, then what we do is we give them license to treat the living in the same way the instruments of abortion treat the vulnerable. So my question is what are we doing with the profit that we're making? Your income is profit, your family is profit, the men around those, the tables that you're sitting out of profit? The connections we have, the influence we have, the relationships.
Speaker 2:
But you want to hear a real scandal. So there's this story that was told and it was a wealthy business owner and he had an account manager and, for whatever reason, the owner decided he was going to fire the account manager. So he tells the account manager I'm going to fire you and the account manager. This is before digital technology, before any of Ethan's tools had come out. The account manager goes, customer by customer, and he says hey, how much do you owe my owner? 100,000, mark it down to 50. Hey, how much do you owe my owner? 75,000, mark it down to 45. He's literally buying relationships. It's not his money, it's the owner's money, but he's buying relationships, he's buying connections.
Speaker 2:
You know who told the story? Jesus did, and he was aghast, he couldn't believe it. He called it an outrage. Not at all. He actually, if you look back and read the story, he commended the shrewd account manager. Is that not a gag? That's a scandal. He commended the shrewd account manager.
Speaker 2:
Here's the lessons. Jesus has quite a few biographies written about him and so one of the biographers, luke, heard this and captured it for us Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. That's what the Jesus taught that message Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. But is it of any irony that as global wealth has increased, the three-headed WFA monster of worry, fear and anxiety have increased in kind? That was Shane's entire talk this morning.
Speaker 2:
But I thought more money would give me freedom. I thought more marginal time would give me freedom. Heard somebody say this one time. Nothing scares me more than a middle-aged man with marginal money and marginal time. Princeton and University of Penn Research has found that happiness grew with income. We've heard this before, and it capped somewhere around $100,000. Now I get inflation and all that, so let's bump it to 150. So you start to increase your income, your happiness comes along with it. You get to about 150 and, according to these researchers, there's no more happiness that comes on the other side of it. And yet we barrel right through because we believe that there's just an ounce more happiness on the other side.
Speaker 2:
There was a situation absolutely seared into my memory with one of our business owners. We sat down and we subdivided all their bank accounts and we wrote out their vision, mission, values and the processes and all of these things start growing and he starts working and six months in every single coaching meeting we have, we start off with what we call a big win. We ripped it off from strategic coach BIG begin in gratitude. And so all our owners want to come in and they want to gripe and they go oh man, this is it, whoa stop, we're gonna start with something that's a big win. And so I asked this client. I said, hey, what you got, man, kick us off big win. And he gave me some big win. I don't even think it was about the business, I think it was about something else and I said, well, I got a big win and my big wins. Actually, you Like, we set these accounts up and you had zero in profit before we started. You're frustrated with your net income numbers on the bottom of the P&L which, by the way, is just a number, not real cash Anyway. And so we went through that and I said, hey, you got $250,000 of free and clear cash, with taxes already paid, sitting in a profit account. He looked at me deadpan I'm not making this up and he said it's just one more problem to deal with the weight of the resources that you carry.
Speaker 2:
David Oskine and I were talking about this earlier. Our org charts are upside down. They're all wrong. We put the CEO of the founder at the top. You need to flip the whole org chart upside down. The CEO and the founder and the owner is holding the weight of everything that they bring in. So when you have this mindset that it's just one more problem, we walk them through.
Speaker 2:
And so we've had to build these series of roadmaps. We have the installation roadmap, which is that one I showed you a little bit earlier, and then that necessitated the next one and the next one, and then our final roadmap that we built is something called the legacy planning roadmap. It's where we don't do the planning. We connect them with legacy advisors, the estates, the financials, the insurance, all of those sorts of things. And so we realized that the more the owners held under the weight of the things that were coming in to their quote successful businesses, the more we had to do planning.
Speaker 2:
You know who didn't have to do a whole lot of legacy planning? Jesus when he left the earth, do you know what he bequeathed? A good news message and a mother. That was it. When he was dying, he looked down at one of his dear friends, john. He said hey, my mom, ashton and I got to go to Ephesus this year during July. While we were away, I had no idea that that's where John and Mary moved to. They lived out in Ephesus, on the western part of Turkey. That's all Jesus had to bequeathed. The whole world was good news and a mother. His load was light Because Jesus spent his advantage. He took the advantage that he had the action that he had to gain an advantage. He took that advantage and he spent it on us.
Speaker 2:
Here's a question I'd love for you to ask yourself Are you a person who is tired and anxious, or are you a person who is spent and satisfied? Are you a person who's tired and anxious or are you a person who's spent and satisfied? You want to punch fear in the mouth. You want to wash worry away, you want to assassinate anxiety, that triple headed WFA monster that we're all inundated with, then start to spend the advantage you have to benefit others and to make friends. Instead, we spend the advantage we have to benefit ourselves. Make more stuff, bring in more stuff so that we're more worried, we're more anxious, we're more fearful that we're going to lose the stuff that we've earned at least we think we've earned Just to be more anxious in this cycle. So there are two elements that I think can help us to serve as a blow to the three headed monster of worry, fear and anxiety.
Speaker 2:
Number one I was sitting with Floyd Dawson before we were leaving. I was talking to my group about this and I met with Floyd about this. One of the things I was really really nervous about when I was leaving was not being present. Floyd set me up with a couple of questions, and this was the first one. Hey, scott, what do you want to cause? By the way, it's a great question to ask a teammate who's not doing so hot. They're underperforming. Hey, here's what I want to cause by my following up with you. What are you trying to cause? See, some of you need to stop talking and start writing. Some of you need to stop dreaming and start writing and then start doing.
Speaker 2:
Nick, I think you did a great job of telling us hey, pick up your shovel, start digging. Well, but I you know if I start digging, but we're too busy theorizing, dreaming. Listen, I'm a planning guy, but Michael Gerber said this. I don't remember if he said it in the email or where he said it, but he said if you don't write it down, you don't own it. If you don't write it down, you don't own it. We've taken it a step further If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:
The fissuree or the fit part of profit is the action. Are you talking or are you doing? If I were to go talk to your spouses, if I were gonna talk to your kids, if I were to talk to your team members, your teammates, your employees, your coworkers, your vendors, your partners, your customers, and I asked them is he doing or is he talking? What would they tell me? Not what you would tell me, but what would they tell me? Would they tell me that you're spending yourselves on the things that matter, or would they tell me that you're just busy wasting a whole lot of wasted action leading to no advantage. So I wanna give you a new four-letter word. You can go ahead and write this one down. This one's safe for women and children.
Speaker 2:
The four-letter word starts with a, b and it sounds like busy. It's our new four-letter word we're gonna introduce into our vernacular. It's one of those words that when you say it, it should make us all cringe. This idea of being busy. It's the four-letter enemy of peace, and busy is the primary symptom of fear and anxiety. Our pursuit of monetary profit for the sake of monetary profit has pushed us to prioritize the curse of busy, leaving us feeling the malaise and the tension of worry, fear and anxiety. When we don't know what to do, we run to busy. We're not sure if we're being effective. We open our email because email will save us Email's from the devil. Write that down. I got a whole talk on that, by the way. Worry, fear and anxiety are signs of a life that is obsessed with being busy.
Speaker 2:
Kevin DeYoung wrote a great book called Crazy Busy. If you've not read it, he said business serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Isn't that a good phrase? Business is a hedge against emptiness. I'm feeling empty. Let me jump into being busy, but we sprint to busy because we leave ourselves on empty. Think about this when you have a big meal, you get done with a big meal. What do you wanna do? So I don't like speaking at 3.30 on a Saturday afternoon. Right, you ate, you listen to other people and now you just kinda wanna settle in. But what happens when you're hungry, man, you start going and driving and pushing and you're looking for food and you're looking for something to drink. Are you causing empty, non-chloric busyness or are you trying to cause peace with what you're doing? What are you trying to cause? And once you've identified what you're trying to cause, the second question Floyd asked I thought was really really powerful Repeat that cause over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:
I first ever manager at Pfizer, he used to tell me this all the time before I go into the doctor's office. He says, scott, repetition is the mother of all learning. Repetition is the mother of all learning Repetitions. He'd say it three times every time 21 years ago and I still remember it. Why? It's because repetition is the mother of all learning. With real, truthful words you can build an internal mantra that by repeating that mantra thousands of times, you will begin to suffocate lies.
Speaker 2:
So when we take the lies of worry and the lies of fear and the lives of anxiety that are beating us down by the disease and the curse of busyness, if we can start to suffocate those lies with truth. In our busy, in our business, we work to liberate owners from chaos, but what we've realized is that we will never eliminate chaos. It's always around. Now you can live in the naivete that you will not experience worry, fear and anxiety, but fortunately, all of you are old enough by now that you've had a healthy dose of it at some point. And so the reality is is they will always be on the prow, they will always be on the scavenge, they will always be on the skulk. Worry, fear and anxiety cozy up to those of us who are too busy in the emptiness of a lack of action or too much of the wrong action that we fail to look up and see the good that we wish to cause. So how do we break free from that? The repetition of truth and the presence of lies? Again, we've got the lies of worry, fear and anxiety and we've got to overtly and proactively begin to strangle the oxygen that goes into those.
Speaker 2:
I told you yesterday, in July 2023 of this year, that I left the business for 31 days, turned everything off, turned the cell phone off. Ashley had her cell phone so if anybody needed a call, they called her. I did text a couple of our teammates a couple of times, but they were purely friend texts. But my biggest fear was spending those 31 days geographically with Ashley and mentally, emotionally, back home. And I was afraid of that because we worked years to get to this point, worked years to build a business to where it could theoretically run without me and theoretically grow without me, which it did. It grew by one client while I was gone. It was the one mission that I gave the team when I left, and so everything worked.
Speaker 2:
But even if it didn't, I didn't really care. What I cared is I wanted to be present with this lady that I committed my life to 25 years ago and, quite frankly, before that, so that we could just enjoy the time to see the things that God had for us to see. So Floyd asked me this question what price are you willing to pay to be present? You're gonna have to pay something. I've asked you to pay the price of putting away your technology for a few minutes so you can be present. What price are you willing to pay to be present? You know what my response was.
Speaker 2:
I thought about it, we talked through it. I said, floyd, I think the price I'm gonna have to pay to be present is I'm going to have to find a mantra of truth, a collection of truths that I put together in real words and just begin to put those on repeat on a Spotify playlist in my head over and over and over again. So what I did is I cobbled together a few truths that have piled up over the years. That intended to provide a straight edge for me is I began to maneuver through a bent and unstable world of leading a family, leading a business, hanging out and connecting with friends and community. And so I went to the pile and I looked. It was on the pile and the first phrase on the pile was John Eldridge. You guys remember him. He wrote that book. Aaron interviewed him just a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:
Wrote the book at the beginning of the pandemic, did not know the pandemic was coming, obviously, when the book came out and the book was called Get your Life Back, and in the book he talks about benevolent detachment. It's this generous idea that there is real and important news happening in Slovakia and I'm okay to not be overly concerned about it, because I can't handle it. I can't handle all of the things that are going on. Somebody dear in my life has notifications that go off when there's a wreck in our hometown and they'll tell me about it. I'll go. Unless I know him. I can't deliver my emotion to that.
Speaker 2:
But in that book, john Eldridge said this. He said Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. He said there are moments that were just so overwhelmed that all we can say if we can say anything at all is Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. That was on the pile of these mantras that I collected over the years, so I started to stack that. And then I put something else on it A dear friend of mine, Jeff Campbell, in November of 2015,. He said, scott, I wanna tell you something that might hurt. God's favorite thing about you is not your productivity. Whoa. Like I'm a systems guy, I'm an efficiency guy, I'm a process guy. Like you can't tell me that, but I remember it, so I took that off the pile. That might not be true about you, but it was true about me. Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. God's favorite thing about me is not my productivity. And then, just a few months ago, I was reading and I heard an author quoted Father Murray Botto, and it was a pilgrim's prayer. I'm not in control, I'm not in a hurry, I walk in faith and hope. I greet everyone with peace and I bring back only what God has given me. So I took that off the pile.
Speaker 2:
Dallas Willard was once asked if you had one word to describe Jesus, what would it be? And that deep-minded philosopher from the University of Southern Cal, who's got a deep-rooted, habitual relationship with Jesus, paused and he said in his soft tone relaxed Isn't that a great descriptive of Jesus? I never thought about that. So I took that off the pile. And then, deep in the forgotten cell of a book written way, way back between 350 and 300 BC, chronicles highlights this peculiar prayer from this peculiar player named Jebes. Now, as we do in our modern culture, some have taken this prayer. We've marketed it, turned it into a movement and so by lost much of its meaning.
Speaker 2:
But Jebes' prayer, removed from that Madison Avenue stain, stood out to me as a hopeful and, quite frankly, an indulgent plea that I should not say that I chose to write on the coattails of God. Will you bless me? Will you enlarge my territory? Will you keep your hand on me and keep me from harm so it might not bring me pain? I love the last part, and God granted what he asked. So I took that off the pile and so, following Floyd's question, I then began to pay the price of recalling these meaningful idioms that we had put together and started to patch them together in this verbal quilt of lingo, to pay the price of restating them over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:
So, at the moment that worry pops up, for fear creeps up, for anxiety begins to seep in, jesus, I give everyone and everything to you, god's. Your favorite thing about me is not my productivity. I'm not in control, I'm not in a hurry. I walk in faith and hope. I greet everyone with peace. I bring back only what God has given me. Jesus was relaxed. God, will you bless me? Will you enlarge my territory? Will you keep your hand on me and keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain? Over and over and over again, thousands of times over the last few months. When worry sneaks back in the door, jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. When fear startles me from the meaningful moments that I'm in, jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. God's favorite thing about me is not my productivity. When anxiety starts to crawl up my left arm like poison ivy, jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. God's favorite thing about me is not my productivity. I'm not in control. I'm not in a hurry. I walk in faith and hope. I greet everyone with peace. I bring back only what God has given me.
Speaker 2:
Your obsession with profit is driving you crazy, because the aim of your profit is misguided and misinformed and you have no repetitive voice to smother the lies and suffocate worry, fear and anxiety. You feel out of control because you are out of control, and worry and fear and anxiety breed in this wet and sticky and humid ground of your busy life. So stop. What do you want to cause? Write it down. What price are you willing to pay? Write it down. Profit is taking action to gain an advantage that can be shared with others, not hoarded for ourselves, lest we consume it and die. So if you want to punch fear in the mouth, then start working to gain a different advantage and then share that advantage with the rest of us. Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. God's favorite thing about me is not my productivity. I'm not in control, I'm not in a hurry. I walk in faith and hope.
Speaker 2:
The IRS says we owe how much. Jason did what at school. I know I've had too much, but I can have one more. I cannot stand it when Diane goes on and on and on. I want to fire her. I wish I could fire her. If I have one more customer call and tell me how crappy our product is, I'm going to punch somebody. God will you bless me. I'm just worried that we're going to run out of cash. I'm a little bit anxious because the leads have fallen so significantly that I'm going to have to go to the hospital. Because the leads have fallen so significantly, I don't know what to do with them. Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you.
Speaker 1:
My wife just got a really bad report.
Speaker 2:
My favorite thing about me is not my productivity. I'm not in control. The good news is they got all the brain tumor, but the bad news is they found more on the kidney. I'm in a hurry.
Speaker 1:
I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry. I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry.
Speaker 2:
You keep your hand on me and keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain. And, god grant, your obsession with profit is driving you crazy, because the aim of your profit is money and not truth. The repetition of spoken truth suffocates and gains an advantage over the evil fantasy of lies. So once you take a second on your sheet of paper and I want you to ask yourself on those two questions, what do you want to cause and what price are you willing to pay? And, more specifically, what's the mantra that you can begin to repeat in the soundtrack of your mind over and over and over again, to begin to suffocate the lies with the repetition of the straight edge of truth. Just take a few minutes and do that now.
Speaker 1:
Was that a mind bender on profit or what? I've listened to it multiple times and I've pulled out and nugget each and every time. I hope that you've been inspired, maybe you've been motivated, or even challenged, and maybe a little of all of it. Remember it's only profit as leverage that takes action. So take action today. As we close out today's episode, I want to encourage you to join the conversation we've started here over in the private Christian Business Man's LinkedIn group we've recently launched. It's a way to connect with other Christian business owners around important topics in our businesses, our family, our spiritual journey, maybe our personal wellness and our finances. Just go to viewfromthetopcom slash group and we will see you there and back on the pod next week.
