Listening In: Jordan Raynor

WARREN SMITH, HOST: I’m Warren Smith, and today you’re listening in on my conversation with author and speaker Jordan Raynor.

Our work matters to God, and there are few aspects of a Christian worldview more important than developing a sound, biblical theology of work. When God created the universe, the Bible describes what he did as “work.” When we humans were still in the Garden of Eden, before the fall, God gave Adam work to do. Work is good. Rightly understood, it is a blessing, not a burden.

Jordan Raynor wants us to recover that understanding of work. He says the purpose of our work is to bring glory to God and to bring help to others. But he also says that most of us have been seduced by a series of lies that cause us to think of work as a necessary evil, or an activity whose sole purpose is to bring money or fame or an early retirement from work. Raynor provides an antidote to that secular understanding of work, and points us toward a more biblical way, in his new book “Master of One: Find and Focus on the Work You Were Created To Do.” Jordan Raynor talked with me about his new book from a studio near his home in Florida.

I want to jump straight into the book, Jordan, if I can. And let’s just start with the title—Master of One. The old saying is “Jack of all trades, master of none,” but you looked for the historical roots of that expression and in some ways recovered that for us. Can you talk about that a little bit?

JORDAN RAYNOR, GUEST: Yeah, sure. So, the book is obviously a play on the old “Jack of all trades, master of none,” which for the first five years or so of my career would’ve described me perfectly. Now, I’ve got no problem being a Jack of all trades. I think being a Jack of all trades is kind of the inevitable byproduct of discerning the work you could do most exceptionally well in the world. But I do have a big problem being described as a master of none because the essence of the Christian life is to glorify God and love our neighbors as ourselves. And we do that through our work when we do our work masterfully well and serve as really effective imitators or image bearers of God’s character of excellence, right? The opposite of mastery is mediocrity. And mediocrity, in my opinion, is nothing short of a failure of love and a misrepresentation of our father.

So, the question that the book starts out with is, okay, well what’s the alternative to being a master of none? And I believe the solution is embracing being a Jack of all trades, but becoming—intentionally becoming—a master of one. And the story goes, and I haven’t been able to verify this, but frankly I don’t think it matters that much cause it’s great advice. The story goes that Ben Franklin was actually the first person to utter this phrase, Jack of all trades, master of none. But we’ve misquoted him over time. What he actually said was be a Jack of all trades and a master of one. So in master of one, this new book I help readers find, focus on, and master this one thing that they’re called to do vocationally in this season of life.

SMITH: Well, the idea of sort of chasing that one thing or discovering that one thing sort of runs through the book once you’ve established this idea of being a master of one. You begin, also, with a story about Mary and Martha. Why did you want to begin with that story? How does that story, which of course is very familiar to many Christians who know their scripture even a little bit will probably have heard that story. Why was that story so important to you in this context?

RAYNOR: Yeah, so the story you’re referencing is Jesus coming to the home of Mary and Martha and Martha is busy doing many different things and Mary’s sitting doing one thing, sitting at the feet of Jesus. And Jesus, as we all know, reprimands Martha and tells Mary few things are needed indeed only one, right? Which I love this verse. And I think it’s representative of a deeper principle that Jesus held dear, right? Jesus said no constantly throughout the gospels, right? Jesus was crystal clear on what his purpose was during his lifetime, right? Jesus came to preach the gospel in word and in deed, and so once he got really clear on that one thing, it led him to constantly say no to really good things in order to focus on the essential work the father gave him to do. And if Jesus can’t say yes to everything, neither can we. Right? If we’re going to do our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others, we, like Jesus, have got to get in the habit of saying no. And I think this is part of the context of what he was saying to Mary and Martha in that famous passage of scripture,

SMITH: Well that a story of Mary and Martha and that understanding recovered from Benjamin Franklin of being a master of one thing leads us to this list that you create early in the book, Jordan, and that is this list of lies that we have sort of bought into. Five lies that we’ve been taught that subtly and in some cases not so subtly militate against this idea of really focusing on the one thing. The first lie is you can be anything you want to be. You can grow up and be president of the United States is the way we often hear it in this country. Talk about that lie and why it is a lie.

RAYNOR: Yeah. So you know, in the book I outline these three lies of career and calling that keep us from focusing on the work we were created to do. And yeah, you mentioned the first one, right? So you can be anything you want to be. This just isn’t true. And by the way, I think if you just stop for 30 seconds to think about it, we all know intuitively that this isn’t true. I’m 5’6″. Until middle school, I had a dream of playing professional basketball. Well, in middle school that dream quickly died. There was no way I was going to play in the NBA. Right? You cannot be anything you want to be if you care about doing your work with excellence. So yes, it is true that today we have more opportunities to choose to do anything we want to do, but we can’t do anything we want to do if we care about excellence in all things and all things for the glory of God.

And I think that segues really well into one of the other lies that I talk about in the book and this idea that your happiness is the primary purpose of work, right? You know, I’m a millennial, I grew up here in my parents and pretty much every adult in my life. Tell me, you know, Jordan, when it comes to your work, follow your passions, follow your dreams, do whatever makes you happy. And as I explained the book, this turns out to be like really bad advice, right? Put simply, it doesn’t work. Millennials have had more opportunities to “do whatever makes us happy.” And as Gallup tells us, we are less happy at work than any generation before us. And in the book I show why, right? I cite a bunch of academic studies that showed that the number one predictor of whether or not you will describe your work as a calling as opposed to a job or career is not whether or not you are passionate about the work before you started it. The number one predictor is the number of years you spend purposefully practicing that craft, right? Passion is a side effect of mastery. We get to love what do by getting really good at it and focusing—first and foremost—on the happiness of others.

SMTIH: Well, Jordan, the book transitions into sort of this process by which you say we can discover mastery. And before I get you to unpack that process, which is explore, choose, eliminate, and then master, I want you to tell a story—a story that you tell them the book. It’s a story about this amazing cathedral in Barcelona. I hope I pronounce it right. La Sagrada Familia. Am I close?

RAYNOR: Well done. Warren. I’m impressed. That’s it.

SMITH: Well, whatever. But all I can do is pronounce it though. I can’t tell the story the way you tell it. It’s just a remarkable story of someone who is really focused on excellence over a very long period of time. Would you talk about that?

RAYNOR: Yeah, so this is probably my favorite story in the book. So in the book I tell the story of about 20 different Christians who are world-class at their craft. And this is probably my favorite one. So if your listeners have ever visited Barcelona, they probably know the name Antony Gaudi. So Gaudi was a world famous architect, right? He spent the first few decades of his career designing some of Barcelona’s most incredible attractions, which are still there today. And later in his career, we’re going back 130, 150 years or so now, right? So late in his career, Gaudi started to catch this vision for a new project: a church that would be so large, so intricate, so beautiful that it would quite literally as 1 Peter 2:9 says, “Proclaim the excellencies of God.” And so, you know, he always had his hand in a bunch of different projects at the same time, but he was so convinced of basically what I’m arguing in Master of One, that the path to doing our most masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others is the path of less but better. That he actually decided to focus exclusively on this church—one project for the last 12 years of his life and Gaudi’s designs were so intricate that the church is still being built today more than 135 years after they began work on the church. It’s actually almost finished. I think they’re going to complete it in 2026.

SMITH: Well, you know, Jordan, there were several things that stuck out to me about that story. One is just the remarkable vision that Gaudi had, that he knew that this would not be finished in his lifetime. That it was, and yet that didn’t matter to him. He could visualize what the end would look like and that kept him on task even when he knew who would never see it in this world, number one. And number two, there’s one particular quote in your book that you attribute to Goudi. I’m just going to read the sentence as you write it, Jordan. “When asked why the church was taking so long to build Goudy once commented, my client is not in a hurry.” 

RAYNOR: I love that line.

SMITH: I do too.

RAYNOR: I love that line. Yeah.

SMITH: Well, in some ways, too, it says not only should we be looking for that one thing that we master, but I think what jumped out at me in that quote, and I think this is what you’re getting at in your book, and I want you to say more about it, is that we really only have an audience of one for our lives as well. Is that a fair assessment?

RAYNOR: Yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s this great story and it wasn’t about La Sagrada Familia. I don’t know where I heard this, but there’s a great story about these people building this great cathedral in Europe hundreds of years ago, right? And the people, there were some craftsmen at the very top of the cathedral painting these like really intricate designs at the very top of the cathedral—hundreds of feet above the floor where no human was ever going to see it. And somebody asked the craftsman, why are you spending so much time working on something nobody’s going to see? And he’s basically like, because God will see this. This is the top of his church. He will see it. And I’m creating for this audience of one. I’m creating for the true master. Right? And I think there’s a lot of beauty in that.

But the other thing I love about that quote from Gaudi, my client’s not in a hurry, you know, I do think a lot of times, especially entrepreneurs, we have these very grand visions for what we want to bring about in this life. And I think to some extent we’re responsible to work on and execute against the visions that God has given us for our work in our careers. But I don’t think we’re responsible for the timelines of them. Right? Like I don’t think in Goudi’s case, I think he was a faithful believer. I think he was following the call that God had on his life, but just because he didn’t finish the church before he died, I don’t think he was being unfaithful. I think God will find people to carry on our vision long before we’re gone, if it’s work that he truly wants to see accomplished in this earth.

SMITH: Jordan, I’d like to pivot in our conversation just a little bit and drill down a little deeper into something that I’ve already mentioned and that is this process by which we sort of arrive at mastery. You have it as a four step process: explore, choose, eliminate, and master. And I want to pause on the explore. We may not be able to dig into all four of them in the level of detail that I would like. But on explore, you talk about a five principles of experimentation in your book where, in other words, this exploring process can’t just be random. This is not just the process of just wandering around, but it’s a process of experimentation where you’re trying things and using those experiments, if you will, to learn and to take you closer to the next step, which is to choose and eliminate. Talk about those five principles of effective experimentation, including the first one: place little bets.

RAYNOR: Sure. Yeah. So, in all of our research for this book, I had a small team of researchers with me. There was a pretty predictable path to mastering something, right? Whatever your one thing is, right. Step one, explore. Step two, choose, elimination, and then finally mastery. And so that first step—exploration—is really, really important, right? And in the book, as you say, I outline these five principles of effective experimentation in your career so that you can experiment purposefully, right? I think a lot of people kind of fall in accidentally to experimenting with their career until they find the one thing they’re called to master. My hope is that readers of this book will do it more intentionally by following these five principles.

So, number one is place little bets, right? So early in your career or early on, the path of discovering a new one thing you want to master, you want to place as inexpensive—in terms of time and money—bets as you possibly can. So if you’re in college, that’s internships. Internships are the best thing in the world when you’re in college. When I was at Florida State, I did a different internship every single semester. Those were little bets to try different things to see what I might be gifted at.

The second principle of effective experimentation is to temporarily embrace being a Jack or Jill of all trades, right? This is the time in your career when you want to be a Jack or Jill of all trades and collect a bunch of different skills and experiences, right?

Number three, fail fast. If you’re going to fail, you want to do it quickly so you could pivot to something else.

Number four, go where you will learn the most. I think this is great advice for any point in your career, but especially early on, right? If you get two job offers on the table and one you know you’re going to learn exponentially more about yourself and your giftings than the other, go there even if it pays less.

And then number five, keep your one thing in mind. And I think this is where a lot of people get tripped up. I think a lot of people spend the first decade of their careers job hopping around without any light at the end of the tunnel for what they’re looking for. I encourage readers to keep your one thing in mind. The purpose of all of this experimentation is to find the one thing that best combines your gifts—most importantly—and your passions—second most importantly—together with the very best opportunity to serve God and others through your work.

SMITH: You know, Jordan, as you and I are talking, the Mr. Rogers movie is in theaters right now, which I’ve seen actually a couple of times and really have been moved by that movie. Mr. Rogers is also, I can tell, a little bit of a hero of yours as well and you talk about his story a good bit, but especially in this—as we’re talking about this idea of exploration—you introduce an idea from Mr. Rogers called “guided drift.” And it sounds a little bit like that that’s also what Mr. Rogers is suggesting. You want to try a lot of things, you want to drift around a little bit, but it needs to be sort of guided by an overarching vision for what you’re doing with your life. Can you say more about that and also more about how Mr. Rogers has informed your thinking?

RAYNOR: Mr. Rogers affected me more than almost anybody else in the writing of this book. So the documentary—I think it was called Won’t You Be My Neighbor—had just come out as I was in the middle of writing this thing. And when I saw it, it was overwhelming to me. I think it’s the only movie I’ve ever cried in for two reasons. Number one, I think Fred Rogers was one of the most consistently Christ-like people I’ve ever seen in my life. And second, he was such a great example of this principle of professional exploration. I mean, Fred Rogers had so many interests. He was an incredibly talented music composition major. He was also interested in early childhood education and theology. Most people know that he went to seminary and actually graduated from seminary, but he was always looking for the single opportunity to marry all those gifts, to marry all those interests in a single direction. So that’s what he meant by like guided drift. He talked about this idea of just kind of drifting from thing to thing early on in his career until he found his one thing, which of course is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But that drift was guided by this deep sense of service. Fred Rogers used to say, you don’t set out to be rich and famous. You set out to be helpful. And I think that’s maybe the most concise way to explain the heart of this book, right? That the purpose of work is not primarily our own fame and our own fortune. It’s primarily to be helpful to others, to serve others and make others happy. That’s what’s guiding us. That’s what guiding all of this exploration is the identification of that one thing vocationally in this season of our careers where we can be most helpful to others.

SMITH: There’s another idea that comes from Fred Rogers in addition to that, the ones that we’ve already talked about: guided drift and the idea that you want to be helpful and that being rich and famous is not a worthy goal in and of itself. There’s another idea that Fred Rogers introduced that you quoted in this book. It’s called the idea of deep and simple.

RAYNOR: Yeah.

SMITH: Can you say more about that?

RAYNOR: Yeah. So there’s a great line kind of buried in this biography or read of Fred Rogers. The quote was like, “Deep and simple. That’s what matters.” And yeah, I think, you know, there wasn’t a lot of exposition around that quote in the biography. And so I’ve thought a lot about what Fred might have meant by it. And obviously, I don’t know. But I think if you look at Fred’s life, I think what he meant by deep and simple, that’s what matters, he had a remarkably simple life and a remarkably focused life. I mean, he focused on this TV show, you know, for 30 plus years. It was his one thing. He could have done a million different things vocationally, but he poured all of his time and all of his energy and he went very deep on this one thing.

And he was really methodical about pursuing mastery of that one thing. Right? So Fred Rogers, after year three or four of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood could have coasted very easily, right? But every single script, he methodically went through—changing words up until the last minute of production because, you know, he saw his work as ministry, right? He saw that TV show as his pulpit and he wanted to make sure that he was serving his television neighbors as himself by producing the most excellent show in the world. And, by the way, excellence in Fred Rogers’ perspective was talking to kids in the language that they could understand. It wasn’t necessarily the highest production value. I mean, you look back at that show, the production value is pretty small, right? It was pretty unimpressive. But what was excellent was serving his neighbors well in the way that he talked to them and he did it masterfully well. He’s such a hero of mine. He was an exceptional culture creator and somebody who really pursued world-class master of his discipline.

SMITH: Well, Jordan, we’re not going to be able to dive as deeply as I would like because of the limitations of time into your model of explore, choose, eliminate, and master. But let’s just simply say, though, for the record and in the interest of time, that after all of the exploring is done, you do have to choose and you do have to eliminate and you do have to focus on the one thing and seek mastery of it. What are some tips that you would have for young people in particular, but all of us who might be, you know, grappling with vocational challenges? Because, you know, Jordan, I’m much older than you. I’m 60 years old and I’ve discovered that even men my age, men and women my age are still dealing with many of these of vocational challenges. They don’t feel like they have found the one thing in their life yet. Or many of them are finding it mid-career or later. So I don’t think this is an age thing. So maybe anyone listening might benefit from some insights into how to choose, how to eliminate, how to pursue mastery.

RAYNOR: Sure. So I think there’s this belief about vocation and calling that’s similar to Hollywood’s cliche view of marriage that we all know is untrue, right? This idea that somewhere out there, there is one single person that I am destined to be with, right? Everyone listening knows that’s not true. And likely there are dozens of people in this world who would have been great matches for me as a spouse, right? There is no Mister Right in your career. There is no one thing out there that God is waiting for you to do. There are many things that you can do to fulfill Jesus as command to glorify God by revealing his character of excellence and loving neighbor as self, right? So there’s no Mister Right? But there is a Mister Best and I believe that gives great freedom, right? To commit to one thing and pursue mastery over it over a significant period of time.

And if you feel like you think you might know what your one thing is, but you’re afraid to commit to it and afraid to double down on it, you know, here’s my advice: Number one, remember there is no right decision, right? God doesn’t need you to choose a particular job, right? He’s given us all a general call, but he’s not waiting for you and I to take up a particular—Warren, if you stop doing your job tomorrow, if I stopped doing my job tomorrow and God wants that work to continue, he’s going to find somebody to do it. He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need me, specifically, right? So there’s no right decision.

Secondly, there are very few irreversible decisions. I talk a lot in the book about, you know, you’re trying to find one thing to focus on vocationally in this season of your career that might change 10 years from now. That’s okay.

And third, keep this in mind: If you believe that you were put on this earth to do your most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others, I believe there is an imperative to make a decision, to choose something to commit to master for the glory of God and the good of others. And that one thing might be super specific, like a specific role within a specific company, but more likely than not, it’s going to be pretty broad. C.S. Lewis’ one thing I talk about this in the book was teaching. Very broad applied in many different contexts. My one thing is entrepreneurship, right? I’ve applied that to running companies and bringing new books and new content products to market. So whether you’re one thing is broad or specific, find it, focus on it, and master it for the glory of God and the good of others.

SMITH: You know, Jordan, you mentioned that a part of your research for this book was to profile—and also part of the structure of your book—is to profile these Christ followers who have achieved some level of mastery in their world, in their work. And you know, we’ve already mentioned Mr. Rogers and a couple of others, but there are a few others that maybe as we bring our conversation to a close, I’d like you to say more about. People that particularly fascinated me. One of them was Sharon Watkins. I spent seven or eight years working for Price Waterhouse Coopers in public accounting. And the whole Anderson Enron debacle was a something that I was fascinated with. And it was interesting to me that, you know, one of the great business scandals in American history really depended in a few key moments in people like Sharon Watkins just behaving with integrity. Can you tell a little more, talk a little more about that story?

RAYNOR: Sure. Yeah. So the book is divided into three parts. The first part is the purpose of mastery. The second part, which we talk a lot about already as the path to mastery. And the third part is the promise of mastery. And I open up that of the book by telling Sharon Watkins’ story. So Sharon was a VP at Enron—she was an accountant, a CPA. And she was the one who first sounded alarm bells within Enron that there was, you know, this massive accounting scandal going on. She ended up testifying before Congress and was a huge part of stopping this massive fraud of Enron and bringing this company, you know, tumbling to the ground, right? And she was named by TIME Magazine as the person as one of three whistleblowers who are the persons of the year in 2002. And Sharon loves Jesus, was following Jesus at the time.

What I find interesting about her story though is Sharon would have never been in this position of power had she not been masterful at her craft. And it’s a great illustration of what I think is a biblical principle. You see this in Proverbs that, you know, when we are masterful at our work, we will not serve before lowly men. We will serve before Kings. Mastery leads to power that we as Christians are called to expense sacrificially on behalf of others. And Sharon did that remarkably well at Enron. Obviously she couldn’t save all these people’s pensions, but she stopped this fraud from happening. She was put in this position of power cause she was great at what she did. And the Lord used her in this really kind of oddly, beautiful, powerful way to stop one of the most corrupt corporations of our time.

SMITH: Well, you know, it also reminds me a little bit, Jordan, of the reality that you could probably add a fourth P to this and that would be the price as well. Because you know, when Sharon Watkins was in the middle of all of this she was not a well loved, it was tough. It took courage. It took integrity for her to speak up, to raise her hand and say, wait a minute, this is not right.

RAYNOR: It took a lot. And by the way, I think Sharon would tell you this. She still pays the price for that. Sharon’s not going to go back and work and fortune a Fortune 500 company. Like big companies aren’t wild about hiring former whistleblowers. But she knew that there was fraud. She knew that she was in a unique position of power to say something about it. She did it. And so this whole chapter of the book is about, you know, I think Christians shy away from the word power. And I don’t think we should, right? I think we should embrace the power that comes with mastery of our craft, but that power is not to be hoarded. It’s to be spent in service of others, even if it means a great sacrifice on our own part.

SMITH: There’s another person that I’d like for you to say a little bit about because it also talks about this idea of having courage and sticking with something even though the odds might be stacked against you. And this is a story that you actually don’t tell at the end, but near the beginning of the book, the story of an Olympic diver who had a real setback early in his career, I should say early in his Olympic career, but ultimately came back. Tell me about that story.

RAYNOR: Yeah. So, I tell the story about David Boudia who is an Olympic diver. Actually, he’s going to be competing again in 2020 in Tokyo. David Boudia is this amazing guy who basically half of his Olympic career, he was following the Lord, in the half before that he wasn’t. And the story really illustrates this idea of what the difference is when we are working for our own glory and when we’re working for God’s glory. So before Christ, David was competing in the Olympics to get something that his work could never provide him: a sense of identity, a sense of self worth, a sense of self. And when you lost at the Olympics, he experienced what I think a lot of us experience when our identity is not in Christ, right? Total crisis. He was very close to committing suicide. He could not handle the agony of defeat, right?

But once he met Christ—interestingly enough, he came to Christ through the mastery of his coach who was also a Christian. So this coach was excellent at what he did, and it made him attractive to David. He accepted Christ. And initially David lost his appetite for the sport, right? He was like, you know what? I’m a Christian now. All that matters is doing “the Lord’s work.” And thankfully he had a pastor in his life who helped them understand that David, your work as a diver is the Lord’s work, right? Just because you couldn’t figure out how to not glorify yourself previously, you can use diving as a means to glorify him and you glorify him when you dive with excellence and be who God created you to be most like his image of excellence.

And so now as David dives and as he’s about to dive in Tokyo this summer in 2020, you know, he thinks about, when I dive, when I dive with excellence, I am trying to be the most effective image bearer of my King, of my creator because this is what he created me to be, to do. It reminds me of Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, right? The Olympic runner. “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” I think. I think that’s what finding your one thing looks like when you’re doing that thing that you believe to be your one thing, you feel God’s pleasure and you do it well. You feel God’s pleasure in that great satisfaction of vocation because you’re doing it primarily for his glory.

SMITH: Well, you know, Jordan, we’ve got to bring our conversation to a close, but you telling that story and relating David Boudia to another story, the story of Eric Liddell, which many people know from the movie Chariots of Fire reminds me that storytelling is an important part of your book. It’s an important part of what a leader does. And near the end of your book, you tell the story of a man named Andrew Stanton who is a storyteller, specifically. Tell me about Andrew and tell me why you use storytelling both in your life and in this book as a key strategy for making the points that you want to make.

RAYNOR: Yeah, so anyone who’s read any of my books and knows I love stories, right? I read business biographies. I’m reading, I’m re-reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight right now. The story of Nike, right? I learn from stories. I think other people learn from stories. And so all of my books, including Master of One, are chock full with stories that help illustrate the biblical principles in them. And yeah, I tell the story of Andrew Stanton, right? Who was the writer of Toy Story, right? And Finding Nimo and Stranger Things. So, a masterful storyteller, but also a follower of Christ and not one that preaches the gospel explicitly through his films. I mean, Andrew’s pretty intentional about not doing that, about focusing primarily on mastering his medium, on mastering his craft and not focusing first and foremost on preaching through his films.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom there. I think as Christians, you know, we are called to be salt and light in the world. We are called to make things that are attractive to believers and nonbelievers alike. And I think we do that when we focus first and foremost on mastering the craft that God has called us to master.

SMITH: Well, so at the end of the day, Jordan, what do you want people to come away with when they read your book? Do you want them to you know, sort of quit their job and seek the one thing? Or, well, what it is it? If not that, then what? 

RAYNOR: Yeah, so, here’s what I want people to walk away with: Number one, I want people to walk away with a greater conviction or at least greater clues as to what their one thing might be vocationally. That’s number one. And number two, I want them to walk away with a really practical roadmap for how to pursue mastery of whatever their thing is today or in the future vocationally.

So, in the book, we get really practical and talk about the three keys to mastering anything. And so I think that’s going to be, I think those are going to be the two biggest, most practical takeaways. But I think the third is a little bit softer, but just this deep conviction of why mastering matters, of why excellence matters. It’s really kind of the theme of the whole book. Mastery matters. Excellence matters. Because our work matters because our work is important. It is a primary means by which we glorify God and love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s the heart of the book, and I think people are gonna walk away being inspired by that.

SMITH: Well, Jordan Raynor, thank you so much for being on the program. I found your book inspiring. I found this conversation inspiring as well. And the stories that you tell in your book. Some of them were familiar to me, but most were not. And I found them most nourishing. So thanks again for your time. Really appreciate your book and your ministry.

RAYNOR: Thank you Warren.

(Photo/Jordan Raynor)

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