YAPClassic: Mark Batterson, Social Entrepreneurship for Visionary Leaders | Productivity

25:04My wife, a couple of years ago, diagnosed with cancer. And that's so hard when you get that news. But there's one or two things that you can do. One is you can just kind of give up and sort of play defense. but my wife read a piece of poetry that posed a question and it said, what have you come to teach me? In other words, like you're going through a tough time. Maybe there's someone out there who's going through chemo or radiation, or there's some kind of struggle that you're walking through. You have to kiss the wave. You have to learn the lesson, cultivate the character, make the change, whatever it is.

25:45And so just a little challenge there to kiss the wave. Yeah, like embrace all the obstacles that come your way, basically. Okay, feed the frog. Mark Twain said, if you ever have to eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning, then you'll know that the hardest thing is behind you, which is kind of hilarious, because I can't imagine that scenario. But it's this idea of harder is better. Do it difficult. You got to get up and hit the ground running. And so, Eat the Frog is this idea that the way you gain strength is through resistance training. And so, I talk a little bit about things we can do, commitment devices that can enable us to really eat the frog and cultivate some of those harder disciplines, especially with that morning routine.

26:31And we will definitely talk about commitment devices to make and break habits. All right, fly the kite. Yeah. So the idea here is if you do little things like they're big things, in my experience, God has a way of doing big things like they're little things. I think we want to do amazing things, big things. But really, if you study exceptional athletes, for example, or musicians or people who are just really good at their craft, the reality is they're just better than the best of us at the basics. someone asked Pablo Casals, one of the greatest cellists of all time. I think he was like in his late eighties, early nineties.

27:15Um, and he was still practicing like six hours a day. Imagine that. And someone asked him why. And I think his short answer was, cause I think I'm getting better. It's this idea that, you know, flying the kite is just getting 1 % better every day. It's this mindset that I want to benchmark and get a little bit stronger, a little bit smarter than I was yesterday. Yeah. And in your book, you have a quote, how you do anything is how you do everything related to fly the kite. And that is literally my all-time favorite quote. It has been for years. It's such a good one. Okay. Cut the rope. Yeah. At some point, you got to take the risk.

27:56Playing it safe is risky. The greatest risk is taking no risks. And by the way, I love in my books, I usually try to include quite a bit of science and history because I like geeking out on that stuff. But Cut the Rope actually comes from one of the original, the OG elevator pitch. A guy named Elisha Otis, who in the Crystal Palace, the World's Fair debuted his elevator break and did it in dramatic fashion. He said, cut the rope, and an ax man literally cut the rope, and his elevator break worked. And the next thing you know, there are hundreds of skyscrapers in New York City, but it traces back to someone who was willing to take the risk.

28:47And without that elevator, you don't have all those skyscrapers. And so kind of a fun story to back that one up. Oh, I love that story. Okay, wind the clock. Time is measured in minutes. Life is measured in moments. And so I think what we've got to do is be a little bit better at really enjoying the moments of life. We're in such a hurry, aren't we? I think, you know, a hundred average person spends 122 minutes on social media. And listen, I love the phone, the technology, the way that my phone gives me access to so many things and so many people. I love it. But there's a great danger in that we're so distracted that we can kind of miss what's happening around us.

29:34And so the idea here is, and there are actually two words in the Greek language for time. One is chronos, and it's this idea of the minutes. And we've got to be good at time management. Like that's part of the deal. But then Kairos is not just time, but opportunity. And so we also have to be better at understanding the season of life that we're in. And when moments present themselves, like learning to really wind the clock and enjoy those moments. Okay, last but not least, seed the clouds. Yeah, and this one I have a little bit of fun on the science side because you can drop dry ice into clouds and seed the clouds and cause it to rain.

30:20There's a fun little story about the origin of that. And the idea here is that you've got to prepare today for what you want to experience tomorrow. And you would think that this is self-evident and so obvious, but the truth is most of us want to win the lottery instead of win the day. We kind of want to get lucky instead of fate favors the prepared. Like, let's do our homework. Let's do our groundwork. Like, I imagine that I bet you studied a lot of other podcasts. You watched what other people did. You did your homework. And then you launch it, and then you keep learning. And so, you're always seeding the future, seeding the clouds.

31:09And so, I think faith is being sure of what you hope for. and it's pretty critical that you won't accomplish 100 % of the goals that you don't set. And so I do have 100 life goals. And what those goals do, by the way, is I think they sanctify the reticular activating system, the part of the brain that determines what we notice and what goes unnoticed. And so what goal setting does is, okay, now I'm going to notice anything and everything related to accomplishing this goal. And so I do think that goal setting is a piece of that puzzle. Yeah. And I completely agree with you. You have to put in the reps.

31:52You used me as an example. So I'll just dig deeper on that. I used to work at a radio station. Young and Profiting Podcast is like my fifth show. I had online radio shows. I had a YouTube show. I had a Facebook show. I built, hacked Twitter. I hacked LinkedIn. Like I knew how to use social media. I did social media for corporate companies. And so I stuck all those things together and then launched my podcast. But it was after all these things that I had been sowing, to your point. And Tim's story calls this work in your land. It's actually taking action every single day towards that bigger dream and leveling up your skills.

32:27I love that. Working your land. And one of my MOs is this idea, and Jesus actually said this, be innocent as a dove, shrewd as a snake. And the idea here is, innocent as a dove, is you always have to check your motives. Can I just challenge us, everybody on this call? Like, you got to check your ego at the door. I've got a mentor who, by the way, says there are two kinds of people in the world. The first kind of person walks into a room and internally announces, here I am. It's all about me, myself, and I. They kind of feel like they're God's gift to everybody. But then there's a second kind of person that walks in and says, there you are.

33:10There you are. It's all about everybody else. If you just look to add value to other people, if you check your ego at the door, then I really think there's no limit to what you can accomplish because you're not going to short circuit. It's not going to come back and bite you in the back. And so innocent as a dove, I think, is key. If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, it's not going to turn out the way that you want it to. But then you have to be shrewd as a snake. And I love that. because I think you've got to be really good at your game. I want to be really good at everything from communicating in public, which is what I do on the weekend, to writing.

33:52I work my craft. I can literally spend an entire day in a thesaurus trying to figure out what is the best word right here. So I think it's about really working hard. And the way I say it is, you've got to pray like it depends on God, but work like it depends on you. And if you do those two things, usually some good things happen. Guys, Mark is dropping so many bombs right now. I advise that you go rewind that little bit back and get inspired and motivated. So work super hard. Okay. So let's talk about habit formation. So 45 % of our behaviors are made up of habits. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know that already.

34:34We always talk about habits on this podcast. So something interesting that I found in your book was that you say that habit formation is as old as the Sermon on the Mount. What does that mean? And is habit formation or the concept of it really that ancient? It really is. I mean, I think long before B.F. Skinner came along or Ivan Pavlov and taught us about conditioned reflexes or operant conditioning, I would argue that the Sermon on the Mount, which is kind of Jesus' most famous sort of message to the world, I can reduce it down to just six counter habits. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

35:17Bless those who curse you. Turn the other cheek. Go the extra mile and give the shirt off your back. That's a quick crash course in the Sermon on the Mount. Here's the thing. None of those things are natural. Like if someone slaps me, my reaction is to slap them right back. And so what's happening here? Well, I would call them six counter habits. And so, yeah, I think this idea is pretty ancient. And I think that habit formation and spiritual formation may be the same thing. And I realize, you know, I love the fact that a lot of different people from a lot of different faith or non-faith backgrounds listening to this.

35:59And so you have to put that through your filter. But the truth is, habit formation is at the heart of anything and everything that we try to do. And so, yeah, I think Jesus had some good things to say about that. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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40:32So I know that you have your habit cycle that you talk about in your book, and it's very similar to Charles Duhigg's habit loop, which is cue, routine, and reward. So talk to us about your habit cycle and what the steps are to make or break any habit. Yeah. And let me go on record, like any other writer, you're researching what everybody else writes. And the truth is, there's nothing new under the sun. All of us are sort of reinventing, recasting so many other ideas. So I love Charles Duhigg, great book on habits. Same with Atomic Habits. So many amazing books. I take my unique slant on it. And I think it is, you have to identify the prompt.

41:19There's so many triggers that we have, for better or for worse. And then you have to interrupt the pattern. And that's hard to do because we are these creatures of habit. The way I would say it is once a routine becomes routine, you have to change the routine even because it's the law of requisite variety. It's this idea that if you go to the gym, which good for you, but if you work out the same sequence on the same machines every single time, it actually loses effectiveness because your body adapts to it. And so what a trainer will do is actually confuse your muscles. How? Well, they'll give you a different incline on the bench, or they'll make you do some kind of exercise with a tire instead of with a weight.

42:13What they're doing is the law of requisite variety. You have to change the sequence, mix it up, then and only then, is your body going to react to that and grow from it? In fact, here's a little formula that maybe people can jot down, and it's something I put into practice all the time. Change of pace plus change of place equals change of perspective. And so what I need to do is change my pace. If I'm always running at the same pace, I'm going to get in trouble because it doesn't allow me. Sometimes you have to walk three miles an hour to get different mindsets or different ideas and then change a place.

42:53There's just something about, for me, oh man, get me at 30 ,000 feet. I just have more better ideas. I don't know what it is, but that change a place is huge. And so you've got to figure out how and where you can go to change pace, change place to kind of get that change of perspective. Very interesting stuff. So I'd love for you to share a story with us. So in your book, you talk about the domino champ, Bob Speca, and how he did really well with dominoes. And you describe a term called the domino effect in habit formation. So talk to us about the domino effect and this domino champ. Absolutely.

43:34I think it traces back to a guy named Lauren Whitehead, an engineer who published a study in the American Journal of Physics, and it was called Domino Chain Reaction. What he discovered is that a two-inch domino is capable of knocking over a domino that's one and a half times its size. So a two-inch domino knock over a three-inch, three-inch can knock over four and a half inch. And so I just have a little bit of fun with it. By the time you get to the 18th domino, you can knock over the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Of course, it's leaning, so that's not entirely fair. You get to, I think it's the 23rd domino.

44:10You could take down the Washington Monument. 27th domino, I think, the Eiffel Tower. And by the time you get to that 28th domino, you can knock over the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world. It's this idea that don't get overwhelmed by the huge goals or the things that are so far out there. Just focus on that two-inch domino. If you write 100 words a day and you do that five days a week, that may not seem like much, but when that year is up, you've written yourself a book. So don't get overwhelmed by the quantity or size, break it down into those dominoes. You know, when I, when I started training for that marathon, I could barely run three miles.

45:01I, it was killing me. It was killing. And, and, and for the record, like I did not win the Chicago marathon. Okay. I finished in the middle of the pack, but, um, but for me, the fact, yes, I finished. Thank you. I finished. They give you a medal for finishing. Right. And so, um, you know, you, you have to start small and then just stick with it and don't try not to get too discouraged. I think this idea of just do it for a day and then getting a wind streak going where two days in a row, three days in a row. That's where the magic happens. It's about creating winning streaks, and it's breaking it down into that daily discipline.

45:43Can I share one other kind of simple example? Yes, 100%, whatever you think to drive it home. You know, I think I'm a little bit concerned, and this is not an indictment per se, and it really, this doesn't matter where you land politically or anything else. there's just a lot of negativity these days. There is a lot of negativity. And one of the things that I do to fight negativity in my own life is I keep a gratitude journal, three gratitudes a day. And I just jot down, what am I grateful for? What am I like, wow, like I get to do this or I'm just so thankful for this or that or the other thing.

46:24And what that's done in my life just by coming up with three gratitudes a day, that little daily habit totally changes my mindset, changes my heart and how I feel at the beginning and end of the day. And so that maybe is a simple example. I promise you, you find three things you're grateful for every day, and it can really change your outlook and your attitude and how you feel about life. Oh, I totally agree. And what you said before about, you know, taking action every day, taking these small steps really reminded me of something Jeff Hayden told us when he came on the show. Jeff Hayden, he wrote The Motivation Myth.

47:04And basically, it's this concept that like motivation doesn't happen first. You actually need to take action first. And then there's this motivation feedback loop where you take a little bit of action, you know, you get good results, you get motivated to do it again. And then you get more good results and you're motivated to do it again. But if you don't start, you never get any of that feedback. And people think that motivation is going to fall from the sky, but really it doesn't. You have to actually start. And yes, there's going to be ups and downs, but every time you get that up, you get that motivation to keep going.

47:32And as you learn more, you get motivation to keep going because you understand more and it just gets a little bit easier and easier every time. That is so good and so true because that first step is the hardest one. By the way, the key moment for me in writing that first book after 13 years of kind of a dream deferred was I leveraged my 35th birthday and I said, I'm not going to turn 35 without a book to show for it. It may not be very good, may not even be edited, but I'm just, I'm finally, I'm throwing down the gauntlet. And so, you know, part of it is you've got to give yourself a start date and a deadline because a dream without a deadline is called a wish.

48:16And so in some ways, it's just about, you almost have to Jedi mind trick yourself. You have to give yourself self-imposed deadlines. And there are ways you can bring other people into the puzzle that kind of hold you accountable to that. But you have to know how you're wired, what's gonna motivate me to really go after this. But that's so true. You cannot finish what you do not start. Okay, so I think you were alluding to a commitment device. So what is a commitment device and how do we use it to make or break habits? Yeah, you know, it's funny because I think the most obvious commitment device is something called an alarm clock.

49:03You know, it's this idea that when you get up every day is a pretty significant factor. Because if you're getting up just in time to kind of eat breakfast, get a shower, get out the door and get to work, I don't think that's a recipe for like accomplishing your dreams. I don't think you're going to get in shape that way. I don't think you're going to get out of debt that way. I don't think you're going to grow spiritually, relationally that way. And so you really have to leverage that alarm clock. A commitment device is simply it's giving yourself a deadline. it's putting things in place that force you to actually do what it is that you're saying that you're going to do.

49:45What's fun is I actually leverage occasionally in one of my messages, you know, and I have the privilege of speaking to a few thousand people every weekend. And one of the things I do, and this is a little trick of the trade, is I'll go public with something because I know that then I'll hold myself accountable. So I announced in a message, hey, I'm going to run a marathon when I couldn't even run three miles yet. So there's a commitment device is basically something that forces your hand. It's making that appointment. It's filling out the application. It's doing something that initiates that process and forces you to commit to it.

50:31Yeah. And I think sometimes it can be a financial investment. You know, they always say that if you actually pay for a course or coach, you're actually going to follow through because you made that investment. When it's free, like you're just like, oh, well, I guess I could flake and it doesn't really matter. That's so good because then you have skin in the game. And so fun fact, the coffee house, Ebenezer's Coffee House that we own and operate on Capitol Hill, it was a crack house. It was a dilapidated property and it wasn't even zoned commercial. The first thing I did, I was at an auction at our kids' schools, and there was some book on the zoning codes for Capitol Hill.

51:10And I remember I bid$85, and it would have been a total waste of money if we didn't buy the property and eventually rezone it and eventually build the coffeehouse. But you know what? I go back to that moment, and it was a unique moment because it was only$85, but it was me putting some skin in the game. And so I think that's so good that you have to invest a little bit in it just to kind of get it off the ground. You know, I talk to all these experts all the time. So I always have like everyone's like thoughts in my head of all the guests that I've studied over the years. And so Gretchen Rubin recently came on the show and she breaks down the world into four personality types.

51:49And I feel like this really resonates with people who are one of her personality types called obligers, which mean that they really need external accountability to get anything done. And so part of this is knowing your personality. So like, for example, I'm an upholder and I actually don't really need that much external accountability. That means that if I decide to go on a diet, I go on a diet because I told myself I would. If I want to exercise three times a week, I do it. I don't need a gym partner or a trainer or whatever to go do it. But if that's you and you have trouble sticking to your internal goals and anything that you don't have external accountability for, then you need commitment devices when you're trying to start a habit.

52:28And so you need to proactively do those things to make you stick to those goals and to those habits. And so I also think, you know, knowing yourself and what you're good and not good at is key to all of this. Oh, that's so good. And that maybe is where the whole thing starts that, yeah, you have to know yourself really well. That leadership starts with self-leadership. and so much of that is really knowing the way that you're wired. It's crazy. I think some of us know more about our favorite celebrity than we know about ourselves. And so it's that ancient idea, know thyself. Yeah. All right. So as we wrap up this interview, a couple of questions that I ask all my guests at the end of the show, what is one action we can take today to become more profitable tomorrow?

53:16Oh, wow. I love it. Can I just, here's the first thing that comes to mind. When I set 100 life goals, the turning point for me was when I shifted from getting goals to giving goals. It totally transformed the way that I think. My goal is to give it all away. And so instead of setting getting goals, you set giving goals and you have to get a lot to give a lot. But there's something about that that setting giving goals was a huge turning point for me because it made it more of an altruistic kind of motivation, which really changed the game for me. Let's dig deeper on that. Say a getting goal versus a giving goal or like flip it on its head to become giving.

54:04Yeah, like a getting goal is, hey, I want to be financially independent by 50. I want to make that first million or I want to have a net worth of X, Y, and Z. And I get that. There's nothing wrong with financial planning and planning for retirement. But my wife and I, our goal is to give a greater and greater percentage of our income away. And part of that is motivated by what I see in the person of Jesus and I see in Scripture that our goal is to eventually live on 10 % and give away 90%. And so what we've done with every book contract is that we give a greater percentage away. And I tell you what, that's where joy is found on the giving side of life.

54:49And then it makes the getting feel really good because you know that you're going to be a conduit for blessing other people. And so, yeah, it's a simple idea that we want to give away a million, 10 million. As a church, we want to give away 25 million. We've hit that goal. And so now we're dreaming bigger. Like, how can we give it all away? I think that mindset is really a game changer. Yeah, super interesting. I never heard that one before. And what is your secret to profiting in life? The secret, I think, to profiting in life is to, it's not about you. It's just, it's not about me. It's about other people.

55:34When I add value to other people's lives, that's where I find joy. That's where I find meaning. And it's kind of like happiness. If you seek it, you aren't going to find it. Happiness is a byproduct of something else. I think meaning is the same way. Like you, and here's where I would challenge listeners. Have you ever defined success for yourself? Not adopting a cultural definition, not adopting your great uncle's definition. No, you, what is success for you? And so for me personally, Normally, success is when those who know me best respect me most, and that's my wife and my kids. It's not about how many books I sell, how many people I pastor.

56:13It really is about, am I better in private than I am in public? And if not, am I at least the same person? I want to be famous in my own home. So you really have to define success for yourself and figure out. Otherwise, you fall into what Stephen Covey famously said. So many people are so busy climbing the ladder of success that they fail to realize that it's leaning against the wrong wall. Man, that was so powerful. Yeah. For me, success is when those who know me best respect me most. And that's my wife and kids. And so really, and especially right in the world that we live in where a lot of people, There's just a lot of, come on, there's a lot of trolling and shaming and baiting and canceling and kind of everybody's doing this to everybody.

57:08At the end of the day, I care most about the people who know me and love me. You start there, make sure that that grass is green, right where you live, and then let it expand out from there. That is amazing advice. Thank you so much, Mark. This was such a lovely conversation. I loved learning about your journey. I loved learning about your perspective related to habits. And then this last bit about, you know, your secret to profiting in life was also amazing. So thank you so much for your time. My joint privilege. God bless.