Optimisfits Read online

  It takes thousands of hours of practice to become an overnight success.

  Chris Martin, the lead singer and lyricist for the band Coldplay, says that the secret to writing a great song is just putting in the hours. He often stays up all night, writing and rewriting, working and reworking the music and the words until sometimes he literally falls asleep with his head on the piano keys.

  Professional golfers will tell you that it is only hours of repeated practice that makes their shots look so effortless. Basketball greats will tell you about how much time they spend practicing at the free throw line so they can make it “nothing but net” in crunch time.

  All too often we spend a lot of time waiting for our opportunity to turn up. Instead, we should turn up our sleeves and get to work.

  Too many people have a million-dollar dream and a minimum-wage work ethic.

  Charles Spurgeon said that if we focus on our ability, then God will take care of the opportunity.

  The way we triumph is to add a little umph to our try.

  One of my heroes is John Wesley, who preached 42,000 sermons during the course of his life. (Do the math; that’s three sermons a day on average!) He traveled 60 to 70 miles a day on horseback to share the message of God’s love with people in far-flung locations. When he was 83 years old he was able to write in his diary: “I am a wonder to myself. I am never tired either with preaching, writing, or traveling.”

  Little surprise that he changed the world.

  I’ve tried to follow that kind of example. While I was still in my twenties I had written three books, had a weekly television show with a global outreach, and a radio program on 400 stations. And I’ve travelled all over the world, speaking to groups large and small.

  Since I am still pretty young, people are surprised at how comfortable I am in front of a crowd or a camera. Well, it isn’t by accident. Young as I am, I have been doing this for a long time. I started early, I worked hard, and I kept at it.

  I recently calculated that I have invested more than 11,000 hours in honing my craft as a writer and speaker. I still work about 13 hours a day on writing, reading, and speaking. I consume books as fast as I can, especially those related to what I love to talk about.

  If that all sounds like a terrible grind, well, it isn’t. It is amazing how much fun it is to do the things you really care about.

  And when I’m done working, I play hard.

  I play hard.

  My friend Peter told me that in order for a Chinese bamboo tree to grow, you must water it every day for five years. In those five years you’ll see no growth. Not even a bud. But if you miss even one day of watering, that bamboo tree is likely to die. After five years of consistently watering it every single day, though, it will then grow 80 feet in 42 days.

  My secret to success isn’t that I’m smart. In fact, I’m dumb by nature. I had a 2.0 GPA in school. No one picked me for “most likely to succeed.” But I think I have managed to rewire my brain by working hard. I’ve built intellectual muscle and spiritual muscle by focusing on my growth in those areas.

  It all begins with your thoughts.

  Here’s a quote that I love. No one really knows where it originated, but it offers a great blueprint for life: “When you sow a thought, you reap an action; when you sow an action you reap a habit; when you sow a habit you reap a character; and when you sow a character you reap a destiny.”

  The thoughts you think become the words you say, which become the actions you undertake, which create the habits you form, which transform your lifestyle. But it all begins with the thoughts we think.

  Follow your heart, but make sure your brain always comes along for the ride.

  21

  RUNNING FREE

  It should have been my moment of glory.

  It was the first game of the season for my eighth-grade basketball team, the South Medford Generals. I was excited to be able to demonstrate my prowess with the ball, as I had worked hard all summer to bring my game to the next level.

  On the first play of the game, the ball was tipped into my hands. I lowered my head and dribbled past the defender, a bit surprised at how easily I was able to get past him. It seemed like he wasn’t even bothering to guard me. I drove to the hoop and put the ball up. I kissed it off the glass. It fell through the net.

  Two points.

  For the other team.

  I’d put the ball in the wrong basket. So, I started my breakout season with negative two points.

  So much for my moment of glory.

  By the end of the season it didn’t matter. My team won the Rogue Valley championship anyway. In the finals we had a showdown against our crosstown rivals and shut them down decisively. It wasn’t even close. We cooked ’em. The officials placed the gold medals around our necks and we posed for the obligatory photos, filled with the pride of achievement.

  But let me tell you, I didn’t have much to do with our success. Sometimes, like the debacle of my first game, I think I actually made it harder for us to win. The reason we made it to the finals and became champs was mainly because we had this kid on our team named Kyle Singler.

  Kyle was a talent to behold.

  He went on to get a full-ride scholarship to Duke University, where he won a championship under Coach K. He was named the Final Four “player of the game.” He was drafted by the Detroit Pistons and was elected to the second team All-NBA rookie squad. Today, he’s raking in nearly five million dollars every year playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder as a professional NBA basketball player.

  He was on my team.

  A couple of years ago I ran into my old basketball coach and said, “Wasn’t it great when we had Kyle on our team?”

  “Oh yeah,” he replied. “Our whole game strategy was just give the ball to Kyle.”

  Sometimes winning is all about who is on your Squad.

  Though I sometimes still score for the wrong team, the Captain of Salvation is on my team. I am often awful, but my God is never anything other than awesome. He is the star player who assures how the final score is going to look.

  When the final buzzer goes off there is no question that we will have won.

  Even if, at this very moment, we are trailing, we don’t have to worry. We will pull this off.

  That, my friends, is the basis of hope.

  No matter how much I mess things up, no matter how bad the situation might be, no matter how much it feels like I am trapped in a corner and things don’t look good—my hope is in a God who says that the battle belongs to Him. He has never lost yet.

  The game is rigged. In our favor.

  Some cynics will tell you that hope is illogical.

  But I believe hope is the most sensible thing in the world. My hope is not an empty hope. It isn’t wishful thinking. It isn’t about positive confession. It isn’t trying to convince myself that something is true that I have my doubts about.

  My hope is certain.

  It is based on facts. Hope is not hype. God has proven Himself again and again in my life and in the lives of others. He will fight on my behalf, He will champion my cause, He will see me through. Because He has overcome the world.

  Period.

  Hope isn’t an airy-fairy, happy-clappy, wishy-washy pie-in-the-sky matter. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word for hope refers to being knitted. We hope because we are firmly knitted into a relationship with the Ultimate Reality.

  When Paul writes to Titus about hope, he uses the Greek word elpis, which means “to be joyful, confident, welcome.” In other words, hope is the joyful confidence by which we welcome the miracles of God. Hope means that we are convinced that God will act in the future as He has acted in the past.

  The MVP is on my Squad.

  The Apostle Paul would have liked ESPN.

  His letters are full of sports metaphors. You know he must have regularly checked out whatever the ancient equivalent was to our sports pages. He wrote about boxing and wrestling, and most of all about running. That’s be
cause sports were such a big deal in the ancient world. There were the popular Isthmian Games in Corinth, the Pan-Ionian Games in Ephesus, and, of course, the Olympic Games in Athens. Sports were all the rage in Paul’s day.

  The foot race was, without question, the most popular event in the ancient Wide World of Sports. Every major city had their stadium, where people would crowd in to witness the runners showing their stuff. So, when he wrote his letter to the Christians at Corinth, Paul told them:

  You’ve been to the stadium and seen the athletes race. A bunch of people line up at the starting line, but only one wins. So run to win. All good athletes train hard. They do it for the gold medal, but that gold medal eventually tarnishes and fades. What you are after is the one that is gold eternally. I don’t know about you, but I am running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got (the Authorized Ben Courson Translation).

  Can’t you just imagine Paul running with abandon, his legs churning and his chest straining toward the tape? He ran like winning this race was everything. Because for him…it was.

  When I was in seventh grade, I joined the track team. One of the races I participated in was the 400-meter dash. It was brutal, and honestly, I hated every second of it. After all, it’s like running a long-distance sprint.

  And I had my issues as a runner. A lot of the problem arose from my tendency to keep glancing backward to see who was behind me. And every time I glanced back I lost some of my momentum. You have to stay focused on the goal if you are going to win the race. Looking back is disastrous. You have to keep moving forward.

  And the really dumb part? I wasn’t that good of a runner, so when I glanced back over my shoulder it looked like the rapture had taken place behind me.

  When Paul wrote to the Philippians, he said that he was forgetting what was behind him and reaching for the prize of the upward calling of God.

  Paul said he had stopped looking back. Instead, he was laser focused on the trophy that awaited the first across the finish line.

  My Squad of Optimisfits and I try to maintain that same kind of focus. We call that focus hope.

  We leave the past in the dust. We forget about what is behind us. We put the pedal to the metal. The past sees only our taillights.

  Hebrews says that we are to run the race set before us with endurance, keeping our eyes on the author and finisher of our faith. In the ancient world the trophy was usually placed right there at the finish line, so that you could fix your eyes on it as you ran your race. It was the most effective kind of motivation. When your feet started to feel heavy or you began to run out of breath, you could just raise your eyes to the prize and find a fresh burst of energy.

  The author of Hebrews goes on to encourage us to lay aside all the burdens that might encumber our progress. Anything that weighs us down needs to be cast aside. Runners don’t keep their warm-up clothes on when it’s time to race. No, they strip down to lightest-weight gear. The ancient Greeks took this principle so literally that they competed in the nude. The 100-yard dash in the buff.

  Talk about running free…

  Our hope gives us the focus to do the hard work of running well.

  My friend Will, who is a professional soccer player, says that you earn your trophies at practice; you just pick them up at the competition.

  That is the kind of confidence we live with.

  That is the kind of hope that fuels our race.

  22

  SOMETHING WORTH DYING FOR

  My friend Peter Unger is about as Germanic as they come.

  Blond hair. Blue eyes. Strong Germanic name that probably should have an umlaut over the letter u. Physically, he looks like Hitler’s dream of the perfect human specimen.

  Years ago, he decided he didn’t want to be a cog in the white-collar corporate system. He wanted to live for a living. Now he has become a poster child for Generation Z neo-entrepreneurship.

  He’s a little like Jay Z, who said: “I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man.”

  Autonomy is his jam.

  For Peter, life isn’t about having two-point-five kids, a dog named Spot, and a white picket fence. It’s about more than working 40 hours a week for 40 years so that you can retire on 40 percent of your income, get your 401K and a timeshare in Palm Springs, tool around in your golf cart for a few years, and then claim your spot in the cemetery.

  To Peter, the classic American Dream sounds more like a nightmare.

  And he wants to wake people up.

  Peter likes to say things that will annoy people.

  On the Fourth of July, when everyone was celebrating how the United States is the land of freedom, he posted this on his Instagram: “We always talk about how we live in America where there’s freedom. But most of the world is free. Seventy-five percent of the world is free. America is one of 146 countries that are free. Happy Fourth!”

  Yeah. That kind of thing.

  He likes to speak truth to power, as they say. He really hates the System. And he hates all the neat little assumptions about God and country.

  One day he started talking to me about how Rockefeller and Carnegie set up the American educational system to create docile slaves for the modern industrial revolution. Not sure about the accuracy of that, but it does make my point—he is no fan of the corporate state.

  Peter doesn’t want to be controlled by anyone.

  Not by corporate America.

  Not by the political system.

  Not by the church.

  Peter is a subversive, working inside the System only as much as he has to, but always wary of its siren song, and ready to pour a bracing bucket of ice-cold water over people’s assumptions so he can awaken them from the American Dream. Because it isn’t a big enough dream.

  He has bigger dreams.

  He says that if your dreams don’t exceed your current capacity to achieve them…they just aren’t big enough.

  And if your dreams don’t scare you…they’re not big enough.

  Peter isn’t afraid of power.

  As George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.” That explains a lot about our world today.

  Peter has no intention of being a fool.

  Let’s face it: There is no such thing as a moderate revolutionary.

  If you want to change the world you’ve got to be extreme. Peter is as extreme as a suicide bomber, but in his case, he is the bomb himself—dropped down into a complacent world so that he can explode all the forms of false comfort and get us thinking about the things that really matter. He wants to give his life for a cause that is worth dying for.

  Namely: maximum sending.

  23

  WEAK IS THE NEW STRONG

  There are 613 separate laws in the Law of Moses, found in the first five books of the Old Testament. They cover just about any topic you can think of.

  When Jesus was asked which was the most important of them, He was ready with an answer. Which in itself is kind of surprising, since when Jesus was asked a question He usually responded by asking a question of His own. This tended to throw the religious leaders off their game.

  When He asked them where John got his authority to baptize, “from heaven or from man?” the Pharisees knew that Jesus had impaled them on the horns of a dilemma. If they said that his authority was from man, then they knew the crowds of loyal followers would go ballistic. But if they said it was from heaven, then it was effectively an admission that what John had said about Jesus was true. The best answer they could muster was, “We don’t know.”

  Boom. Game, set, match.

  Throughout His ministry Jesus kept the conversation focused where it should be by asking a question of His interlocutors.

  But when it came to the question of what was the most critical concern in the Scriptures, Jesus didn’t hesitate for a moment to give a straightforward response. Under the full gaze of His piercing eyes, and looking His inquirer full i
n the face, He told them that everything hinged on love.

  Love for God.

  Love for our neighbor.

  That’s the message of Jesus in a nutshell, especially if we add to it His directive to love our enemies. After all, as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, we should love our neighbor and love our enemy…because often they are the same person!

  If you are living the Optimisfit life, some people just aren’t going to like it. You must be prepared to make a few enemies. Winston Churchill was someone who knew what it was like to stand up to opposition. He once said, “You have enemies? Good. It means you stood up for something at some time in your life.”

  When Churchill was scheduled to speak, the announcement would cause the halls to be filled to overflowing. When he was asked how it made him feel to be able to pack ’em in like that, he smiled his wry smile and answered, “It’s quite flattering, until I consider that the halls would be twice as full if they were coming to see me being beheaded.”

  When you stand up for something that matters to you, you better be prepared to be shouted down sometimes. And when you are, the best response is to love the shouters.