Jon Acuff on Overthinking, Mindset and Faith-Driven Success (Part 2)
Bestselling author and speaker Jon Acuff has built a career helping people rethink how they think. In this interview, he explains how “soundtracks”—repetitive thoughts—shape our lives. Acuff offers practical tools for identifying overthinking, strengthening faith, and developing a healthier mindset in both leadership and everyday life
Don’t miss Part 1 of our interview, where he talks about his formative years and how he became a writer.
That brings us to your two most recent books, Soundtracks and then the youth expression of that, Your New Playlist. Why the topic of overthinking?
Because I am an overthinker. Again, I write books that I need first, and then I go see if a bunch of other people need it, too. I’ve been an overthinker forever—that’s why the epigraph to the book is my wife saying, “Jon, I think you might be overthinking this.” I went to the marketplace, and I was surprised at how many books and resources just basically said, “Stop it, stop it, stop it.” And I thought, No. 1, that’s impossible. I mean, I love quiet time, meditation, whatever phrase you want to use. That’s 10, maybe 20 minutes of your day. What about the other 23 1/2 hours?
Then second, I thought, Why would I ever turn off this amazing thinking machine? God designed me to think. What if I could use those thoughts in a good way? What would that look like? So that launched this multiyear exploration of, “What does it look like to change how you think, in a real way, a tangible way?” It was about mindset.
There’s a man named Mike Peasley who helps me do research. Mike has his Ph.D. Now, I’m not a social scientist. There are no beakers involved or electrodes on people’s heads. I don’t want to exaggerate that. But Mike will help me, saying, “Hey, let’s figure out what people are really struggling with.” We decided to look into the topic of overthinking. Each of us tends to think that we are the only one who overthinks. Well, we asked 10,000 people if they overthink, and 99.5% of people said yes. Right away, doesn’t that make you feel a little better?
Soundtracks came out 18 months ago, and I still examine my mindset daily. I am still using it.
Unpack the titles for us: Soundtracks? Your New Playlist?
Well, I love music. I think it is powerful. There was this study that talked about how the music you listen to when you’re a teenager leaves a deeper impact on you than music you hear during other periods of your life. Something you listen to when you are 15 stays with you longer than something you listen to when you’re 35.
I started to think about how the things we believe about ourselves are the same. I started to see 45-year-olds that I work with, leaders who’d be given a better leadership opportunity in the company, but they’d pull back and say things like, “Well, I’m not a natural leader.” If you pull the thread far enough, you usually find out thoughts like that started about [age] 14. Somebody in a position of authority told them, “Hey, you are not a natural leader,” and by now they have listened to that same soundtrack 10,000 times. By the time I am talking to them at 45, they have two or three decades of playing that same song. If you listen to a song for 30 years, you know every lyric. And I started to really say, “That is what we are doing. We’re all walking around with these soundtracks.”
So for “playlists,” we really wanted to ask what would it look like for you to have a handful of thoughts that you could listen to regularly?
And then the other thing with the soundtrack, I was able to say, “A soundtrack has the power to change an entire moment, and often we didn’t even notice it is happening. We don’t even notice it is playing.” I can use the movie metaphor and say, “A movie opens up on a quiet, small house, a white picket fence, kids frolicking in the yard, and then you play an ominous soundtrack. That changes the entire feel, doesn’t it?” And people instantly go, “Oh, you’re right.” Because what was just a quiet house, when they play an ominous soundtrack, becomes too quiet. Now it’s dangerous. Don’t go in there. There could be a creepy clown in the sewer. [Laughs.]
