I get up very early every day before the sun. I work out for an hour every morning from 4:45 to 5:45. Then I get cleaned up and I go to church every day from 6:30 to 7. Now, this is the holy hour. It doesn’t matter if you’re Protestant or Catholic, we’re Christian people. I recommend the holy hour. That’s the hour of you with the Lord, where the Lord can sustain you, the Lord can console you, but that’s a discipline. That’s like your exercise. It’s more important than your exercise every day. Then it’s a question of how are you gonna spend your day in creative life and contemplation and prayer and working with other people.
Starting a day like that is a very, very healthy way. The biochemistry of it is not even necessary for me to talk about, but the science is all there. This is a way that you can actually maintain the neurochemical balance that’s required to be a public person.
A lot of [pastors] measure their success by attendance or budgets. How do you encourage clergy to rethink success in ways that cause them not to be constantly disappointed that maybe they’re not a megachurch pastor.
Look, all of us are absolutely prone to idolatry. It does not matter how deep your Christian faith is, idolatry is there. Aristotle said through Thomas Aquinas that there are four idols that bedevil us. What we really want is God. But we’re distracted from God. Why? Because the devil distracts us with worldly idols that have divine-seeming characteristics. And there’s only four—this is unbelievably good behavioral science, by the way; as a scientist, I completely agree with this—the four idols that each one of us can fall prey to are money, power, pleasure and honor. And by honor I’m talking about fame or admiration of other people or prestige.
[For] a lot of public people their main idol is that prestige. And anytime we’re counting people that are sitting out there or church budgets, we’re falling prey to something that is not the message of Jesus Christ. The truth is that if we’re working for the Lord, then we have to put our ambition in God. We have to put our ambition in the work of Jesus Christ and his plan for us.
We always say, Lord, guide my path. We never mean it. Maybe God’s path for us is a small church of people who actually go out and are truly apostolic in their work. And the fact that they’re very close to their pastor—like physically close to their pastor—maybe that’s what those particular people need.
But to say, Lord, take my career. Do with me what you will. I am your servant. I’m in your hands. And then actually meaning that. That’s hard. But that’s the only path.
So how do I reframe accomplishment in ways that I can experience happiness if my church isn’t growing. Can I be happy still?
Yeah, for sure. It’s satisfaction, not accomplishment. Satisfaction is accomplishment with struggle. That’s what brings happiness. Accomplishments without struggle, that’s like winning a lottery or getting an inheritance. That brings no sweetness to life. When you don’t feel like you’ve earned your success, that’s not meaningful to you. So let’s talk about how the accomplishment and the struggle actually work, and the scale of it, and what to actually measure.
I’ve made this mistake a hundred times, Ed. I used to be the president of a big think tank in Washington, D.C., called the American Enterprise Institute, which is a free market think tank. I loved that job. But when I came into the job in the beginning of 2009, we were in the middle of the Great Recession and we were deeply in debt and it was a big problem. And I got this kind of depression mentality—as in economic depression mentality—where I thought that I had to just fundraise all the time.
I got into this bad habit. This is a very common bad habit, it’s a very human thing of thinking, if we weren’t growing and my contributions weren’t going up and I didn’t have more donors, that I was failing. But that wasn’t the job. The job was to actually have an effect on public policy. The effect was to have an effect on individual politicians and policymakers so they would do things that were better for America.
“Anytime we’re counting people that are sitting out there or church budgets, we’re falling prey to something that is not the message of Jesus Christ.”
OK, so how did I learn about this? I was doing all this research on charitable giving, and I noticed that charitable giving really, really affects your happiness. Not when you drop dollar bills out of a helicopter. What really affects your happiness is when you change somebody’s life, a real person’s life, in a meaningful way. That’s when it really affects your happiness. And I was showing my wife Ester—who has a graduate degree in theology; she’s super-sophisticated—and I said, “Honey, this is funny, isn’t it? I think we should give more.”
She said OK.
And I said, “You want me to write more checks?”
And she said, “No, I think we should adopt a baby. Because if you’re talking about turning the whole dial, then let’s turn the whole dial.”
And I was dead to rights.
We did. And it was the most life-changing thing that ever happened to us.
You may be called to change one soul. One soul. because the body of Christ is in each soul. So each soul is equally important, and you don’t know the scale of one or a million. It’s not for you to know. This is not human knowledge. This is supernatural knowledge.
So, when the numbers aren’t changing, sure, try to grow your church, get best practices, get better at what you do, go to more seminars, watch Ed’s podcast. I completely agree with that. But when you’re doing everything that you need to do and your numbers aren’t going up, it might just be that the Lord wants you to be touching the same number of people at a more intense level.
And that’s still accomplishment.
Oh my goodness, that might be the most important accomplishment.
So, leadership and calling is a key theme throughout, not just your writing, but The Happiness Files, for sure. You talk about treating life like a startup. How can pastors in established churches or parachurch organizations treat life as a startup without going to plant a church? Not that there’s anything wrong with planting a church.
Yeah, I talk about life as a startup because life is the ultimate entrepreneurial endeavor. We love entrepreneurs in America. I mean, we’re a very immigrant-based culture, and we’re just a bunch of cowboys in America is really what it comes down to. The way to think about life in the American context typically is with this kind of startup vernacular. I’m willing and able to take serious risk. I’m gonna put my capital at risk in search of explosive rewards. And explosive rewards mean outsized, outlandish rewards that other people can’t see.