There are few things that annoy me more than the entrepreneurial, success at all costs types that are all too prevalent online these days. We’ve all seen them. Sleep 4 hours a day to maximize productivity! Build 14 businesses! Optimize everything in your life or you're a loser! Do all the things, and do them better, faster and do more of them!
Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that it is good for a man to know how to put his head down and work. Being able to grind through adversity and challenges is an essential skill for a man to possess. Discipline, grit and work ethic are all good things. But even good things can become corrupted when we take them to unnatural extremes.
Understand this: discipline and work ethic are tools that can help us get what we want in life, but what we want in life isn’t always good for us. Furthermore, guys that get into the success at all costs mindset often start to worship the tools of their ironclad discipline and unshakeable work ethic. They completely forget about the God that made them and blessed them with those skills and abilities. Guys like this worship at the altar of self. It’s all about what they can do, what they can accomplish and what they can achieve. If something ever goes sideways in life, their faith lies purely in themselves. Any loss that is incurred can be fixed by more effort, more work, more willing of the self. Ultimately men who bow down at the altar of self make themselves the god of their own lives.
No humility, all puffed up pride. Chase trinkets and figure out how to bring more glory to the unholy trinity: me, myself and I.
Where Ecclesiastes teaches us that there is a time and place for everything under the sun, the entrepreneurial hustle bro teaches us that there is only one time in a 24 hour day: IT’S TIME TO WORK MF’ER!
Let me reiterate. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of success, or worldly achievement, or making more, or becoming more. But it is easy to completely lose yourself in these pursuits. And it’s also easy to be pursuing all of these things with no real idea as to why they are even so important to you in the first place.
There’s a big difference between a man who finds his ultimate sense of security in what he has, what he does, and who he thinks he is according to himself, and the man who finds his ultimate sense of security in what he has through Christ, what Christ did for him, and who he is according to the God who made him.
Where the first man tries to fill the God shaped hole in his heart through achievement, the second man has a sense of peace and fulfillment that transcends all worldly metrics. The first man needs to achieve to prove to himself and others that he is worth something, where the second man already knows what he is worth, and he operates from that place with a sense of peace and confidence. When a man of God pursues something worldly, he does so free from the illusionary ideas that whatever worldly thing he is pursuing is going to do something for him that only God is capable of doing for him.
Building your identity on things that can all disappear or be taken away is like building on quicksand. When you know Christ, you have an unshakeable foundation to build on.
Something to think about as we head into a new week!
“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:7
-Brendan Schmidt