Episode 25: Doing Work For the Good of Others with Jordan Raynor

Jordan Raynor is a serial entrepreneur and author who has the honor of working to help Christians connect the gospel to their work. In November 2017, Jordan wrote and published Called to Create: A Biblical Invitation to Create, Innovate, and Risk, which became an instant national bestseller. Since then, he and his team have helped more than 3,000,000 Christians do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. In 2020 Master of One: Find and Focus on the Work You Were Created to Do was published, and coming soon is Redeeming Your Time.

Jordan also serves as the Executive Chairman of Threshold 360, a venture-backed tech startup that has built the world’s largest library of 360° experiences of hotels, restaurants, and attractions. From October 2016—March 2019, Jordan had the distinct privilege of serving as CEO of the company.

Some questions Tynan asks:

• How does one become set on taking personal responsibility for their own mastery?

• What does it look like for companies to begin allowing space for their employees to become masters at their roles and for their own personal endeavours?

• Why does our society believe the ultimate dream/goal is to not be working when it's so fundamental to what we were created for?

• How do you decide on the area of life you should focus on to become a master?

• Should we become a jack of all trades?

• How does hiring for high GPAs affect different diverse candidate populations?

• What would it look like to bring up faith in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion discussion?

What you'll learn from this episode:

• Learning that work is a service to the world is incredibly important on the journey towards mastery, it needs to become part of your motivation.

• To encourage mastery at work, companies should:

  • Have exceptionally high standards for their talent & hiring.

  • Look for ways in your team to allow them to be more focused in their discipline, and remove things pulling away from that core thing.

  • Establish workplace cultures that foster Deep Work.

  • Guard your employees and encourage them to create boundaries so they can do undisturbed, focused, deep work regularly (ideally 4 hours per day).

• Being efficient with your time is something to be celebrated but believing that work is meaningless isn't the goal.

• Work was part of the original perfect design by God (Genesis 1).

• "Passion follows mastery, passion follows service. It grows with competency over time because that's how God created us. God created to serve us. We create the serve other people. When you understand work like that, you're fired up and you want to do as much as much work as you can for the good of others."

• Your area to master = the area of life you're disproportionately skilled in.

• Jack/Jill of all trades is great and worth celebrating, as it's the inevitable by-product of discerning what you're going to go big on vocationally.

• Looking at GPA when hiring is only part of the equation, but understand that we need to be more intentional, digging in and hearing about someone's full background.

  • Discussing faith in the workplace is fine. But the fundamental ministry for people of faith is pursuing excellence at work, and becoming relevant through that excellence becomes an open door to discussing faith.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Jordan's new book Redeeming Your Time releases Oct. 19, 2019, and if you pre-order, head to JordanRaynor.com to enter into the sweepstakes for a Trip to Israel

• Grit - Angela Duckworth

• Jordan's podcast episode with Dee Ann Turner (Fmr. VP of Talent at Chick-fil-A)

• Jordan's course "How to Land a Book Deal with No Platform"

This episode is brought to you by Peninsula, which offers 24/7 HR, health & safety, and employment support to Canada’s small and medium businesses. For the white-glove treatment and an initial consultation just for CultureING Podcast listeners, head to this link and enter the code "CULTURE"