Jon Acuff's Blog

Don’t believe me?

Ask Clint.

When you sign up for the Quitter Conference, September 21-22, go ahead and order some new business cards while you’re at it.

You’re going to need them.

Clint did.

It’s easy. Here’s all it takes.

Spend more time practicing your dream than you do promoting your dream.

That’s it.

The Internet has made it ridiculously easy to promote your dream, your craft, your passion, your whatever. As someone who writes books and throws events, that is awesome. But that ease comes with a consequence.

The temptation is to spend more time on promoting what you’re doing instead of practicing what you’re doing. Honing your skills, putting in the hours to improve, working hard while no one is watching. Promoting makes people think you’re great. Practicing actually makes you great. There’s a huge difference between those two things.

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Fear always tells you two things about time:

1. It’s too late.

2. Do it later.

The first destroys you with regret.

The second delays you with laziness.

They’re both lies.

Wage war against them.

Right now is the best time to get started because it’s the only time we’re guaranteed to have.

The truth is, my wife and I didn’t have “chase a dream” as a line item in our household budget.

We didn’t have money earmarked for that. Some people are that smart perhaps, we were not. So when we started to talk about doing something different with our lives, when we started to have big “what if” discussions, money was an issue.

I remember my wife and I going back and forth about whether we should pay to have someone redesign and redevelop the Stuff Christians Like blog. We didn’t have a “blog development” line item in our budget and had to be really careful. We had to McGuyver things together with the limited resources we had.

That’s why it was important to me to give you a money back guarantee for the next Quitter Conference.

I think you’ll love the conference.

You are going to learn a ton, laugh a ton, and dream a ton.

You are going to meet hundreds of people who will encourage you to never give up on your dream.

You are going to be blown away by the surprises we’ve planned for this one that we’ve never been able to pull off before.

But more importantly you are going to feel like the ticket price was worth every dollar you spent because I don’t take those dollars for granted.

I’ve been in the trenches of dream chasing, I know that every dollar counts. I know that the two resources that are in the highest demand are your time and your money.

So if you come to the Quitter Conference in Nashville on September 21 and 22 and don’t LOVE it, I’ll refund the price of your ticket. No questions asked.

The last one sold out and we had a waiting list. Please don’t miss your chance to go to this one. To get the early bird ticket price of $99 before that ends on May 24, sign up today!

Fear is incredibly talkative. The minute you start working on something that matters, it will talk your ear off if you’re not careful. One of the things it always says is:

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This is a picture I took of my alarm clock two weeks ago in Indianapolis.

I wasn’t there to work out for the Colts, but that’s a pretty good assumption.

I spoke in Grant County, Indiana on a Friday night. Then rode 95 miles back to Indianapolis and checked into the hotel at 12:30AM. Roughly 3 hours later I was up for a flight to San Antonio.

Before I took my dream job, I didn’t expect so many 4 AM alarm clocks. I bought into the myth that when you find your passion or calling or dream, things will be easy. Life will flow like a gentle river of fresca, passing banks of candy cane grass. La. La. La.

I was wrong. Here’s the truth:

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Why do I write dozens of tweets during the Grammy’s?

Steven Pressfield, one of my favorite authors, answers that question in his brilliant book, The War of Art:

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There’s a bed they sell that let’s you set a “sleep number.” You get to determine the stiffness or softness you want with a dial and then enjoy a restful night of customized comfort. I forget the name of the manufacturer, but if they want to sponsor my blog, I would Google that on the quick and write it in bold. (The kids need new shoes! Keens specifically, because wow, those things stink after a season of backyard romping.)

The commercials they run about this bed have people talking about their “sleep number.” I think it’s an interesting concept, but what’s even more fascinating to me is that most people have a “success number.”

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We usually think the distance between ordinary and extraordinary is a thousand miles.

When we survey where we currently stand and where we’d like to land, the journey feels massive.

The gulf between who we are and who we want to be seems impossible.

The distance between what is and what could be seems overwhelming.

It’s not though. It’s a lot smaller than you think.

And two cups of yogurt reminded me of that recently.

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For about a year before I started www.stuffchristianslike.net, I wrote a blog called Prodigal Jon. On my best day, two hundred people showed up and read what I wrote. On the average day, fifty people did. And a lot of those fifty people shared my last name. And were my mom.

It was a quiet blog that, by blogging terms, wasn’t very successful. If the goal of a blog is to grow an active, vocal community, then I was failing. Almost no one read it. And, even though I worked as hard as I could, it stayed roughly the same size. Day after day, month after month, I wrote Prodigal Jon.

At the time, I felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt confused that so few people knew about it. I didn’t see the point of writing to a handful of people on a consistent basis. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But looking back on it, I needed that year. I needed the gift so few of us want but most of us need: the gift of invisibility.

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