Jon Acuff's Blog

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!

This video is 20 minutes long, or roughly 14 years long in Youtube video terms. But, I assure you, it is worth it.

Lately, I’ve felt the invitation to be vulnerable extended to me in a number of different ways. Frankly, I find the term “vulnerability” a bit terrifying. In this clip from the TED conference, Brene Brown unpacks what it means to live with vulnerability and why it’s so important. If you don’t have time to watch it, here are some highlights:

1. The original definition of courage was “to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.” The courage to be imperfect.

2. Based on intense research, Brown found that people who live with their whole heart possess three things:

Compassion – to be kind to themselves first and then to others because as it turns out we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly.

Connection – they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be.

Vulnerability – they believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.

3. My favorite quote was “I know that vulnerability is kind of the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy of creativity of belonging of love.”

Question:
What was your greatest takeaway from this clip?

(Today’s blog is a guest post by standup comedian John Crist. Check out his website or you can follow him on Twitter @johnbcrist)

Want to Kill Your Dream? Start Lying.

This idea came to me in the shower; the exact place Jon Acuff said it would come.

I just left my company to pursue my dream as a standup comedian. When people questioned my decision to leave, I found it extremely easy to exaggerate.

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A while ago, Michael Hyatt wrote a great blog post titled, “Why I won’t retweet you.” (If you’re not reading his blog, you need to. He is a blogging beast.)

He raised some great points that really got me thinking about how I choose what I’m going to retweet. (I’m @jonacuff on Twitter.) I knew that someday I’d do my own version of that post, and today is that day.

Here are the 5 reasons I didn’t retweet you:

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I don’t know anyone who absolutely loves meetings.

I’ve never heard anyone ever say the phrase, “I don’t have enough meetings each week.”

I’ve never met anyone who felt more productive because they attended more meetings.

If anything, I’ve heard countless people say, “I was in meetings all day and didn’t get any ‘real’ work done.”

So what’s the solution to this meeting dilemma? It isn’t to stop having meetings. Some of them can be critical to the success of a project.

The answer is to have shorter meetings.

Or, rather, to meet like a sea captain.

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If you follow me on Twitter, than you know I’ve tweeted approximately 92 times about the PBS British drama “Downton Abbey.” Now, it appears that someone named KievKirby did a mashup of the show with the Super Bowl. I thought this was funny and appropriately titled, “The Super Proper Bowl.” (Thanks for the link HollyB!)

If I had a dollar for every year I put “quit my day job” on my list of New Year’s resolutions, I’d be wearing golden pants and telling people how much cowbell a song needs.

Quitting your job is a pretty common goal at the start of the year. Especially if you’ve got a dream and you feel like your job or your boss is standing in the way of it. But, I have to tell you a cautionary tale, because quitting your job right now might be the best way to kill your dream.

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Three years ago I would have hated the first chapter of my book Quitter.

Why? Because I wanted to quit my job, and the title of the chapter is “Don’t Quit Your Job.”

I wanted to read books that said things like “Just go for it!” or “Right now is the best time to quit!” or “Step out in faith!”

I didn’t want someone to tell me to wait. I wanted out, right away. And maybe you feel that same way right now. Part of the reason you feel that is, when it comes to quitting your job, there are only two things we talk about:

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Larry David feels just like me and you when it comes to criticism.

You’d think he wouldn’t. He co-created Seinfeld, the most successful sitcom of all-time. His current show Curb Your Enthusiasm is a smash success. He’s on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone magazine. And yet, he still does the same math you and I do when it comes to critics.

What’s critic’s math?

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Yesterday, I challenged you to finish something this year. I dared you to jump into Finish Year with me. But how do you pick something to “finish?” What does that even mean? If you’ve got a book you’ve always wanted to write, it’s easy to say “I’ll finish my manuscript this year,” but what if you don’t have a goal like that?

Those are great questions to ask, and the hardest part of Finish Year might be figuring out something worthy to finish.

Here are a few ways to build your Finish List:

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