Episode 210
MATT REYNOLDS - How To Stop Wasting Your Time: Vital Lessons from "Undoing Urgency"
(Thanks to my bro Matt for pinch-hitting for me on the intro this week, while I've been out sick. - Will)
Matt Reynolds, founder and CEO of Barbell Logic, joins The Will Spencer Podcast to discuss his new book, "Undoing Urgency." The central theme of their conversation revolves around the idea that urgency often crowds out the important aspects of life, leading to a diminished quality of existence.
Reynolds emphasizes the necessity of identifying core values and prioritizing actions that align with those values, rather than succumbing to the chaos of daily demands. He shares personal anecdotes about his journey, including the challenges and failures he faced, illustrating how these experiences shaped his perspective on strength, health, and leadership.
Ultimately, the discussion highlights the importance of intentional living and the pursuit of a meaningful legacy for future generations.
Takeaways:
- Matt Reynolds discusses the importance of identifying core values to prioritize meaningful tasks over the urgent ones.
- He emphasizes that urgency often crowds out the significant aspects of life, such as family and health.
- Reynolds shares the lessons learned from personal failures and the necessity of vulnerability in leadership.
- The conversation highlights that true growth comes from recognizing and overcoming personal struggles.
- He stresses the importance of maintaining physical health as a means to fulfill one's responsibilities towards family and community.
- The episode illustrates the interconnectedness of faith, family, and personal well-being for long-term success.
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Transcript
Foreign welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Matt Reynolds:This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.
Matt Reynolds:New episodes release every Friday.
Matt Reynolds:Will is a bit under the weather this week and so he asked me, today's guest, to introduce today's show.
Matt Reynolds:My name is Matt Reynolds.
Matt Reynolds:I'm the founder and CEO of one of the largest online fitness coaching companies in the world, Barbell Logic, where our goal is to improve the quality of life of as many people as possible by helping them experience strength and the refining power of voluntary hardship.
Matt Reynolds:I'm a longtime friend of Will's and this is my second appearance on the podcast.
Matt Reynolds:Today I had the pleasure of having a wonderful conversation about my new book, Undoing Reclaiming youg Time for the Things that Matter Most, published by Forbes and on sale now at Amazon or any major retailer where books are sold.
Matt Reynolds:In our conversation, we do a deep dive of the problem of urgency.
Matt Reynolds:How virtually everyone is drowning in urgency and how that urgency often crowds out the most important things in our lives, diminishing our faith and spiritual disciplines, our calling as husbands and fathers, business owners, good citizens, and often comes even at the expense of our own health and fitness.
Matt Reynolds:Urgency truly is the enemy of the important.
Matt Reynolds:It was a huge honor to be on the show and I'm incredibly grateful to Will for his support and friendship over the years.
Matt Reynolds:So I hope you enjoy and get a ton of practical value in our discussion about pulling weeds, undoing urgency, and learning to focus the bulk of your time on the most important things in life, which are almost never urgent, but that are most intimately tied to your personal core values.
Matt Reynolds:For those ready to go deeper, please visit willspencerpod.substack.com and become a paid subscriber for ad free interviews and exclusive content.
Matt Reynolds:And remember, Will's sponsors aren't just businesses, they're allies, building Christian economic wealth for generations to come.
Matt Reynolds:Supporting them isn't just spending money, it's investing in an American reformation.
Matt Reynolds:And with that, let's begin our conversation with Will Spencer and me, Matt Reynolds, author of Undoing Urgency.
Will Spencer:Matt Reynolds, welcome back to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Matt Reynolds:Hey, brother, thanks for having me.
Matt Reynolds:I'm excited.
Matt Reynolds:Been a little while.
Matt Reynolds:Been a few months.
Will Spencer:Has it been.
Will Spencer:I think it's been like a year or so since you came on last time.
Matt Reynolds:Yes, but not that long since you've come and stayed at my house and got to experience the Ozarks.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:For the first time, which was a blast.
Matt Reynolds:So, yeah, thanks for having me back.
Will Spencer:On the show that was August of last year actually hung out with you and Brandon and the crew.
Matt Reynolds:That's crazy.
Matt Reynolds:Time flies.
Will Spencer:It does.
Will Spencer:So I'm excited to talk to you today about your new book.
Will Spencer:Congratulations, Undoing Urgency, which I think is out now.
Will Spencer:Well, probably by the time this podcast comes out, it will be out.
Will Spencer:But is it out like literally today?
Matt Reynolds:December 10th is the official published date.
Matt Reynolds:You can buy it on Amazon.
Matt Reynolds:I think it's gonna, like you said, when this comes out, I think it will already be out.
Matt Reynolds:And so We've already sold 7,000 copies, which is insane and broken.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, Forbes, it's broken the records for Forbes already for pre sale.
Matt Reynolds:So they're excited.
Matt Reynolds:I'm nervous because I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched.
Will Spencer:And so some chickens have already hatched.
Matt Reynolds:We've already hit bestseller lists on Amazon pre sale, which is really rare to hit bestseller on.
Matt Reynolds:On Amazon.
Matt Reynolds:We'll see.
Matt Reynolds:I don't.
Matt Reynolds:It's really hard to make bestseller for New York Times and that's not why I wrote the book and so.
Matt Reynolds:But I'm excited.
Matt Reynolds:Forbes was the publisher and so it's nice to have a name behind it that it can actually kind of push it out there.
Matt Reynolds:It'll be in all the Hudson News and, and places in the airport.
Matt Reynolds:And Hudson actually decided they reviewed it and they wanted as a face out book as a.
Matt Reynolds:As opposed to a, you know, just to see the spine of the book.
Matt Reynolds:So that'll be.
Matt Reynolds: ews in January or February of: Matt Reynolds:I probably will need to do an airport tour.
Matt Reynolds:I thought it'd be cool to just go to, you know, just a handful, like do a circle airport tour of like some business trips and it would be cool, just walk in the Hudson News and Fancy as well as there's a handful of other book suppliers in the airports that aren't Hudson.
Matt Reynolds:And it'll of course be on Barnes and Noble and all the other places you can buy books.
Matt Reynolds:But Amazon is.
Matt Reynolds:Amazon is king at this point.
Matt Reynolds:So the goal is to.
Matt Reynolds:That's where the rankings come from.
Matt Reynolds:And so yeah, that's the goal for sure from a ranking standpoint.
Matt Reynolds:But ultimately I just hope this book is a blessing to others and it changes lives.
Matt Reynolds:I think that I've read a ton of business books and there, there are a ton of business books I've read and I'm like, that's a good book.
Matt Reynolds:But it didn't really change my life My goal is I would rather change a handful or a few scores or maybe hopefully a couple hundred lives than to sell a million books and change no lives.
Matt Reynolds:And so, you know, I'm not a, I don't make my money from writing books.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not a content producer for, for money.
Matt Reynolds:I run a service business.
Matt Reynolds:And so really the book was a thing that was, it just held a ton of bandwidth in my brain.
Matt Reynolds:Lessons I've Learned over nearly 20 years of business ownership and life and almost 25 years of marriage.
Matt Reynolds:And so I just put it all out there.
Matt Reynolds:And for those that get the book, the intro is pretty hard and very vulnerable and transparent.
Matt Reynolds:But I think it's important because it shows humanity and it shows, I think a lot of business owners that have been successful.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:And this is not just a business book.
Matt Reynolds:This is more of a lifestyle book.
Matt Reynolds:And it's also not a time hack book.
Matt Reynolds:I want to be clear.
Matt Reynolds:It's about how to leverage our time more effectively, but not in a time hack sort of way.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think a lot of successful people if, if I end up being qualified as that, and I don't know that I do, but if I am, if I am, I think people often tell the story of just the wins and not the losses.
Matt Reynolds:But I think the lessons are really learned more in the failures than they are in the wins.
Matt Reynolds:And so there's a lot of failure lessons there.
Matt Reynolds:And these are stories that my family knows and my staff knows and people that know me know, you know, my pastor, my church know.
Matt Reynolds:But I still had to call my mom and say, you know, I need you to read the intro because, oh wow, you know, this is, there's some painful stuff in here.
Matt Reynolds:And so, but I think, I think it, you know, one of my favorite business books I've written, going down a rabbit trail already is, is a book called the Hard Thing about Hard Things written by Ben Horowitz, who is a co founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the biggest venture capital and maybe private equity firms at this point.
Matt Reynolds:These guys are interesting.
Matt Reynolds:Marc Andreessen was just on Rogan last week.
Will Spencer:He was.
Matt Reynolds:And these guys are prototypical long term liberal Democrats in the, in the tech space and completely flipped for Trump in the last year or so and the pushback and the things that they're seeing in that world.
Matt Reynolds:Ben Horowitz wrote a book called the Hard Thing about hard things.
Matt Reynolds:He obviously now being the founder of a major multi billion venture capital firm has been very successful.
Matt Reynolds:But his whole book is almost no wins and all losses.
Matt Reynolds:It's all like, this is how hard it is to build a multi billion dollar business in America today.
Matt Reynolds:And the things you're going to have to deal with, not because of America's culture, but because this is just how hard business is.
Matt Reynolds:And it is so cathartic.
Matt Reynolds:As a matter of fact, I'm about to go on vacation.
Matt Reynolds:By the time this comes out, I'll probably be in Mexico with my family.
Matt Reynolds:I hope that I am and Lord's blessed to have a business with where I can, I can work a little bit down there and spend some good time with my family.
Matt Reynolds:And so I probably will listen to that audiobook while I'm sitting down on the beach.
Matt Reynolds:There's a, there's a cathartic thing that happens when you hear other people's struggles who have gone through very similar struggles as you.
Matt Reynolds:And so that's what I wanted to do to intro the book was to kind of lay out the story of, look, I do, I do not.
Matt Reynolds:I have not done this well.
Matt Reynolds:I do not always do this well.
Matt Reynolds:And so these are why I've learned these lessons.
Matt Reynolds:Not because I crushed it, but because I didn't.
Will Spencer:That is an incredible way to start the podcast.
Will Spencer:And you've given me so many different paths to go down.
Will Spencer:So.
Will Spencer:Okay, so I think first where we'll start is I think it's necessary for the audience to have a bit of context of what Undoing Urgency is about.
Will Spencer:Sure.
Will Spencer:And the structure of the book.
Will Spencer:Because then I want to get into sort of what you said about the actual process of running that out over the course of being a business owner, an entrepreneur or whatever in today's cultural climate.
Will Spencer:So let's start by talking about the book Undoing Urgency.
Will Spencer:Like, what's the structure of it?
Will Spencer:What processes are involved?
Will Spencer:Let's fill in some gaps for people.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And I'll even expand.
Matt Reynolds:It's not a business book either.
Matt Reynolds:There's a lot applicable as you get into the later third.
Matt Reynolds:And I'll back up and I'll lead into this.
Matt Reynolds:But there's a lot of business things that we've learned over the years that we talk about in the book.
Matt Reynolds:But this really applies to, I think almost everybody.
Matt Reynolds:And it's because of this, when I was a kid, if someone in the 80s and 90s, and probably same thing for you, if somebody came up to your dad or to my dad and they said, how's it going?
Matt Reynolds:How you doing?
Matt Reynolds:Same sort of question we asked today.
Matt Reynolds:Question hasn't changed the Answer's changed.
Matt Reynolds:Question is, how's it going?
Matt Reynolds:How you doing?
Matt Reynolds:The answer in the 80s or 90s were good.
Matt Reynolds:It was just sort of a flippant answer that like, yeah, it's good, it's good, right?
Matt Reynolds:It was sort of a small talk, right.
Matt Reynolds:And now it doesn't matter.
Matt Reynolds:If you ask the business owner, the soccer mom, the church leader, how's it going?
Matt Reynolds:The answer is busy.
Matt Reynolds:I'm busy.
Matt Reynolds:Like you hear that way more often.
Matt Reynolds:And I.
Matt Reynolds:And so the concept of the book is that we are really all drowning or most of us are drowning in urgency.
Matt Reynolds:There are there.
Matt Reynolds:We have set up our lives surrounded by urgency of things we have to do all the time.
Matt Reynolds:And what that urgency does is it crowds out the important things.
Matt Reynolds:And so Charles Hummel wrote a book years ago called the Tyranny of the Urgent.
Matt Reynolds:And he said the, the urgent is the enemy of the important.
Matt Reynolds:And then building off of that, Eisenhower, President Eisenhower has this matrix that we can get into if you want to talk about details where he said, Eisenhower said, when he was president, actually at the end of the war as well, he said, I have two types of problems.
Matt Reynolds:I deal with the urgent, which are almost never important, and the important problems, which are almost never urgent, which tells me that there is a dichotomy there between the urgent and the important.
Matt Reynolds:And I think what we tend to do is get caught up in the urgent and it crowds out the important.
Matt Reynolds:So if you think about the things that are most important in your life, and certainly I would love to get into some of our core values.
Matt Reynolds:My core values, your core values.
Matt Reynolds:But for most of your listeners, that's going to be, you know, family and faith and health and fitness.
Matt Reynolds:And even for me, being a CEO of the company, like the CEO stuff, not the in the trenches stuff in the business.
Matt Reynolds:If I, if I'm drowning in the urgency of the day to day, what ends up happening is it pulls me from being the husband that I need to be, or the father I need to be, or the leader I need to be, whether that's in church or business.
Matt Reynolds:And I want to do things to pull from the urgent, non important things as much as possible, work on the things as efficiently as possible that are urgent and important so that I can focus the majority of my time on the things that are most important and often never urgent.
Matt Reynolds:It is never urgent to spend time with my family, to my, with my kids, with my wife.
Matt Reynolds:It's never urgent to get the workout in today.
Matt Reynolds:It's never urgent to do my spiritual disciplines it's never urgent to do the vision casting for the business, but all of these things are wildly important in my life.
Matt Reynolds:If we're not careful, we spend all of our time drowning in the urgency, working in life, in business, in church, not on life, on business, on.
Matt Reynolds:We work in it, not on it.
Matt Reynolds:And I don't want to drown in that.
Matt Reynolds:And I was telling you before we even started the call and I kind of stopped, like, let's talk about this during the, during the podcast is that this is still something that I deal with every day.
Matt Reynolds:I have to get up every day and think, okay, what are the important things I need to accomplish today?
Matt Reynolds:And that's a list of one or two or maybe three things.
Matt Reynolds:And what are the urgent things that need to get done?
Matt Reynolds:But like, it is not five years from now, I will not remember that this existed.
Matt Reynolds:And that's a list of 25 things.
Matt Reynolds:If I'm not careful, I spend all my time doing the 25 urgent non important things or urgent and somewhat important things.
Matt Reynolds:And I crowd out the stuff that's the most important in my life.
Matt Reynolds:I miss the workout, I miss the spiritual disciplines.
Matt Reynolds:I miss the time of my, the quality time of my family and for the urgent.
Matt Reynolds:So that's really what the book is about.
Matt Reynolds:It's about setting core values, understanding your core values, which I love doing a podcast like yours because I think our core values are similar and most of your listeners are gonna be similar to our, to mine, but identifying what those core values are and then leading a life that is in.
Matt Reynolds:In is in congruence with those core values.
Matt Reynolds:I think if we look at our time, if we look at our calendar, if we look at our, if we do a time audit, we'll often see that the things we're spending our time on are not cohesive with the things that we really think are important.
Matt Reynolds:And so ultimately that's what the book is about.
Matt Reynolds:So it opens up with a lot of those core value pieces, how to identify that and then how to set the major goals in your life to get the stuff done that needs to be done so that you can open up the time to be the person that you actually want to be.
Matt Reynolds:Not just today, but to build a legacy of who you want to be.
Matt Reynolds:When you're say 80, I want to be the jacked wise grandpa that loves Jesus.
Matt Reynolds:And if I'm not living a life, because the problem is I don't wake up at 80 and get there 80, it's actually not the goal.
Matt Reynolds:That is the thing that brings the Joy.
Matt Reynolds:It's the 60 years before the 80, before I'm 80.
Matt Reynolds:It's from 20 to, it's from 20 to 80.
Matt Reynolds:It's the, it's the process of living a lifestyle that is in congruence with, with those core values.
Matt Reynolds:So that's really what the book is about.
Matt Reynolds:And so it goes like a lot of books do.
Matt Reynolds:And I think I read a lot of books and that are, I mean I read lots of books.
Matt Reynolds:The first third or first half, I'm like, I get it, I get the, I get the thesis.
Matt Reynolds:I don't need to read the rest of this thing.
Matt Reynolds:For, for us, we wanted to make sure we had value throughout the entire book.
Matt Reynolds:So the book is, you know, starts at kind of the 50,000 foot view.
Matt Reynolds:It dives into the more personal view and then gets into the tactical.
Matt Reynolds:Here's how you actually do this on a day to day basis without being a time hack book.
Matt Reynolds:Because I don't want to be a time hack book.
Will Spencer:Right, okay.
Will Spencer:So just to, just to back up.
Will Spencer:So the, the important tasks that you define those are based on your core values.
Will Spencer:So it's not as if you just show up to the office during the day and you make an arbitrary judgment about what tasks are important and what are urgent.
Will Spencer:The important tasks themselves are determined by who you are as a person, the things that are most important to you.
Will Spencer:And that is what determines whether something is important, not some external deliverable by someone else's based on your own expression of what's essential in your life.
Matt Reynolds:That's a great explanation.
Matt Reynolds:And I would just, the only, the only pushback I would have on that is I would say those are the most important things.
Will Spencer:Okay.
Matt Reynolds:And so coming back to Eisenhower, Eisenhower saying, okay, things are either urgent or important, but when you really look at it and Stephen Covey and 7 Habits are highly effective people.
Matt Reynolds:I think it was the first one to talk about this.
Matt Reynolds:Brett McKay's talked about this on Art of Manliness, other books have talked about this.
Matt Reynolds:But it's created what is what we now call the Eisenhower matrix.
Matt Reynolds:And I talk about this quite a bit in the book.
Matt Reynolds:Eisenhower didn't come up the Matrix, but the reality is that there's actually.
Matt Reynolds:You can took.
Matt Reynolds:You can look at every single thing that you do in a day or in a week or a month or whatever, and you can put those in one of all of those tasks, all of those things in one of four quadrants.
Matt Reynolds:So you have the things that are not urgent, not important.
Matt Reynolds:And I would qualify those things as like binge watching Netflix video games, Internet porn, doom scrolling social media.
Matt Reynolds:Some of those things are very clearly immoral, I.
Matt Reynolds:E.
Matt Reynolds:Internet porn.
Matt Reynolds:And some of those things are not necessarily immoral.
Matt Reynolds:They may be amoral, but they are not urgent, not important.
Matt Reynolds:And our argument would be for that quadrant one, non urgent, not important things.
Matt Reynolds:We should literally purge them.
Matt Reynolds:We should eliminate them from our lives.
Matt Reynolds:And then quadrant two would be the things that are urgent but not important.
Matt Reynolds:I'll give you an example.
Matt Reynolds:As we're doing this podcast, I'm almost certain a team of guys are going to show up and clear all the leaves.
Matt Reynolds:We have 16 trees in my yard and they're going to.
Matt Reynolds:And it's, it's, you know, early December and I've got all these leaves in my yard and they're going to clean up the leaves.
Matt Reynolds:I'm in an hoa.
Matt Reynolds:If the leaves aren't cleaned up by the end of the weekend, I'm going to get a letter from the HOA to say, clean up the leaves.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:Urgent, not important.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:It's the.
Matt Reynolds:So.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:That's exactly right.
Matt Reynolds:Grocery shopping.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I don't grocery.
Matt Reynolds:Like, guys, it's $10 to have any grocery store deliver to your front door.
Matt Reynolds:So that's urgent because you need food, but it's not important.
Matt Reynolds:You don't need to spend two hours going grocery shopping.
Matt Reynolds:I can spend 15 minutes on the app buying the groceries, and the groceries show up two hours later on my front doorstep, mowing my lawn, a lot of housekeeping chores.
Matt Reynolds:We have a housekeeper.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe you can afford a housekeeper once a month, once every two months.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe it's every week.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe you have a housekeeper that lives in your house.
Matt Reynolds:It doesn't like your financials will determine that.
Matt Reynolds:But I don't want to clean my floors and baseboards.
Matt Reynolds:We keep a clean house.
Matt Reynolds:We're not messy people, but we hire people to do those things.
Matt Reynolds:And so it also may be things like basic.
Matt Reynolds:I have an executive assistant that handles the vast majority of my emails, my calendar, my podcast, you know, interviews, things like that.
Matt Reynolds:Those things are often urgent but not that important.
Matt Reynolds:Housework, like whatever those things are in your life.
Matt Reynolds:And so we want to, in that quadrant two, we want to delegate or automate those things.
Matt Reynolds:Delegate has been the primary factor over the past 40, 50, 60 years.
Matt Reynolds:As AI comes in, I think there's more things that we're able to automate.
Matt Reynolds:I think those are fine.
Matt Reynolds:That's another conversation we can have.
Matt Reynolds:We're gonna try to leverage as much as we can, technology to Automate things like calendar setups, calendly, you know, there's tons of apps that help make you more effective that you don't have to do.
Matt Reynolds:So these things that are urgent but not important.
Matt Reynolds:Then quadrant three, which is where most of us who are business owners or say executives, upper, upper level managers, we have a ton of stuff that we have to do that's urgent and important.
Matt Reynolds:And this is where the differentiator between what you said is there are things that I have to do every day.
Matt Reynolds:So for example, today, this morning at 5:15am I recorded a State of the Union address.
Matt Reynolds:We call it the State of the Union for my company to put out to all of the employees, the entire staff, staff of a hundred, plus another 300 coaches.
Matt Reynolds:And that's urgent and important.
Matt Reynolds:The State of the Union needs to go out.
Matt Reynolds:It's Q4.
Matt Reynolds:They haven't heard from me in a while.
Matt Reynolds:It's between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Matt Reynolds:They need to hear that thing I need.
Matt Reynolds:It took a long time to set up.
Matt Reynolds:It's 5:15, it was still dark outside.
Matt Reynolds:I'm trying to set up lighting and you know, and, and you know, ring lights and I went in my daughter's room and she had a makeup light and I was like, I need this too because it's too dark in the room and you know, set all this stuff up.
Matt Reynolds:Teleprompter.
Matt Reynolds:The thing, did the thing urgent and important.
Matt Reynolds:The urgent and important things, those daily tasks, those emails that have to be responded to that the EA can't do.
Matt Reynolds:The, you know, the, the project management list, the daily tasks that are important and urgent.
Matt Reynolds:Especially as you move up in the, if you're in the corporate world or that have to be done, those need to be done very efficiently.
Matt Reynolds:So going back again, Quadrant one, non urgent, non important.
Matt Reynolds:Eliminate.
Matt Reynolds:Quadrant two urgent, not important.
Matt Reynolds:Delegate or automate.
Matt Reynolds:Sorry.
Matt Reynolds:Quadrant three urgent and important.
Matt Reynolds:We want to do those effectively, efficiently as possible.
Matt Reynolds:That means no notifications on the phone, no notifications on the computer.
Matt Reynolds:Often doing those when other people sleep.
Matt Reynolds:For me, that's when people are still sleeping.
Matt Reynolds:In the morning it might be for, for you, it might be late at night.
Matt Reynolds:My queue is about 80 at 8 o'clock at night, as you know me, I go to bed early and I get up early.
Matt Reynolds:So I get up early, I get great work done and that work in the morning, very early.
Matt Reynolds:From like 3 in the morning, 3:30 in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:I don't set an alarm.
Matt Reynolds:You've, you've stayed with me in my guest room.
Matt Reynolds:I just wake up, make coffee, go downstairs, walk the dog.
Matt Reynolds:This time of year, it's cold outside, wakes me up a little bit, get a little burr, get a little, little chill will come in and I knock out work for, for three or four hours before my family wakes up and I'm doing urgent and important work.
Matt Reynolds:Family wakes up, do my workout.
Matt Reynolds:And then the key there is, if I do that efficiently, it opens up the most time possible for that quadrant four, which is extremely.
Matt Reynolds:That's the most important stuff, but is never urgent.
Matt Reynolds:It's the.
Matt Reynolds:It's the being.
Matt Reynolds:It's spending time with my family, with my wife, with my children, it's spiritual disciplines, it's reading my Bible, it's working out, it's health, it's fitness, faith, church.
Matt Reynolds:It's those things, those things are like, it's never urgent to read my Bible.
Matt Reynolds:It's never urgent to take my wife on a date, but it's extremely important to me.
Matt Reynolds:And if we're not careful, we drown in the urgency and it pushes out the importance.
Matt Reynolds:And so I want to instead get rid of the things that are not urgent, not important, delegate the things that are urgent, not important.
Matt Reynolds:I want to be as efficient as possible on the things that are urgent and important, which I spend a lot of time doing as a CEO so that I can free up as much time as possible.
Matt Reynolds:This is really a discussion about freedom and versus bondage of your day, of your time, of your schedule, so that I can be free to do the things that are most important to me, that will leave the legacy that I want to leave as the husband and father and Christian and church leader and leader in the business that I want to be.
Matt Reynolds:I want to spend the most amount of time doing that thing.
Matt Reynolds:And that is the Eisenhower matrix.
Matt Reynolds:And that's really what the book fleshes out long term.
Will Spencer:Okay, this is great because maybe you can help me answer a question, a personal question that I've been struggling with.
Will Spencer:So I've noticed for myself that the best time that I have in terms of mental focus, clarity, et cetera, is when I first wake up.
Will Spencer:So I've struggled with what I do in that time.
Will Spencer:What I can do in that time is I can write or I can, which is for me is urgent and important work, like original creative writing, putting my thoughts into some solid form.
Will Spencer:Or I heard people say, well, the first thing you should do when you get up is you read the Bible.
Will Spencer:Or I've had a trainer, a doctor who was actually as Dr.
Will Spencer:Joe Bova.
Will Spencer:I don't think that you were on that stream with us.
Matt Reynolds:But, but yeah, he said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Will Spencer:But he said, you know, the best time for men to lift is first thing in the morning when they wake up because their testosterone is at its highest.
Will Spencer:So those are three different things that I can't all do at the same time.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Will Spencer:And, and, and when I, if I work out, then I want to eat something first.
Will Spencer:And so if I eat before I work out, then by the time I get around to doing any work, I mean, I don't have a gym in my house, I have to leave.
Will Spencer:And so it just obliterates, it obliterates that focus time.
Will Spencer:But it seems like these three important and somewhat urgent things.
Will Spencer:Well, maybe working out isn't quite so urgent, but you know, these things vie for time.
Will Spencer:So how do you solve that?
Will Spencer:It sounds like the first thing you do is get up, make coffee, urgent, important work, and then work up.
Will Spencer:Okay, but I unpack that.
Matt Reynolds:But I don't think that's the right, I don't think that's the only answer, right?
Matt Reynolds:So I think figuring out what will allow you to do this best is the best answer.
Matt Reynolds:So if I got up at 7 or 6am or something like that, practice middle, I would work out.
Matt Reynolds:I would work out first thing.
Matt Reynolds:That'd be the first thing I do.
Matt Reynolds:Okay, Because I get up at 3 and because I have a home gym, because if I deadlift at 3:15 in the morning, what?
Matt Reynolds:That's a fast track to divorce.
Matt Reynolds:That's a joke.
Matt Reynolds:My wife.
Matt Reynolds:So, you know, I can't deadlift downstairs in the gym because I have a home gym at 3:15 in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:So what I do is I get up, I make the coffee, I focus as much as I can.
Matt Reynolds:I walk the dog, get cold and sit down and have this routine where I give myself about an hour to an hour and a half of urgent and important work and even occasionally, whatever urgent non important work that I can knock out very, very quickly and not send to the, to the ea.
Matt Reynolds:I do first thing.
Matt Reynolds:So I do that first.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm still at Listen at 3:15, even though I wake up and I'm awake and my brain is going enough when I lay in bed that I know I have to get up.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not, I'm still a little bit groggy.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not like I couldn't get up into a state of the union at 3:15 in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:I'm still, you know, occasionally pouring water into my coffee grinder where that's not where the water Goes right.
Matt Reynolds:And so, and so I get up.
Matt Reynolds:Yep.
Matt Reynolds:And I make the coffee and I do the work.
Matt Reynolds:So I work an hour, hour and a half and I knock out as much as I can efficiently early in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:And then when my wife wakes up, I.
Matt Reynolds:And, and for me that's also like online coaching because I'm still an online coach.
Matt Reynolds:I coach my clients, I break down their videos.
Matt Reynolds:I've done that for tens of thousands of hours.
Matt Reynolds:So I'll do that stuff.
Matt Reynolds:And then when she wakes up at 6:45, we'll often walk around, we walk around the neighborhood, we talk about the day and then we come in and we prep and we do a workout.
Matt Reynolds:And then I come in from the workout and I have the protein shake or the post workout eggs or whatever and then I sit down and I start to do the important work.
Matt Reynolds:And so that's how I do it.
Matt Reynolds:By the way, I left out the thing.
Matt Reynolds:So I do the urgent work for the first hour and a half because, and then I read my Bible, I do my spiritual disciplines and that's because of this.
Matt Reynolds:And this is just me and this is my personality.
Matt Reynolds:I have a really hard time focusing on the things that I'm reading and trying to learn.
Matt Reynolds:So, so for those of your listeners, hopefully most of whom are Christians, are reading their Bible and doing their spiritual, spiritual disciplines, I have a hard time.
Matt Reynolds:My brain is not functioning at full capacity immediately.
Matt Reynolds:It takes a little bit of time, but the time that it takes, say an hour or less is stuff that I can still knock out, the emails and the project management stuff.
Matt Reynolds:As a CEO, if there are questions that are being asked in the company and I can't answer them, by the time the rest of my company wakes up, some of whom are on the west coast, many of whom are on the west coast, so two hours behind me, if that question isn't answered, their work stops until they get an answer from me.
Matt Reynolds:So I do urgent, important work.
Matt Reynolds:First this is just me.
Matt Reynolds:And then I do spiritual disciplines.
Matt Reynolds:I often make another cup of coffee, I go to the bathroom, I make another cup of coffee.
Matt Reynolds:When I'm doing urgent and important work, I've prepped all those things.
Matt Reynolds:I've gone to the bathroom, tmi, but I've gone to the bathroom, I've made the coffee, I've.
Matt Reynolds:And then when I do urgent and important work, I'm not allowed to get out of the chair.
Matt Reynolds:I'm notifications off hammering.
Matt Reynolds:Urgent, important work.
Matt Reynolds:That's how I do it.
Matt Reynolds:I get up very early in the morning I do that for an hour, hour and a half.
Matt Reynolds:Then I go make another cup of coffee.
Matt Reynolds:I take a five minute break a lot of times, walk around.
Matt Reynolds:I might even go outside on the back deck.
Matt Reynolds:It's cold.
Matt Reynolds:I might hit.
Matt Reynolds:I've got a cold plunge, you know, I've got a hot tub, things like it might sit in the sauna for a few minutes, just kind of like get the blood flowing in my body.
Matt Reynolds:Hit the cold plunge, then come in and do the spiritual disciplines.
Matt Reynolds:Because for me it's hard.
Matt Reynolds:I wish I could focus on the spiritual disciplines if the cloud of urgency wasn't hanging over my head, but because for my personality it is.
Matt Reynolds:I will have anxiety reading the Bible while I know that there are questions that have to be answered and I could answer them in five or 10 minutes.
Matt Reynolds:So I answer the questions first, then I take a little break.
Matt Reynolds:And when I say a little break, I'm talking about a five minute break, a ten minute break, max.
Matt Reynolds:Another cup of coffee, ready to go.
Matt Reynolds:Now I'm in spiritual discipline mode.
Matt Reynolds:I read my Bible and it's not a.
Matt Reynolds:Check it off the list.
Matt Reynolds:I want to be in a place.
Matt Reynolds:And this is why I don't do it first.
Matt Reynolds:Because I think if I did it first, it would be like, just get through the next chapter of 2 Kings and I would just read through.
Matt Reynolds:But I want to like, I want to dive into the thing.
Matt Reynolds:I want to really do it right.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And so then it's spiritual disciplines.
Matt Reynolds:By that time, my wife has woken up, we go on a walk, we work out, we eat, we shower, and we don't shower together, although there's nothing wrong with that.
Matt Reynolds:But she takes a bath, I shower, and then I get to sit down and I get to be CEO Matt.
Matt Reynolds:And I get to do the things that are most important at that.
Matt Reynolds:So now it's 8am in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:I have done urgent, important work.
Matt Reynolds:I have done spiritual disciplines.
Matt Reynolds:I have trained, I have eaten, I have showered, I've dressed for the day.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not in pajamas or sweatpants or whatever.
Matt Reynolds:And it's CEO time.
Matt Reynolds:And I go to a private office just, just which is here.
Matt Reynolds:Luckily, thank the Lord, here in my home, I've got several places I can do this.
Matt Reynolds:And I sit down and I start to do the important work that is less urgent.
Will Spencer:So it sounds like what you do is you, you get up at 3, which I think is probably not going to be feasible for a whole ton of people.
Will Spencer:That's a, that's a, it sounds like a biological it sounds like a wiring thing for you.
Will Spencer:I know that.
Matt Reynolds:Something I even want to do.
Will Spencer:Right?
Matt Reynolds:Just FYI.
Will Spencer:Oh, okay.
Will Spencer:When I came to stay with you and you went to bed at like 8 or 9, I actually wanted to ask, was this something that you trained yourself to do over here?
Will Spencer:It's just who you are.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:There are pictures in my.
Matt Reynolds:Actually in my library because of where the sun is right now, not in my office.
Matt Reynolds:And in my library, I have a bunch of scrapbooks that my mom gave me because my mom is a boomer and kept lots of scrapbooks.
Matt Reynolds:And you've probably seen this.
Matt Reynolds:The boomers are now giving their kids all the crap that they owned over the years.
Matt Reynolds:And their Gen X and millennial children are like, we don't want all this stuff.
Matt Reynolds:But in.
Matt Reynolds:I looked, we took.
Matt Reynolds:We walked our kids through a few months ago, the scrapbooks.
Matt Reynolds:And there's a picture of me sitting crisscross applesauce.
Matt Reynolds:You know, cross legs.
Matt Reynolds:Okay.
Matt Reynolds:You've not heard that term?
Will Spencer:Never before in my life.
Matt Reynolds:Oh, you're not a.
Matt Reynolds:You're not.
Matt Reynolds:You weren't a kindergarten teacher.
Matt Reynolds:Well, Spencer so.
Matt Reynolds:Correct.
Matt Reynolds:So when you sit on the floor with your legs crossed, kindergarten teachers call that crisscross applesauce.
Will Spencer:Okay.
Matt Reynolds:I don't know why I didn't invent it.
Matt Reynolds:Okay.
Matt Reynolds:And my mom and dad always woke up really early too, like 5am or whatever, somewhere in that ballpark.
Matt Reynolds:And in the Midwest, before the very early news comes on, which might be 5:30am or 6:00am in the Midwest, we have a show called Ag Day, like Agricultural Day.
Matt Reynolds:And it was an hour or maybe two hour show where it was farmers talking about the day's price of pork bellies and corn and how the rain was and things like that.
Matt Reynolds:And so she has a picture.
Matt Reynolds:She got up and I'm maybe 2 or 3 years old, and I'm sitting in front of one of those big box tube televisions, you know, with the television, like in wood.
Matt Reynolds:In casing.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, wood paneling.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm sitting.
Matt Reynolds:Yep, exactly.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:I'm sitting on the floor right in front of it.
Matt Reynolds:Like this close.
Matt Reynolds:It's amazing.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not blind.
Matt Reynolds:And with the sound way down.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm watching Ag Day.
Matt Reynolds:But I didn't grow up on a farm.
Matt Reynolds:Again, I'm a Baptist preacher's kid.
Matt Reynolds: t, that was what was on TV in: Matt Reynolds:So I would wake up and I would just like turn on ag day and I would sit crisscross applesauce in front of the tv, on the floor, on the shag carpet and watch this show.
Matt Reynolds:Somehow my mom caught a picture of this.
Matt Reynolds:She's like, you've always been that way.
Matt Reynolds:I've also like, you can see as the sun goes down like I'm hot and sweaty and red and I've always been hot natured.
Matt Reynolds:She also has like, I'm a big guy now, lift a lot obviously, but I've also been like very hot natured.
Matt Reynolds:And she has a million pictures of me at 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, just sweating profusely from my forehead.
Matt Reynolds:Those things are innate in me.
Matt Reynolds:So the waking up early and the being very hot natured and sweating is normal.
Matt Reynolds:I know that's not normal for most.
Matt Reynolds:And so understanding your circadian rhythm of when you wake up, when you go to bed again, by the end of this podcast my, my IQ will have dropped to about 85.
Matt Reynolds:And so, so don't like, let's lower expectations for the end of the podcast because it's bedtime and that's, that's when I spend time eating, watching great movies.
Matt Reynolds:We watch documentaries, like we're a big documentary family, love watching documentaries as a family.
Matt Reynolds:And, and so, you know, I talked about the non urgent not important things.
Matt Reynolds:Binge watching Netflix or streaming TV I would call non urgent not important.
Matt Reynolds:But for my family there is actually a thing that I would actually take some of those documentaries and things that we learn and talk about.
Matt Reynolds:We pause documentaries about 10 times during every documentary and we talk about the history behind the thing that we're watching.
Matt Reynolds:So we're watching a thing on Churchill or watching a thing on World War II or watching a thing on whatever.
Matt Reynolds:And I stop and I go, wait, do you understand what just happened here?
Matt Reynolds:This is what's going on.
Matt Reynolds:And we talk about the thing and so that take for us and it's just us and I'm sure it's some others, but not everybody.
Matt Reynolds:It takes that streaming television from quadrant one to quadrant four.
Matt Reynolds:Because now what we're doing is we've eaten dinner together at the table, we've had family worship, we've done the things we've decided we're going to watch.
Matt Reynolds:Like I'll watch insure noble Chernobyl right now, which we've, my, one of my daughters and I have watched.
Matt Reynolds:My wife and other daughter had not watched.
Matt Reynolds: d in Russia and Soviet Union,: Matt Reynolds:So we're watching this thing, and that is a learning experience for our family that we enjoy.
Matt Reynolds:We just never watch more than one episode in any one night after that.
Matt Reynolds:It's board games, it's talking.
Matt Reynolds:It's more family worship.
Matt Reynolds:It's going to bed, it's doing what?
Matt Reynolds:Whatever.
Matt Reynolds:We just don't do four hours of TV together.
Will Spencer:Right.
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:So it's.
Matt Reynolds:It's not that I'm saying that, by the way, we've also done family vacation or family thanks.
Matt Reynolds:Like Thanksgivings and holidays where we.
Matt Reynolds:We break out the old Nintendo 64 and we all play Mario Kart together.
Matt Reynolds:And it's a blast, the four of us doing the thing.
Matt Reynolds:So I'm also not saying that video games.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I'm not a video game guy.
Matt Reynolds:I.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not a video game guy primarily because I'm scared of what it will do to me because video games are amazing at this point.
Matt Reynolds:I'm like, yeah, give me a good World War I or World War II video game and I might get sucked in forever.
Matt Reynolds:So I stay away from the thing.
Matt Reynolds:But playing Mario Kart for 45 minutes with my family, that takes it from a quadrant one to a quadrant four.
Matt Reynolds:Like, this is a blast.
Matt Reynolds:You know, we make popcorn, you know, we drink.
Matt Reynolds:It's eggnog season.
Matt Reynolds:My family loves.
Matt Reynolds:Do you guys.
Matt Reynolds:Do you drink eggnog?
Will Spencer:I have drunk eggnog.
Will Spencer:Yes.
Matt Reynolds:Not a fan.
Will Spencer:I mean, I.
Will Spencer:It's not something that I crave.
Will Spencer:It's not something I crave during the holidays.
Will Spencer:I grew up not celebrating Christmas.
Will Spencer:Eggnognog was something that I had way later.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, yeah.
Matt Reynolds:They don't like you 8.
Matt Reynolds:You don't have 8 days of eggnog in the Jewish culture.
Will Spencer:8 days of matzo ball soup.
Matt Reynolds:That sounds way worse.
Matt Reynolds:I would much rather have eggnog.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:So, I mean, a good matzo ball soup will blow your mind.
Matt Reynolds:It is true.
Matt Reynolds:I have.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:That is true.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:I mean, so I want to be careful in putting judgment on the things outside of like the Internet porn and the.
Matt Reynolds:And the, you know, doom scrolling or the binge watching.
Matt Reynolds:It's.
Matt Reynolds:It's the.
Matt Reynolds:The what?
Matt Reynolds:I would, what I would say the fault or the sin is in the binge or.
Matt Reynolds:And obviously with porn, immoral.
Matt Reynolds:But, you know, for things like us, like, we will often watch a show at night as a family.
Matt Reynolds:After dinner, we talk about the show.
Matt Reynolds:We learn from the show.
Matt Reynolds:We're not watching Game of Thrones.
Matt Reynolds:We're watching a documentary that has historical evidence that matters.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe good Maybe bad.
Matt Reynolds:And we talk through the thing like, hey, let me tell you the, this has been skewed this direction for this reason.
Matt Reynolds:And so we do those things.
Matt Reynolds:And so that's the way my daily schedule works.
Matt Reynolds:But what I want to be careful of in the book, and I was careful in the book, is saying everyone needs to wake up at three or four in the morning, work in the morning when everyone else is sleeping, doing the urgent and important work spiritual disciplines work out so that by 6am you've gotten all those things out of the way and it's time to just work on the important things.
Matt Reynolds:Because I think a lot of people are wired the opposite.
Matt Reynolds:And I think that's fine.
Matt Reynolds:If you wake up at six or seven or eight and you have your own system in place and you're most creative at 7 or 8pm and when my, as my IQ is winding down, yours is cranking up, I think that's fine.
Matt Reynolds:There's no judgment there.
Matt Reynolds:The key is identifying what are the things that are urgent, what are the things that are important, focusing on things that are important when they make the most, when they're most effective.
Will Spencer:That's helpful because I think not everyone, like I've tried to force myself to get up at 5 and it'll work really well for a couple days.
Will Spencer:But I find that it's very difficult for me, you know, because I'm a social person, to get to bed at 9.
Will Spencer:I just, it's just, it might be an impossibility for me.
Matt Reynolds:It is also an impossibility for me to get to bed at 9 because I'm already sleeping.
Will Spencer:Exactly.
Matt Reynolds:For the opposite reason.
Will Spencer:Right?
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:But I have recognized inside myself that, that there is benefit in the early morning hours before everyone else is awake.
Will Spencer:And I think this is why Benjamin Franklin said, because he is the origin of this phrase, early to bed, early to buy makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
Will Spencer:And I think that's why he said that because he recognizes that a man has such a diverse range of responsibilities that extend outside himself.
Will Spencer:That I've noticed for me, as soon as I'm aware that the world has started waking up somewhere around like 9:00, something like that, my whole day changes.
Will Spencer:And then later in the evening, like for example, after 10 or 11, when I know everyone's sleeping, then I, then I get that focus time back.
Will Spencer:So, you know, I think to some extent there's, we may be wired to have this maybe environmental, situational awareness that there are people that have legitimate demands on our time and our Energy and our attention.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:And we have to be present and available to them, including family members, subordinates, employees, etc.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:Or, or just the next person down the line of the information management management chain.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:But to wake up early and to have that time where it's like, I'm not responsible to anyone right now or I'm going to knock out, as you said, those emails that, you know, for your fellow executives that need to, that they need to have in their hands in order to work that day, like to take care of that, you know, those demands.
Will Spencer:But if you have that time for yourself and whatever it is, 90 minutes or whatever, I think that's, that's invaluable to have whenever you can.
Will Spencer:Whenever you can get it.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, for sure.
Matt Reynolds:I think the thing that doesn't change is that people who are wired to work and work well, and I would argue most men, that's really what we're called to do in Genesis 3 is to do this thing.
Matt Reynolds:We will find a time to work when everyone else is sleeping.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:So whether that's early in the morning or late at night, find the time that works for you.
Matt Reynolds:I don't care.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I coach a lot of people that do this.
Matt Reynolds:So when I say I don't care, I'm not saying I want you to do it.
Matt Reynolds:I just don't care what time of the day it is.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:So whatever time is most sustainable.
Matt Reynolds:I get the same question as a strength coach.
Matt Reynolds:Should I work out early in the morning?
Matt Reynolds:Should I work out in the afternoon?
Matt Reynolds:Should I work out at night?
Matt Reynolds:I say whichever one you're going to do consistently for the next 10 years is the one you should do.
Matt Reynolds:If that's 5am, if it's 3pm or it's 10pm, I don't care so long as you get the workout in.
Matt Reynolds:And so if you're someone who wakes up, this is a conversation I've had with Brett McKay from Art of Manliness about motivation and discipline, which try to there, there is a famous influencer, Navy Seal who often takes pictures of his watch at 4:30 in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:And I don't, I don't do that because it's at 3:15 in the morning and I don't want to feel like I'm better than him and which obviously you are.
Matt Reynolds:He's a, he's a good dude, he's fine.
Matt Reynolds:And, but the point, the point there is that for, for us, I want people just to do the thing that works.
Matt Reynolds:And so if training at 5 in the morning works train at 5 in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:If spiritual disciplines at 5 in the morning or 6 in the morning work, do, do that.
Matt Reynolds:If it's 10 in the morning, do that.
Matt Reynolds:If it's 3 in the afternoon, do that.
Matt Reynolds:And if it's 10 at night, do that.
Matt Reynolds:There is zero chance I would comprehend anything I read in the Bible at 10pm we occasionally have a church, I mean, you've been to some of our church stuff.
Matt Reynolds:You know, a social event, a dinner that goes to 9 or 10pm and I mean like, I can't, I'm just, I, I, I can't comprehend anything at that point.
Matt Reynolds:So for me it's early in the morning.
Matt Reynolds:That's when the comprehension comes.
Matt Reynolds:And for me, you know, three in the morning, 3:30 in the morning, four in the morning, whatever it is, till seven when my wife and kids wake up, that's my best work of the day.
Matt Reynolds:That's the most efficient work of the day.
Matt Reynolds:And again, coming back to that quadrant, the urgent and important work is the work that has to be efficient.
Matt Reynolds:And let me be clear, quadrant four is not about efficiency, right?
Matt Reynolds:Family time, husband time, parent time, spiritual discipline time, occasionally workout time, could, could be, but you know, health sort of stuff.
Matt Reynolds:That's not about efficiency, that's importance.
Matt Reynolds:And so we're trying to make time to do that stuff.
Matt Reynolds:So as, as we get deeper in the book and we talk about the tactical aspects of the game plan of goals, actions, metrics, execution.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not applying goals, actions, metrics, execution to how good of a husband I am.
Will Spencer:Right?
Matt Reynolds:The, the point there is to apply those to the previous three or certainly two quadrants so that when I get to the husband time, I'm not like, hey, we got an efficient 45 minute date right now.
Matt Reynolds:Like everybody knows this, right?
Matt Reynolds:This is actually got asked this on a podcast.
Matt Reynolds:I was like, yeah, we don't apply that to the things that are most important, that those tactical things for efficiency occur on the urgent things that actually matter that are urgent and important, or that are urgent and maybe not as important, but have to be done purging quadrant one and still making as much time possible for that.
Matt Reynolds:Quadrant four.
Matt Reynolds:I want to spend as much time possible in the word.
Matt Reynolds:I want to spend as much time possible with my wife, with my children.
Matt Reynolds:Nobody looks back and says, I wish I was a more efficient, you know, I worked more as a CEO, as a, as a business owner, as a whatever.
Matt Reynolds:And so I do want to be efficient at those things.
Matt Reynolds:But the reason I want to be efficient at those things is so I can do the things actually matter to me, which come back to my core values, which is being a great husband, great father.
Matt Reynolds:The legacy I want to leave of the jacked wise old grandpa that loves Jesus, that goes for generations to come, not just to my children, but to my children's children, into multiple great grandchildren and great great grandchildren that I will.
Matt Reynolds:I may never know and they may not even know my name.
Matt Reynolds:But if I set the culture, if I set the values in my family now, the values can be passed down.
Matt Reynolds:So while like I, I don't know the names of any of my great great grandparents, I know the names of my great grandparents.
Matt Reynolds:I've met them as a child.
Matt Reynolds:I have very small memories of them.
Matt Reynolds:I know my grandparents well.
Matt Reynolds:And they're really the ones who I think helped us.
Matt Reynolds:They accepted and took on Christianity and sort of turned us into a covenant family, I would say.
Matt Reynolds:But beyond that, I don't know.
Matt Reynolds:And so the reality is how much value has been pushed down from.
Matt Reynolds:My grandpa was here for Thanksgiving last week and he's 89 and it's.
Matt Reynolds:I'll get choked up.
Matt Reynolds:This might be the last Thanksgiving we get with him.
Matt Reynolds:He's pretty frail.
Matt Reynolds:He's still mentally pretty sharp, but really physically frail.
Matt Reynolds:And I've lost my dad.
Matt Reynolds:And he said, you know, you're not going to be long and you're going to be the patriarch of the family.
Matt Reynolds:You're going to be the leader of the family.
Matt Reynolds:And I thought to myself, I already am.
Matt Reynolds:And I wasn't gonna say that to him.
Matt Reynolds:Cause he is still alive.
Matt Reynolds:But the reality is that my job is, because he is a wonderful man who loves Jesus, is to carry the torch and carry the ball down the field.
Matt Reynolds:And I want my children and my children's children and my children's children's children to carry the ball down the field even if they don't know my name.
Matt Reynolds:I hope the values that I instilled in them because of the time I spent doing the important things and not the urgent things that I'll never remember.
Matt Reynolds:No one will ever remember the urgent things.
Matt Reynolds:The basecamp project management and the emails and the podcasts and all the things, no one will remember that.
Matt Reynolds:But the values that I instill in my family, while they may not even remember my name and they may not be able to say, great grandpa Matt Reynolds did this, if I do it well, it can last generations to come right to it, to a thousand generations.
Matt Reynolds:That's what the Bible tells.
Matt Reynolds:Like that.
Matt Reynolds:That is, I think, a Promise on some level that we can have faith in, that we can pass down to our children and our children's children.
Will Spencer:You are consistently one of my favorite podcast guests.
Will Spencer:You know that?
Will Spencer:I mean, that's, that's what.
Matt Reynolds:It's crying.
Matt Reynolds:I'm red.
Matt Reynolds:I'm like, I hope, I hope people are listening to this, not watching the YouTube video.
Will Spencer:Please go over to YouTube and watch this right now.
Will Spencer:So, no, I mean, that's, that's really what it's all about.
Will Spencer:And that's, that's why your book is important, right?
Will Spencer:Undoing urgency.
Will Spencer:And we were talking before we started recording the reason why I think this matters contextually, just to zoom out to the hundred thousand foot level.
Will Spencer:I think we all agree that with the election of Donald Trump about a month ago, Christians now, and everyone's been saying this, Christians now have a window of opportunity to build.
Will Spencer:And depending on who you talk to, that window could be three months, six months, you know, maybe a year, four years, who knows?
Will Spencer:But we feel that there's a window we've been given.
Will Spencer:And everyone has been saying we've been given a reprieve doesn't mean we won the game, right?
Will Spencer:We've been given a reprieve, and praise God, hallelujah for that.
Will Spencer:How long that reprieve lasts, who knows?
Will Spencer:But we know that we have it.
Will Spencer: hat Donald Trump did from his: Will Spencer:But the one thing that was unquestionable, unquestionable to me at the time, was that he had provided air cover for men to build.
Will Spencer:Whatever else he did, there was air cover for men to build.
Will Spencer: So that when the storms of: Will Spencer: So because men built from: Will Spencer:For example, the guys up in Moscow, right, Canon.
Will Spencer:Because they had, they had done so much building beforehand.
Will Spencer:So now here we are, here we are run the clock forward additional four years, right?
Will Spencer: eight years, I suppose, from: Will Spencer:And this is.
Will Spencer:This time is a very, very precious resource every single day.
Will Spencer:So how do we go about it?
Will Spencer:In, in order to build, in order to solidify what we need to solidify in order to have a, and in order to have a long view for what's coming down for our families to come.
Will Spencer:That is, I think, how Christian men and Christian women who support them should be thinking about this moment.
Will Spencer:That's why I think this book, Undoing Urgency, is so important to come along right now because time management is not something many people have learned from their fathers.
Will Spencer:Sure.
Will Spencer:It wasn't something that I learned.
Will Spencer:My dad just worked all the time, and so I just worked all the time.
Matt Reynolds:And you didn't identify the difference between urgent and important.
Matt Reynolds:And like, what was the thing?
Matt Reynolds:They just, he just worked.
Matt Reynolds:That's our dad's generation.
Matt Reynolds:They were just, they just worked.
Will Spencer:Yeah, there was like, work, life, balance.
Will Spencer:What's that?
Will Spencer:You know, it's, it's, it's just work.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:And, and that's great.
Will Spencer:It's, it was, it was great for me until I was around 18 or 19 years old.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer:But it just, it's not a way to live.
Will Spencer:That's a good way.
Will Spencer:It's a good way to burn out.
Will Spencer:It's a good way to, you know, work yourself to death.
Will Spencer:It can pay off later.
Will Spencer:So now there's a question of, like, well, as a, as a, as a Christian man, I have to balance my daily label labors, my daily responsibility.
Will Spencer:Add something onto that that includes like, well, how to build for the future.
Will Spencer:Add on health, because we're fighting an obesogenic culture.
Will Spencer:Add on spiritual disciplines, and in my case, you know, no family yet, God willing, that's coming soon.
Will Spencer:But I'm thinking about that as well.
Will Spencer:And that all has to be managed properly with the right mindset and practices, period.
Will Spencer:Because it doesn't get done spontaneously, as I'm sure that you know.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:So I, I think the first thing we do is we look at the call of men in early Genesis, in Genesis 2 and 3.
Matt Reynolds:So, so one, we're called to work.
Matt Reynolds:I, I, I would challenge anyone that says that men are not called to work.
Matt Reynolds:We're called to work no matter what.
Matt Reynolds:Now the, the, the value of that work.
Matt Reynolds:Let me get in, I'll put a, put a flag in it for a second.
Matt Reynolds:We're also called to be fruitful and multiply.
Matt Reynolds:Take dominion.
Matt Reynolds:Like all these things matter.
Matt Reynolds:These are all important things.
Matt Reynolds:And then what is the work that happens after the fall is that you're going to work the ground all the days of your life.
Matt Reynolds:Thorn and thistles are going to grow up.
Matt Reynolds:And so the reality is, is that if we don't Work and cut the thorns and thistles.
Matt Reynolds:It will choke out the fruit.
Matt Reynolds:And so our job.
Matt Reynolds:And so this is where the important stuff comes in.
Matt Reynolds:And I think if you spend all your time cultivating the ground or planting the seeds, but not.
Matt Reynolds:But not cutting out the weeds, pulling the weeds, cutting the thorns, then it's all for naught because the fruit never grows.
Matt Reynolds:And so obviously, there's.
Matt Reynolds:What I love about your podcast is I can go.
Matt Reynolds:I can go into covenant theology with this, but.
Will Spencer:Yes, you can.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:So the reality is that I used to think of covenant theology as what I would call Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.
Matt Reynolds:It was like this thin little stalk, and every time you got saved, it was.
Matt Reynolds:Or not every time, but when you got saved, you became a little branch on this crappy little tree.
Matt Reynolds:Only that's not the picture that's painted in scripture.
Matt Reynolds:It's this beautiful, abundant olive tree that grows and that our job is to cultivate and do the things that create fruit.
Matt Reynolds:They will know us by our fruit.
Matt Reynolds:They will know us by our work.
Matt Reynolds:They will know us by the work that produces fruit.
Matt Reynolds:These are all pieces of gospel, pieces of scripture that are given to us that are very inerrant, infallible, Word of God.
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:And so for us, I think it's very easy.
Matt Reynolds:And of course, we know culturally, you know, Paul didn't understand or the New Testament, like, God knew what was coming.
Matt Reynolds:But, you know, the AI revolution and enter the Internet and the very small world that we live in, like, the vast globalism that we live in today, like, all that sort of stuff was not really probably considered at the time, while the Bible is still completely applicable to that for us, we have to take the Bible and apply it to this crazy culture that we live in.
Matt Reynolds:We don't.
Matt Reynolds:We don't say the thing that's written in the Bible is no longer applicable because of the culture.
Matt Reynolds:We say, how do we apply the Bible to the culture?
Matt Reynolds:And the culture's freaking crazy, right?
Matt Reynolds:And so we live in a world where it's very easy to get for our work to be choked out by the thorns and thistles and weeds.
Matt Reynolds:Our job as men is to pull the thorns and thistles and weeds, or pull the weeds and cut the thorns and thistles so that we produce fruit.
Matt Reynolds:And whether that means in the work itself, in the actual work we do for occupation, whether that means in cultivating our family, our homes, our marriages, our children, our churches, these are the things that matter.
Matt Reynolds:And the.
Matt Reynolds: oblem with time management in: Matt Reynolds:And reduce the thistles tremendously.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:And this is what is so powerful.
Matt Reynolds:By.
Matt Reynolds:Again, like, do I think Donald Trump's a Christian?
Matt Reynolds:Probably not.
Matt Reynolds:I don't.
Matt Reynolds:Probably not, right?
Will Spencer:No.
Matt Reynolds:But God puts leaders in place and I think about, you know, it's almost still a joke, but I don't think it's going to be a joke in another year.
Matt Reynolds:Like the, The Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge with Elon Musk and Vivek.
Matt Reynolds:You look at a guy like Elon Musk, you talk about men building things, right?
Matt Reynolds:I want government to get out of the way and let guys like that just build.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, but not just him, because he's exceptional.
Matt Reynolds:We can look at him and say, yeah, but that Guy's got an IQ of 180 and he's like, crazy.
Matt Reynolds:But, like, I want that for all men.
Matt Reynolds:I want that for all families.
Matt Reynolds:I want that for all churches.
Matt Reynolds:I want that for the good of humanity.
Matt Reynolds:I want that because Christ sits on the throne and because we have an opportunity to build and to grow.
Matt Reynolds:And so if we are bogged down, come back to the absolute deepest of the trenches, we have an opportunity to build.
Matt Reynolds:But we binge watch Netflix and we play video games, we look at Internet porn and we doom.
Matt Reynolds:Scroll social media.
Matt Reynolds:No, like, we have to plant the flag and say, we're not going to do it.
Matt Reynolds:We are going to build.
Matt Reynolds:We have.
Matt Reynolds:We have no idea how much time, but we have some time to build something that is incredible, that will last beyond us, that will go.
Matt Reynolds:That will go far beyond.
Matt Reynolds:Like, so you obviously, you know, I'm not.
Matt Reynolds:Neither one of us are Catholic.
Matt Reynolds:There is a.
Matt Reynolds:I think it's a Benedictine abbey where the monks are.
Matt Reynolds:I don't know what, do monks go to abbeys?
Matt Reynolds:I don't.
Matt Reynolds:Outside of monasteries.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe it's monastery outside of Tulsa.
Matt Reynolds:And there's a long story there that I won't get into the background.
Matt Reynolds:But anyway, that it built over years.
Matt Reynolds:And those guys, while I don't agree with them theologically at all, they.
Matt Reynolds:They are playing the long game.
Matt Reynolds:These are guys who have built the cathedral out of rock that they.
Matt Reynolds:From the land they bought on, that they bought and, and built and built, you know, the old rock, if you've ever been to England or Scotland.
Matt Reynolds:And they've got the old, you know, stone fences, the stone walls, they've Built that they gathered the food and the garden, they've planted the gardens, and they, they're playing the long game.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think for us, the most important work we can do right now is play the long game and play the long game as efficiently as possible.
Matt Reynolds:And that sounds a little bit like a, like a dichotomy because, like, how can you play the long game as efficiently as possible?
Matt Reynolds:Well, I want to plant as many seeds as I can right now and cultivate as hard and fast as I can while I'm not up against the rest of the world who's fighting me tremendously as they have been the last four years, to cultivate these seeds, to plant these seeds, to grow these.
Matt Reynolds:I don't, I don't.
Matt Reynolds:Do you have a yard at your house?
Will Spencer:No.
Matt Reynolds:Okay, so I'm kind of a yard nut.
Matt Reynolds:I'm like a.
Matt Reynolds:I'm a 45 year old and then pretend that I'm a 70 year old.
Matt Reynolds:I'm the guy that, like, wants to have the nicest grass in my yard.
Matt Reynolds:The roots get the strongest in the late fall, going into winter.
Matt Reynolds:The best time to plant grass is actually in the late fall and winter because the roots will get strong during the winter and they will come up incredibly green and strong and vibrant in the spring.
Matt Reynolds:If you plant grass in the spring, it might take.
Matt Reynolds:But there's.
Matt Reynolds:I would say there's a 70% plus chance it will burn up because it won't be strong enough by the time the summer comes.
Matt Reynolds:It's gonna, It's.
Matt Reynolds:It's.
Matt Reynolds:It's the parable of the sower.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:So the, the key is, is that we, we plant when the soil is ripe.
Matt Reynolds:We cultivate when the times are good, which we're now, praise be to God, for four years or two years or six months, whatever that thing is, so that the thing lasts long term.
Matt Reynolds:That is the point of focusing on the important.
Matt Reynolds:And again, coming back to the book, if we drown in the urgency, think about how many times in your life, and maybe even right now, you look back and you think, like, how fast time has passed.
Matt Reynolds:Now.
Matt Reynolds: me because we've had Covid in: Matt Reynolds:And however long you want to extend it, like there's been this crazy.
Matt Reynolds:And the macroeconomic condition has changed dramatically and the political climate has changed dramatically.
Matt Reynolds: through: Will Spencer:Right.
Matt Reynolds:And so we have a time right now where we have to work in a way that is playing the long game, but we do that in as efficient manner as possible so that by the time the enemy rises up again, and it will.
Matt Reynolds:The roots are as strong as possible.
Matt Reynolds:And we've planted the seeds and cultivated the plants and the tree, the olive tree, the fruit, the things that are as strong as humanly possible to withstand the enemy at that point.
Matt Reynolds:Like, if we have a time right now where we don't have.
Matt Reynolds:Hopefully we don't have enemies spraying DMT and Roundup over.
Matt Reynolds:Over our gardens.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's not dmt.
Will Spencer:Hopefully you don't have.
Matt Reynolds:No, not dmt.
Matt Reynolds:What is it?
Matt Reynolds:Ddt.
Will Spencer:Sorry.
Matt Reynolds:DMT is a different.
Matt Reynolds:That's a different thing.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:You know, we don't have the crazy fertilizer.
Matt Reynolds:We, you know, whatever the thing is.
Matt Reynolds:And so you get what I'm saying?
Will Spencer:I do.
Matt Reynolds:So.
Matt Reynolds:So, you know, we've got.
Matt Reynolds:We've got a time where now's the time to.
Matt Reynolds:There's a term I want to use that I can't use on this podcast, but to take the world by the cojones and do the thing.
Matt Reynolds:Can I say that?
Will Spencer:You just did.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, that's.
Matt Reynolds:Whatever.
Matt Reynolds:And so the point is, like, we want to do good work in the stuff that matters that's important.
Matt Reynolds:And so this all comes back to, I think, understanding what your core values are and what really matters.
Matt Reynolds:What's the legacy you want to leave?
Matt Reynolds:What's the long game you want to play?
Matt Reynolds:What is your.
Matt Reynolds:What do you want your family to look like?
Matt Reynolds:Not in 20 years.
Matt Reynolds:Which 20 years matters.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I think you should think about 20 years, but in a hundred years, in 200 years, what.
Matt Reynolds:What does that look like?
Matt Reynolds:Well, we have an opportunity right now that I think we're going to look back in history and say, like, we have an opportunity to plant the seeds that will become the fruit, that will become the fully grown fruit trees.
Matt Reynolds:The.
Matt Reynolds:These incredible trees that bear fruit a hundred years down the road, 200 years down the road, and hopefully 20 years down the road, hopefully five years down the road.
Matt Reynolds:But the fruit is better 200 years later.
Matt Reynolds:The best wineries are coming from these French and Italian wineries that are coming from vines who have been there for 200 years that have made it.
Matt Reynolds:Like, you can't create great wine out of a new vine.
Matt Reynolds:You can create decent wine out of a relatively new wine.
Matt Reynolds:But I want to create a fruit that matters and so no one will look back on.
Matt Reynolds:No one will remember Barbalogic.
Matt Reynolds:No one will remember Matt Reynolds, the CEO of the company.
Matt Reynolds:They'll remember the guy, hopefully.
Matt Reynolds:Or even if they don't remember the guy, they'll remember, I hope, the values that I created in the family, in the church, in the community that I live in, that will last for generations to come.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's.
Matt Reynolds:And that's the difference between the influencer mentality, which is like, I want to be popular, I want to be known, versus I want to build something that lasts far beyond me, is with the same thing I think we've talked about in a previous podcast.
Matt Reynolds:I couldn't care less if my business doesn't need to be based on Matt Reynolds.
Matt Reynolds:My business needs to be strong and healthy outside of me.
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:And my family at some point will have to be strong outside of me because I'll be dead.
Matt Reynolds:So I get to use my time wisely to focus on the things that are important, to plant the seeds, to cultivate the plants, to build the trees, to do the things that will last for generations beyond, far beyond my lifetime.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's what we're trying to do.
Matt Reynolds:And we believe that is true because Jesus sits on the throne and is king right now, and he is, by his grace has given us the ability to have a time that we believe is a time of peace where men can cultivate and grow and build.
Matt Reynolds:So I want.
Matt Reynolds:My desire is for everyone else to get out of the way and let people, let men build.
Will Spencer:That's great.
Will Spencer:I mean, I love what you said there about the influencer mentality versus the builder mentality.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:What are you.
Will Spencer:What are you going somewhere?
Will Spencer:When I came to visit you guys, you gave me the book the E.
Will Spencer:Myth Revisited.
Will Spencer:I have that on my shelf outside, so.
Will Spencer:And one of the things that I think is relevant about that classic business book to now is that there's a difference between, you know, all of the business practices are contained within you as an individual versus have they been externalized so that someone else can do them?
Will Spencer:And then.
Will Spencer:And then something begins growing organically as a result of that.
Will Spencer:Right?
Will Spencer:So then you.
Will Spencer:Then you've built something that lasts for the generations.
Will Spencer:Even if you don't, it still runs.
Will Spencer:And I think that's a vital mindset because I do believe that it's very easy today to sneak in the idea that we're going to live forever.
Will Spencer:And I don't mean that anyone actually consciously thinks they're going to live forever, but to live without an awareness of our eventual death.
Will Spencer:And as a result of that, we don't think what happens after us because there is no after us.
Will Spencer:But if we think as men in terms of, well, there will be an after me, what will live on after me.
Will Spencer:I think that's, that is a way to think about things that can feed into the notion of like, okay, if there will be something after me and I want something to continue on that isn't necessarily just my name, but my influence.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer:In terms of, in terms of what I've created, what does that mean for me today, right now, this morning as I just got out of bed?
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:You realize first, it's not about you.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:I think that's a really important understanding is to say it's just not about me.
Matt Reynolds:And then two, I think you see the dichotomy.
Matt Reynolds:We've talked about this, I think on the previous podcast as well, of a hopeful or post mill eschatology versus several generations.
Matt Reynolds:A couple hundred years of generations who thought.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, a couple hundred years of people who thought, like, generation Jesus is coming back right now, today.
Matt Reynolds:I don't think they played the long game because I thought, I think so many people thought that they were the last generation.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:Now we may be the last generation, but I don't think we are.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:And so, and so, like, I don't know if Christ is going to return a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now or 10,000 years from now.
Matt Reynolds:So.
Matt Reynolds:But I don't, I don't think he's going to return in my lifetime.
Matt Reynolds:It'd be great if he does.
Matt Reynolds:Lord, come quickly, like, please.
Matt Reynolds:But if he doesn't, then I'm playing the long game.
Matt Reynolds:Because Christ sits on the throne.
Matt Reynolds:We've been called to go and make disciples, teaching them, like discipling them, baptizing them, and teaching them everything that he taught us.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:Like that's the point.
Matt Reynolds:That's the long game that we're playing.
Matt Reynolds:And so that starts with our family.
Matt Reynolds:I want to create that covenant household that, that lives hundreds of years beyond me.
Matt Reynolds:Like, maybe the best thing you could do as a man is create a culture and a value system and a, and a covenant familyhood and potentially even a covenant community.
Matt Reynolds:Covenant business.
Matt Reynolds:Like, maybe not covenant business, but you know, the value system is still attached to the business that lasts so far beyond you that they don't even remember your name.
Matt Reynolds:But the values still live on.
Matt Reynolds:And the values are not.
Matt Reynolds:This is again, something I can't say on most podcasts.
Matt Reynolds:The values are not My values.
Matt Reynolds:The values are the gospel.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's the point.
Matt Reynolds:And so I'm trying to create that in my family, in my church, in my business, in my.
Matt Reynolds:And listen, there are lots of people in my business, and some of them will listen to this and they'll be like, the heck are you talking about?
Matt Reynolds:You know, and it's like, but, but this is the.
Matt Reynolds:This is.
Matt Reynolds:The advantage that I have as a founder of a business of this size is that everyone understands exactly what our values are in our business.
Matt Reynolds:And they would say, they would understand that this, the creation story of the business or the story of the business is the story of the founder.
Matt Reynolds:Now, what is the story of the founder?
Matt Reynolds:The story of the founder for me is this is the story of the.
Matt Reynolds:The power of the gospel in my life.
Matt Reynolds:And this is the important thing.
Matt Reynolds:And so when I'm caught up in the urgent, I'm caught up in the thing that's not the story of the gospel.
Matt Reynolds:And the way it's changed my life, the way it's changed my business, the way it's changed my marriage, the way it's changed my children, the way it's changed my church.
Matt Reynolds:In our church.
Matt Reynolds:Like, again, you came down here.
Matt Reynolds:Our church has doubled in size in, like, the last four weeks.
Will Spencer:He was in your living room.
Will Spencer:When I was down there, it was.
Matt Reynolds:In my living room.
Matt Reynolds:And we bought a building.
Matt Reynolds:It's doubled in size.
Matt Reynolds:And I haven't had conversations about this, but I just can imagine there are original members in our church, most likely, or early members in our church, who are terrified about the fact that it's doubled in size.
Will Spencer:Oh, sure.
Matt Reynolds:Because it just naturally has to, on some level, change the culture.
Matt Reynolds:There's lots of people to deal with.
Matt Reynolds:Like, there's.
Matt Reynolds:There's new problems.
Matt Reynolds:What do they believe?
Matt Reynolds:All those sorts of things.
Matt Reynolds:But again, what are we doing this for?
Matt Reynolds:Was the goal 50 years from now to be 25 people in a living room?
Matt Reynolds:And let me be clear.
Matt Reynolds:The goal is not to be a mega church either.
Will Spencer:Sure.
Will Spencer:The goal is to change between there.
Matt Reynolds:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:The goal is to change as many people as possible in the power of the gospel and to literally carry out the Great Commission.
Matt Reynolds:And when we get to a point that we're big enough to make more churches, like, that's.
Matt Reynolds:That's part of the goal.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think if you push back against that, I would challenge it because, like, that's what we're called to do, and that's what I'm called to do as a husband not make new churches, but to.
Matt Reynolds:To create that value stream that comes from the gospel of the power that's changed.
Matt Reynolds:This is what's so beautiful to me about people.
Matt Reynolds:You actually, honestly, like, you are a great story of this that are probably.
Matt Reynolds:I think you've talked about this enough.
Matt Reynolds:The first true, like, covenant Christian member of your family.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:And so there is.
Matt Reynolds:You know, I'll get choked up.
Matt Reynolds:I'm praying for you to find a wife and have some children, have some covenant babies and like, because.
Matt Reynolds:Because you are the new branch on the olive tree.
Matt Reynolds:And it doesn't look like Charlie Brown's olive tree.
Matt Reynolds:It's not this skinny little crappy trunk with individual.
Matt Reynolds:Like, here's Will, and then eventually here's his wife.
Matt Reynolds:A different branch.
Matt Reynolds:It's.
Matt Reynolds:No, no, no, no, no.
Matt Reynolds:Like, off of that branch comes a wife and children and grandchildren.
Matt Reynolds:Sorry.
Matt Reynolds:And so, like, that is the beauty of life.
Matt Reynolds:And so, again, we get so caught up in the urgency that we miss the forest through the trees.
Matt Reynolds:We miss the olive fruit through the.
Matt Reynolds:Through the trick.
Matt Reynolds:Like, we don't get it.
Matt Reynolds:And this is the stuff that matters.
Matt Reynolds:And so the point of the whole book, if you get.
Matt Reynolds:Buy the book, great.
Matt Reynolds:Love it.
Matt Reynolds:But if you don't understand the value of the thing that is, don't drown in the urgency.
Matt Reynolds:Focus on the stuff that's important.
Matt Reynolds:That's what matters.
Matt Reynolds:Like, there's beauty in that.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I want to actually hire.
Matt Reynolds:By the way, if you're listening to this and you're an artist, I will hire you.
Matt Reynolds:I want to create a.
Matt Reynolds:What my.
Matt Reynolds:What my view of what the olive tree looked like, which is Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, was for all of my life and what the olive tree actually looks like now.
Matt Reynolds:And I want.
Matt Reynolds:And I want to put them on both sides of my office, like, one on the left and one on the right and say, like, it doesn't look like this.
Matt Reynolds:It's not a single branch with lots of little individual branches coming off.
Matt Reynolds:It's this beautiful olive tree that grows fruit off of fruit, fruit off of branches.
Matt Reynolds:And also sometimes branches get cut off and grafted in.
Matt Reynolds:And those things are beautiful, too.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's all God's work.
Matt Reynolds:We just stay faithful to the gospel, and these are the things that are important in life.
Matt Reynolds:And when we drown in the urgency, we miss it.
Matt Reynolds:And we'll blink, and it'll be four years from now or two years from now, and the Congress will change.
Matt Reynolds:And, like, it doesn't change anything about Christ sitting on the throne, but Right now in America, we have an opportunity to build.
Matt Reynolds:We have an opportunity to grow.
Matt Reynolds:We have an opportunity to develop and cultivate that olive tree, those plants and those.
Matt Reynolds:Those trees and that growth.
Matt Reynolds:Like, those are the things that we have to do right now.
Matt Reynolds:And if we.
Matt Reynolds:If we sit on our laurels or if we get.
Matt Reynolds:And I think most of you guys are probably listening to your podcast, aren't.
Matt Reynolds:They're not lazy.
Matt Reynolds:Maybe some are.
Matt Reynolds:I'm sure some are, but most are probably drowning in urgency.
Matt Reynolds:And both the lazy and the overworked miss the important.
Matt Reynolds:And the important is the thing we have to focus on.
Will Spencer:Just want to back up to something you said a moment ago about the first Covenant member of my family.
Will Spencer:You're the first person to say something like that to me.
Matt Reynolds:Oh, really?
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:I mean.
Will Spencer:I mean.
Will Spencer:I mean, you're right.
Will Spencer:I'd never really thought of it that way.
Will Spencer:And I.
Will Spencer:I guess this is probably going to sound funny.
Will Spencer:You know, I'm used to being an outsider for so much of my life.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:So from travel, that's what I am.
Will Spencer:You're just a walking outsider, whether you like it or not.
Will Spencer:And, you know, journeying through so many different, you know, religions and political orientations, like, I'm just used to being an outsider.
Will Spencer:And it's only hit me in the past four to five months, really, because I'm also kind of new to reform theology, to this kind of world that's much bigger, and there's more to it than I realized, especially today.
Will Spencer:And so it's only hit me in the past few months, you know, like, no, Will, you're part of this thing.
Matt Reynolds:There's a.
Matt Reynolds:There's a Spencer branch.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:That didn't exist before your conversion.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:There is.
Matt Reynolds:Is there anything more beautiful than that?
Will Spencer:No.
Matt Reynolds:That's incredible.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:So you are.
Matt Reynolds:You are the branch of the Spencer family.
Matt Reynolds:And now.
Matt Reynolds:And.
Matt Reynolds:And I think that's why you feel the weight of creating more fruit, having more family, leading the family that you currently have to Christ, finding a godly wife and having children.
Matt Reynolds:Like, that's where.
Matt Reynolds:That's why the pressure.
Matt Reynolds:That's why you feel the weight of that, is because.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And it's not.
Matt Reynolds:And by the way, let me.
Matt Reynolds:It's not to put humanistic pressure on you at all.
Matt Reynolds:It's just like, I think you get the gravity of it.
Matt Reynolds:Like, it's.
Matt Reynolds:If everybody in their conversion is their own branch, then their own branch is nothing special.
Will Spencer:Right.
Matt Reynolds:But if you're the first branch of a family, and you build a thing.
Matt Reynolds:Like when I wrote my.
Matt Reynolds:When I signed the book to my grandpa a couple days ago on Thanksgiving, Matt, I couldn't even.
Matt Reynolds:There's no way I could read it on here because I would get so choked up.
Matt Reynolds:He and my grandma were the first Christians in my family, and I understand the gravity of that.
Matt Reynolds:There is incredible weightiness to that.
Matt Reynolds:And so, man, first off, thank you for being able to do the podcast, to be able to talk about these things, because I don't get to talk about this most podcasts.
Matt Reynolds:I'm going on business podcasts and lifestyle podcasts and someone, you know.
Matt Reynolds:But to be able to have the freedom to talk through those things like there is, when we talk about the important things and you can read it in the book, it's not.
Matt Reynolds:I don't gloss over it.
Matt Reynolds:It's pretty evident, while at the same time not shoving it down every reader's throat, still being published by a mass publisher.
Matt Reynolds:Understanding that that is the most important thing.
Matt Reynolds:Understanding, like, our role that we play in building into Christendom, in building into our families and our church and our community, and not because God needs us, but because he delights in it.
Matt Reynolds:That's what's so incredible, is that because he chose to love us before the foundation of the world chose you, you now get to delight God by building fruit with his, obviously with his help tremendously, or even all his work in building fruit on the Spencer branch, which did not exist before you, which is pretty incredible.
Will Spencer:It is.
Will Spencer:It is.
Will Spencer:And I hadn't.
Will Spencer:That sounds silly.
Will Spencer:I'd never really thought of it that way before because most of the questions.
Matt Reynolds:The.
Will Spencer:Most of the questions that I get asked are about the family that I have left behind or that left me behind, or however you want to look at it.
Will Spencer:In fact, I was.
Will Spencer:I was on the new St.
Will Spencer:Andrews, the university in Moscow.
Will Spencer:They just had me on their podcast of flames and crowns with Lennox, California, I believe is how you say his name.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Will Spencer:So.
Will Spencer:So that'll be coming out tomorrow when we're recording.
Will Spencer:It will already have been out when people listen this.
Will Spencer:Listen to this.
Will Spencer:And he.
Will Spencer:Like.
Will Spencer:Like the.
Will Spencer:Like Crosspolitik, like so many other people have asked me, like, about the response of my family to becoming a Christian.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:What was it like being an ethnic Jew who became a Christian and being left behind?
Matt Reynolds:Which is a perfectly valid question.
Will Spencer:It is.
Matt Reynolds:But a much.
Matt Reynolds:I would argue a much more important question is what's it like being the first guy, the first branch on the olive tree for your family?
Matt Reynolds:And what sort of weight do you bear to build the fruit off of that thing?
Matt Reynolds:God, I hope people don't watch this on YouTube and watch me cry and turn red.
Matt Reynolds:Can you guess if you are watching?
Matt Reynolds:Can you just listen to it, please?
Will Spencer:I might just clip this out and post it on Twitter.
Matt Reynolds:Well, no, no, it's like, it's so.
Matt Reynolds:There's so much we in it, man.
Matt Reynolds:And like, you know, I hope Sunday, when you take communion, which we take every Sunday, that you.
Matt Reynolds:That you feel the weight of it, because the.
Matt Reynolds:The gloriousness of it is.
Matt Reynolds:Is it had nothing to do with anything you did.
Will Spencer:Yep.
Matt Reynolds:This is the goodness of the gospel, that it's everything that Jesus did to do that, to.
Matt Reynolds:To.
Matt Reynolds:Well, here's what's wild.
Matt Reynolds:Here's another wild thing that maybe nobody's ever told you.
Matt Reynolds:Your family got cut off the olive tree and then you got personally grafted back in.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, that's wild.
Matt Reynolds:That's wild.
Will Spencer:Yes, it is.
Will Spencer:Yes.
Will Spencer:I remember I read Romans 10.
Matt Reynolds:There is gravity to that.
Will Spencer:Oh, I remember when I read Romans 9, 10, and 11 the first time, like, oh, well, there it is.
Matt Reynolds:I'm out and I'm in.
Will Spencer:Yes.
Will Spencer:That I have thought about.
Will Spencer:Yeah, that I have.
Will Spencer:But I mean, how to let that land in me has been a.
Will Spencer:Has been a big challenge.
Will Spencer:Like, I think I acknowledge it.
Will Spencer:I'm consciously aware of it.
Will Spencer:But the emotional.
Will Spencer:What you're talking about, the emotional weight, the emotional gravity of it.
Will Spencer:Perhaps I've never quite let it hit me before, or maybe because I've been looking back at what I've left behind, I haven't yet fully turned to acknowledge what it is I've been grafted into.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:So, you know, and that.
Will Spencer:And.
Will Spencer:Which is natural, right?
Will Spencer:Which is natural.
Will Spencer:It's a.
Will Spencer:There's a grief.
Will Spencer:There's a grief process.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:But, yeah, I.
Will Spencer:I do feel the.
Will Spencer:I do feel the weight of that.
Will Spencer:And I do believe, as Doug Wilson talks about the Deuteronomic blessings for faithfulness.
Will Spencer:I've read those passages and have them all marked up in my Bible.
Will Spencer:And, And.
Will Spencer:And I'm doing it.
Matt Reynolds:I'm doing it.
Matt Reynolds:I'm doing it.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer: est on my podcast in November: Will Spencer:Off the top of my head, I don't know, but I.
Will Spencer:But I know I'd had Doug Wilson on at least once by then, but, like Covenant theology, I didn't know what that was.
Will Spencer:You know, soteriology like all these things have unfolded over the past couple years to the point now where it's like, oh, wow, maybe I can finally understand this for real in an embodied sense.
Will Spencer:It's not head knowledge.
Will Spencer:Yeah, right.
Will Spencer:It's feeling the weight and the emotional reality of it and then extending that into the future.
Will Spencer:You're the first person to say anything like that to me.
Will Spencer:Others may have thought it or felt it or seen it or, or simply assumed that it was implied.
Will Spencer:But, but, but to hear it said to me is.
Will Spencer:Is very meaningful.
Will Spencer:It's very meaningful.
Will Spencer:So thank you.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, it's true.
Matt Reynolds:And I feel.
Matt Reynolds:I feel the weight of it for you, you know, and I feel the weight of it for me.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I've got two daughters who, you know, one of whom has a serious boyfriend.
Matt Reynolds:And you think about, again, like, your olive branch, which is a branch with one.
Matt Reynolds:Essentially one olive, let's say on it, one piece of fruit.
Matt Reynolds:And your goal is to, like, get that thing to branch out and produce lots of fruit, obviously through the work and power of Jesus Christ.
Matt Reynolds:Same thing for me.
Matt Reynolds:Like, you have to recognize that you don't have total control over that thing and you stay faithful to it.
Matt Reynolds:And I get worried about, like, who my daughters are going to marry and if they're, you know, are they going to give me lots of grandkids and coveted grandchildren and all those sorts of things.
Matt Reynolds:And you realize, like, a lot of that's just sort of out of my control while I still try to plant those seeds and, and build those values.
Matt Reynolds:And you.
Matt Reynolds:And you realize, like, God is just sometimes God is just good and God has been good to you.
Matt Reynolds:And it's really an amazing story that you don't have to be this thing that is a spindly little crappy branch on the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but that you get to be part of this incredible, voluminous, fruitful olive tree as part of the family of Jesus Christ of Christians, which is really, really cool, man.
Will Spencer:I wish I could give you a hug right now.
Matt Reynolds:So I'm glad we.
Matt Reynolds:We got through it.
Matt Reynolds:So here's.
Matt Reynolds:Here's what I would challenge to your listeners.
Matt Reynolds:Here's my sales pitch, because I would love to hear how much of that comes through in the book.
Matt Reynolds:So for those of you who are listening to this, not to listen.
Matt Reynolds:I run a company that's a service company.
Matt Reynolds:We do fine.
Matt Reynolds:It's not about selling the books.
Matt Reynolds:I couldn't buy the book.
Matt Reynolds:Get the cheap, but.
Matt Reynolds:But find it on sale.
Matt Reynolds:Get it.
Matt Reynolds:I don't care.
Will Spencer:Go get it, the library, used copy.
Matt Reynolds:Whatever, doesn't matter to me.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:I think, I think the Kindle and audible, like all those things are going to be on sale.
Matt Reynolds:Like whatever.
Matt Reynolds:Get a sale.
Will Spencer:Yeah, it's, it's.
Matt Reynolds:But I would love, I would, I would love to hear from your listeners and I'm super easy to find.
Matt Reynolds:Matt Reynolds, Barbell logic.
Matt Reynolds:My email is easy.
Matt Reynolds:I mean it's all over the place.
Matt Reynolds:You can find my email.
Matt Reynolds:You can.
Matt Reynolds:If you spend 30 seconds and you can't find my email, your IQ is too low to send me an email.
Matt Reynolds:But if you read the book and you listen to Will's podcast, if you listen to this podcast, I want to know if you feel that thread in the book.
Matt Reynolds:Because I've tried to read, write a book that is not a overtly in your face Christian gospel centered book that has these threads that run through it that I can be very proud of that I can pass down to my families and these values are still stand and for people who know me, I want those things to be.
Matt Reynolds:And look, I'm very open about being a Christian and these are my core values in the book.
Matt Reynolds:I say those things, but I'm not talking about olive trees and olive branches.
Matt Reynolds:But like I think if you listen to this podcast, I would love to hear.
Matt Reynolds:If you buy the book and read the book, I would love to hear from you.
Matt Reynolds:Reach out to me by email.
Matt Reynolds:I promise you I will read the email and I will respond personally.
Matt Reynolds:My EA will not respond to your email.
Matt Reynolds:Like, do you see that?
Matt Reynolds:That thread, that ribbon that binds this all together of like what he's really trying to tell you guys is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the thing that's most important and family and faith and spiritual disciplines and even health on some point.
Matt Reynolds:Because again, I think health is important.
Matt Reynolds:It's been in the.
Matt Reynolds:Without going down the Pluto.
Matt Reynolds:It's been nuts the last couple weeks on Twitter of fat pastors and all the things that we see.
Matt Reynolds:But I would just say like the health and fitness piece, like this is what I do.
Matt Reynolds:There's been a weird crossover for me and that I've been very reformed and Calvinist and things for years and I've been a strength coach for years.
Matt Reynolds:And for those of you who are still watching YouTube, even though I'm crying and I have a red face and all this stuff, those felt separate so my fists are not together.
Matt Reynolds:And then something happened and I started to do podcasts like Crosspolitik and, and the Ogden guys and Moscow guys and all the, whatever, all the guys and those worlds, like, combined and there started to be this ribbon that binded that together.
Matt Reynolds:And what I see in the health and fitness space, not to be judgmental against quote, unquote, fat pastors, because I don't want to be that.
Matt Reynolds:It's that if we're playing the long game, if that's the goal.
Matt Reynolds:And like, yes, you know, like Paul says, if, if I get, if, if heaven is tomorrow, like, lord, come, like, let's do that.
Matt Reynolds:But if, but if not, I don't just want to walk my daughters down the aisle at their wedding.
Matt Reynolds:I want to walk or be there for my granddaughters and my great granddaughters and man, if God blesses me, my great great granddaughters, to walk down the aisle as well, I want to play.
Matt Reynolds:And so I can't do that if I'm not healthy.
Matt Reynolds:And so, and so while the health is not this on the same level as the spiritual health and the values and the family health and the leadership in your church or in your business or whatever, the things are like, there's still a long game there that we're trying to play.
Matt Reynolds:And I realize our days are numbered, but I also think there's, you know, again, read Proverbs and read Ecclesiastes and you get to see, like, the dichotomy of both of those things.
Matt Reynolds:I still think that there is Proverbs is pretty clear that God.
Matt Reynolds:The tendency is for God to bless those with a long life, with those who work and take care of their bodies and do the things.
Matt Reynolds:And we're not guaranteed it.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:Like, you can do the thing, you can die at 25.
Matt Reynolds:But I want to not do the things that will kill me at 50.
Matt Reynolds:I want to try to do the things that will allow me to see the long game that hopefully I planted a value and building of my family's olive branch for 40, 50, 60 more decades or years to come, four, five, six decades to come.
Matt Reynolds:And so that's where the health piece comes in.
Matt Reynolds:If you are unhealthy, you're not, almost certainly not going to watch your great grandchildren walk down the aisle at their wedding.
Matt Reynolds:And what a joy to be able to do that.
Matt Reynolds:If you're able to.
Matt Reynolds:If the Lord spares you and you're able to be healthy through that.
Matt Reynolds:So that's where the health stuff comes in.
Matt Reynolds:And I think that's where there's importance there.
Matt Reynolds:So certainly for me, being a Christian first and a Christian leader, both in my church and my business, in my home, in my family, and my spheres of, of influence and sovereignty with my family, with my wife and my children, like that's, that's number one for me.
Matt Reynolds:Um, but I would love, like I have eternity to enjoy Jesus and so I would love to see if the Lord blesses me and he terries to be able to see another, another four, five, six decades of what the Reynolds family looks like from now.
Matt Reynolds:Unless it goes bad.
Matt Reynolds:And then I'll let God can kill me anytime he wants to.
Matt Reynolds:He can do that anyway.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, it's true.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think, I think that's where the health part and I think that's why I put that in the important piece.
Matt Reynolds:I would certainly put it as A, you know, whatever 1B or something below those other things.
Matt Reynolds:But I think that's still really important.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think it's important for us because we have fallen into, it's such a.
Matt Reynolds:We, we live in a time of such excess and, and we can eat, you know, we can doordash anything.
Matt Reynolds:We went to our home and we can, we can eat junk and we can eat food and, and then we get up in the morning and we study scripture and we, and we are good dads and, and good husbands and we do those things.
Matt Reynolds:But we don't take care of ourselves or we drown in urgency or we drown in stress and we have a stroke or a heart attack or whatever and you're like, man, you missed it and you didn't have to.
Matt Reynolds:And so that's where I think the health piece comes in.
Matt Reynolds:I just, I just, at this point, man, I, I've been a professional strongman and a professional power lifter and I just don't care about how much weight I lift.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I still love to lift heavy.
Matt Reynolds:It's still super fun and I still do, but I, I just want to lift to be, to be healthy.
Matt Reynolds:I don't want to live to be.
Matt Reynolds:I don't care about the strength any.
Matt Reynolds:Like I'm strong enough for anything life can throw at me at this point, right?
Matt Reynolds:Like to this day, like in my late 40s, I'm, I'm strong enough for anything life will throw at me, but I'm not necessarily strong enough for the stress of 18 hour work days, which the strength doesn't help, right?
Matt Reynolds:And so at some point I have to focus on do I really want to see the fruition of like literally the fruit of the olive tree of the Reynolds branch in my family?
Matt Reynolds:And I do.
Matt Reynolds:And so I want to be there, not to just watch my daughters or walk my daughters down the aisle, but to watch their daughters walk down the aisle, and again, if the Lord blesses, maybe their daughters walk down the aisle.
Will Spencer:That's always been one of the tough parts about the Christian conversation regarding health and fitness is trying to land in a why in a godly why.
Will Spencer:Because a lot of people will resist the call to fitness because they'll immediately jump to, well, it's all about aesthetics.
Will Spencer:And I don't want to be vain.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer:They'll throw it into the vanity category.
Will Spencer:And I, I don't think, I think that can be a proper category depending on how some men conduct it.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:And, but I think in, in general, to dismiss, you know, weight training, healthy diet.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:In general, as, as a category of vanity is wrong.
Will Spencer:But I think fruitfulness, prosperity, health, sober mindedness, I think all of these are far more accurate categories.
Will Spencer:I've said for years, if you could snap your fingers and give anyone 24 hours in their ideal body, whatever, that looks like their ideal body weight, and at the end of 24 hours, they would have to go back to wherever they were when you snapped your fingers.
Will Spencer:At the end of 24 hours, they would be begging you.
Matt Reynolds:They would change meaningfully.
Will Spencer:They've never known, because most people have never known what it's like to be, to be either truly fit, truly strong, or, or both.
Will Spencer:Whatever, whatever that looks like.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:And so because I know that when I started the renaissance of men, when I started this podcast, whatever, four and a half years ago, four, four or so years ago, that was the, that was the, the fittest, the strongest and leanest I'd ever been in my entire life.
Will Spencer:I had unlocked a whole new level of energy, of clarity, of mind, of motivation, et cetera.
Will Spencer:And so naturally, a lot of fruit came out of that.
Will Spencer:And that's.
Will Spencer:That stuck with me.
Will Spencer:And so I often challenge people to say, like, how would you be, how would you perform in your everyday life?
Will Spencer:How would you feel if you had just checked that off your to do list?
Will Spencer:It doesn't mean 8% body fat up.
Matt Reynolds:On stage at a body not typically healthy.
Will Spencer:Correct.
Matt Reynolds:Actually, something between where you are now and there, right?
Will Spencer:Yeah, exactly.
Will Spencer:And £20 off of anybody.
Matt Reynolds:I would.
Will Spencer:I give, I give everybody a mulligan of about £20 today, you know, and I think that's a product of so many different things.
Will Spencer:Sedentary lifestyle, you know, probably air conditioning probably has a lot to do with it.
Will Spencer:Just for men.
Will Spencer:Well, because we don't have to.
Will Spencer:Our bodies don't have to resist the elements anymore.
Matt Reynolds:And I Think we don't, we don't work manual jobs.
Matt Reynolds:We sit at a desk.
Matt Reynolds:Yep.
Matt Reynolds:Like all those sort of things, like why was food.
Matt Reynolds:Why was.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:Processed foods.
Matt Reynolds:Why?
Matt Reynolds:You've seen the pictures of, from the seventies on the beach where there's nobody that's fat.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:Why is nobody fat on the beach?
Matt Reynolds:I'm gonna, I'm gonna again, I'm.
Matt Reynolds:By the time this comes out, I'll probably be in Mexico surrounded by fat people.
Matt Reynolds:And, and right.
Matt Reynolds:And, and, and I struggle with the same thing.
Matt Reynolds:Like it's this, this.
Matt Reynolds:There is this thing that when I am overwhelmed with urgency, one of the first things to go for me is often is the food and the alcohol and the training and the, and so those things and you follow that and the next thing you know you're like, wow, I've put on £25 and I'm less healthy than I was.
Matt Reynolds:And so my body weight is fluctuated tremendously.
Matt Reynolds:I would just say that for me and for our business.
Matt Reynolds:And again, this is not a pitch for the business, but for.
Matt Reynolds:It really is.
Matt Reynolds:You laugh at barbellogic.
Will Spencer:I'm loving all the pitches.
Matt Reynolds:You can do them, man.
Matt Reynolds:Our focus is normal people improving their quality of life by experiencing strength and health.
Matt Reynolds:That's the point.
Matt Reynolds:It's not about 22 year old kids who take pictures of their abs and post it on Instagram.
Matt Reynolds:That's just not who we train.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm not going to say that every kid that does that is in sin or whatever.
Matt Reynolds:I think that aesthetics, everyone wants to look better.
Matt Reynolds:I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Matt Reynolds:But I think aesthetics are a byproduct of performance improvement and quality of life improvement.
Matt Reynolds:If you improve your performance and quality of life, strength, health, et cetera, the aesthetics will improve.
Matt Reynolds:You'll feel better about yourself aesthetically, but more importantly, you'll be healthier, stronger, perform better, quality of life will be better.
Matt Reynolds:I want my quality of life to go up year after year after year.
Matt Reynolds:And here I'm in the mid-40s, hit a peak around 50, 55 and hold until I'm 90, 100, whatever, and then die.
Matt Reynolds:And that's okay, there's nothing.
Matt Reynolds:Because what most people do are the opposite.
Matt Reynolds:They hit their peak at 19, 20, 25 and they slowly decline into this.
Matt Reynolds:They osteoporosis and osteopenia and they lose, lose all this muscle and lose all this bone density and they, and they, they get so frail that they have to go into it.
Matt Reynolds:I don't Ever want to go to go to a nursing home, you know, so I want to maintain quality of life and then just the Lord take me.
Matt Reynolds:That's okay.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:No, I think that's a good way of thinking about it because I think a lot of our culture is also in terms of short term thinking, I'm going to live forever, right.
Will Spencer:Me centric, individualistic, and then also heavily youth centric.
Will Spencer:It's a strange phenomenon.
Will Spencer:I see people all the time on Twitter, like, oh, I'm 30 now, it's so over.
Will Spencer:Like what?
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:I believe firmly, I've said this to countless people, a man does not truly become useful until he's 35.
Matt Reynolds:And I would say his peak is 35 to 45 or 35 to late 40s.
Matt Reynolds:And then I think you can maintain that lifestyle for probably another two decades.
Matt Reynolds:I mean, we've had tons of clients that, man, we have guys that are 65 years old that deadlift over 400 pounds and that's plenty strong for anything life throws at them.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:But not, not only are they strong, and I say that maybe like, and they're not 300 pounds, right?
Matt Reynolds:They're, they're 185.
Will Spencer:Exactly.
Matt Reynolds:And they're strong and they're healthy and they're lean and they're, you know, we do their blood markers and their, their metrics are strong.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think those things are important because, and, and so I'll be careful the way I say this because of the things I've seen, even on X this week, I want to stop calling it Twitter because it's X now.
Will Spencer:Because that's true.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Will Spencer:It's earned the right to be X.
Will Spencer:After helping Trump win the election, it's earned the right to be X.
Matt Reynolds:But because of the arguments that I often see with this thing, like, I, I would love.
Matt Reynolds:If you are listening to this and you are a pastor or a church leader who's struggling with this, again, please reach out to me.
Matt Reynolds:I will not try to sell you something that's not the goal.
Matt Reynolds:The goal is to help you understand what you need to do to move forward.
Matt Reynolds:And so, and so the attacks on the older boomer and late Gen X pastors that are, you know, overweight on some level, not morbidly obese, but nor, and maybe morbidly obese, but a lot of them are just, you know, somewhat overweight.
Matt Reynolds:I think that there is a, a simple, hard, effective solution to those things.
Matt Reynolds:It doesn't take six days a week, two hours A day.
Will Spencer:Did you say hard?
Matt Reynolds:It's still hard.
Matt Reynolds:Yes, but it is simple.
Matt Reynolds:Like, it's not complicated.
Matt Reynolds:It's not.
Matt Reynolds:And complexity is seductive.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:So people want to, and I see, you know, we see this in theology all the time where people argue about any weird variation, especially reformed theology that we're both in.
Matt Reynolds:But like the simplicity of the work is, is, there's beauty in that.
Matt Reynolds:But to be clear, simple does not mean easy.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:Simple is.
Matt Reynolds:And simple plus hard equals effective.
Matt Reynolds:And so if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm the guy you're talking about, I'm the 45 or 55 or 65 year old pastor or church leader or deacon or whatever, or just dad.
Matt Reynolds:And I have to get this under control again.
Matt Reynolds:Reach out to me, like, shoot me an email.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not going to try to sell you something like one.
Matt Reynolds:I, I don't even have space on my roster to take you, but I will definitely give you help and I will help you because I, I want, I want you, if you're 45, 55, 65, in the same way that I want me to be able to see multiple generations of your family watch the fruit grow that you spent your life planting.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I just, I don't want to be the farmer that, that plants the seeds and has this little seedling and then dies and never gets to see it.
Matt Reynolds:And I know you get to probably see it from heaven and all this, but like, I want to, I want to hug my grandkids as they cultivate the same plants, as they cultivate the tree, as they cultivate the fruit.
Matt Reynolds:Like, those are the things.
Matt Reynolds:And that's why health matters.
Matt Reynolds:It's not so you can deadlift 400 pounds, which is cool, but like, that's not number one.
Matt Reynolds:Number one is quality of life, improvement and health and, and those sort of things.
Matt Reynolds:And so, so I, so I, in the book, I qualify that as, as one of the important things to me now again, I think it should be probably important to most.
Matt Reynolds:Just like, I think if you have family, family should be, there's other things.
Matt Reynolds:Like, you know, being a CEO of a company is not going to be important to some people.
Matt Reynolds:Or, you know, potentially Christianity is not going to be super important to some people, like religion, whatever.
Matt Reynolds:Is not that.
Matt Reynolds:Read the book.
Matt Reynolds:Should be, should be.
Matt Reynolds:Again, yeah, thank you.
Matt Reynolds:But that's okay.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I, I, there, there is also a thing that we've seen as we train people at Barbell logic that happens that when, when people Take personal responsibility for their health and their strength and their performance.
Matt Reynolds:It, it is often the first step in a movement in the right direction.
Matt Reynolds:And by right, I mean right.
Matt Reynolds:In the right.
Matt Reynolds:And so they.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, in the.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, but also right direction.
Will Spencer:Yes.
Matt Reynolds:So, yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And so it's, it gets them out of victimhood mentality.
Matt Reynolds:It gets them out of, you know, I was raised with a, you know, bad parents in a bad situation with a bad hand of cards.
Matt Reynolds:Like, okay, in the fifth grade, I'm okay with you using that example, but at 41, I'm not.
Matt Reynolds:Like, at some point you have to take responsibility for like everybody, like genetics, social, socioeconomic status, family, upbringing, background, whatever that is.
Matt Reynolds:At some point you just had to be like, I'm a grown up and I have to take responsibility for my own actions.
Matt Reynolds:It's amazing what putting a bar on your back and squatting does for people that have never done that, who've played the victim mentality their entire life.
Matt Reynolds:And so that, that sense of responsibility that comes in is wild because I've watched clients and coaches and employees.
Matt Reynolds:Again, if you're listening, you're an employee and you're not this, it's okay, move that direction and not play the victim because there's something about like, I have to have personal agency to be able to get strong and take control of my own health.
Matt Reynolds:And again, you.
Matt Reynolds:And I understand that there's still like a sovereignty of God piece here that God still kind of controls on some level of those things.
Matt Reynolds:But, but I'm, I'm certain if you sit at home and binge, watch Netflix and Doordash all day and drink too much alcohol, you're not going to wake up one morning with six pack abs and healthy.
Will Spencer:Pretty sure that's not how that works.
Matt Reynolds:And so you still got to put in the work.
Matt Reynolds:And, and so yeah, it's, it's, it's an important thing too.
Matt Reynolds:Not as important as the legacy and the virtue and the values and the family and the olive tree and all the stuff that we talked about, but still pretty important because I think it just dramatically improves your chances to see the fruition of that labor.
Matt Reynolds:And I think seeing the fruition of the labor is wonderful, but I still think the process of the labor is actually where the joy occurs.
Matt Reynolds:The fruition's amazing.
Matt Reynolds:Like, right, the seeing the fruition is great.
Matt Reynolds:Or you know, like the, you know, the concept of Michael Jordan winning championships was wonderful for him, but three days later he just looked to the next championship.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, Kobe Bryant looked at work and just Said, like, there's value in the work.
Matt Reynolds:I'm going to enjoy the championship, but I'm going to enjoy the work more.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think for us, we have to have the same attitude.
Matt Reynolds:Like, there's just.
Matt Reynolds: Right now, there's a time in: Matt Reynolds:He can bless, he can make better.
Matt Reynolds:He doesn't have to.
Matt Reynolds:He's not guaranteed.
Matt Reynolds:We're not prosperity gospel people.
Matt Reynolds:But at the same time, I think that we're still.
Matt Reynolds:Whether he does or not, right?
Matt Reynolds:It's Shadrach, Meshach, and Nebednego.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:Like, we know our God can bless us this way or can deliver us.
Matt Reynolds:We believe he will, but even if he doesn't, one, we will be faithful and choose rightly.
Matt Reynolds:And two, he is still faithful, and he is still God, and he's still sovereign no matter what.
Matt Reynolds:So.
Matt Reynolds:But our job is still to do the work and let.
Matt Reynolds:And then let God build the fruit.
Matt Reynolds:Our job's not actually not to make the fruit.
Matt Reynolds:Our job is to do.
Matt Reynolds:We're called to the work.
Will Spencer:Amen.
Will Spencer:This is great.
Will Spencer:I'm grateful that you're on the podcast so we can talk about this stuff, because I don't get to talk about this stuff, because all these things do fit together.
Will Spencer:They fit together in a very important way that I don't hear a lot of people synthesizing.
Will Spencer:You have a lot of bros who, you know, who say, don't be a fat pastor.
Will Spencer:You know, strength is Godly.
Will Spencer:Amen.
Matt Reynolds:Yes, true.
Will Spencer:Fantastic.
Will Spencer:Right?
Will Spencer:You know, health, all that stuff.
Will Spencer:And then you also have the concept of legacy.
Will Spencer:You have the concept of building.
Will Spencer:You have the concept of family.
Will Spencer:You have the concept of the olive tree.
Will Spencer:All this stuff, it all fits together into a cohesive vision of the Christian life.
Matt Reynolds:That's right.
Will Spencer:All of these pieces are part of a whole.
Will Spencer:And I think one of the things that's really exciting about probably the reformed theology world, despite all the insanity that's going on.
Will Spencer:But one of the things that's exciting is this recovery of covenant thinking.
Will Spencer:This is, as far as I can tell, this is a topic that I've only heard talked about increasingly over the course of the past year.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:It's only recently that I've noticed that it's coming up more and more, probably because of The Baptist to Presbyterian superhighway, that's.
Will Spencer:That's going on right now.
Will Spencer:But this way of thinking in terms of covenants enables all of these different aspects to be melded together into what do I do as a man today to think about my.
Will Spencer:Myself, my household, my community, my church, my family, my legacy?
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:All these things fit together in the notions of covenants because we have commitments that.
Will Spencer:Binding commitments that God makes to us, that we make to those around us.
Will Spencer:And by carrying through those binding commitments, that I think is what makes for a good man.
Will Spencer:A good man is a guy who does what he says he's going to do.
Will Spencer:That's your man card.
Will Spencer:The price of your man card is.
Will Spencer:Is accountability.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer:And so.
Will Spencer:And so I think there are a lot of boys, you know, in.
Will Spencer:Some of them are driving adult male bodies.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, sure.
Will Spencer:Who avoid responsibility because they want to avoid accountability.
Will Spencer:Sure, right.
Matt Reynolds:Yes.
Matt Reynolds:The old Driscoll.
Matt Reynolds:The old Driscoll line.
Matt Reynolds:Boys who can shave.
Matt Reynolds:Yes, that's great.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not necessarily promoting Driscoll, but, like, that's the line he would use.
Matt Reynolds:It's boys who can shave.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:They were boys on a man's body.
Will Spencer:On the other hand, you have Doug Wilson, who says masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.
Matt Reynolds:I say it all the time.
Will Spencer:What does sacrificial responsibility look like relationally?
Will Spencer:It looks like a covenant.
Will Spencer:It looks like a commitment.
Will Spencer:It looks like accountability.
Will Spencer:And so stepping into the sphere of accountability.
Will Spencer:Right.
Will Spencer:Means you've now taken on all these different covenants around you.
Will Spencer:Maybe not.
Will Spencer:They're not all theological in nature, but they'll have to be managed with your individual commitments to your time.
Matt Reynolds:That's right.
Will Spencer:So that's.
Will Spencer:That's how I see all these things fitting together.
Will Spencer:And that's why it's exciting to have this conversation, because I've been thinking and creating content.
Will Spencer:I've been thinking about masculinity for 20 plus years, 24 years at this point.
Will Spencer:I've been explicitly creating content about masculinity for four years plus.
Will Spencer:And now here we are, all the pieces are finally fitting together with theology.
Will Spencer:It's such an exciting.
Will Spencer:It's such an exciting moment collectively for Christians, for men, and for me personally.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, I've gone through the same thing.
Matt Reynolds:And I think, you know this about me.
Matt Reynolds:I have a history degree.
Matt Reynolds:I was a history teacher in my first career, and I recognize that I was taught history where there were these pieces of history and they were all siloed and they were like Completely.
Matt Reynolds:Like World War I and World War II were completely separate.
Matt Reynolds:And, you know, and.
Matt Reynolds:And.
Matt Reynolds:And the American Revolution and Civil War were separate.
Matt Reynolds:And you.
Matt Reynolds:And then you realize there's actually a ribbon that binds all of those together.
Will Spencer:That's right.
Matt Reynolds:And I think what you're discovering and what you just laid out is that there's a ribbon that binds all of these things together, from the most important things of, like, that.
Matt Reynolds:Like Christ and him crucified at the Gospel down to the less important things, and then understanding, like, how our role as men, as fathers, as husbands, as men who are strong, as men, who are capable, as men, who are powerful, as men who can work, as men who can work in the field.
Matt Reynolds:And by the way, to be clear, there are many days where the thorns and thistles grow up around the things that I'm building.
Matt Reynolds:I built a very successful business.
Matt Reynolds:And yet there are many days I sit down with my wife, and I go, I have a term, and I'll say, thorns and thistles.
Matt Reynolds:And she knows what it means.
Matt Reynolds:She means.
Matt Reynolds:It means, like, I've been up since three, and it's seven now, and I've been working for four hours, and it's all been thorns and thistles today so far.
Matt Reynolds:And then she knows how to handle it.
Matt Reynolds:Doesn't mean, like, I'm gonna fly off the handle or anything, but it means, like, it's been hard already in the first four hours.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:And that is.
Matt Reynolds:That is okay, because that is still, like, there's a goodness in the God that.
Matt Reynolds:That's the brokenness of creation that we look forward to eventually to be restored.
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:Where.
Matt Reynolds:Where the stones cry out, where the.
Matt Reynolds:Where the.
Matt Reynolds:All of creation is groaning for, like, every time someone comes to Christ and says, is this the last one?
Matt Reynolds:Is this.
Matt Reynolds:Do we.
Matt Reynolds:Are there.
Matt Reynolds:Sorry, Are there no more thorns?
Matt Reynolds:Are there no more thistles?
Matt Reynolds:Right?
Matt Reynolds:And so.
Matt Reynolds:And there are days where I'm blessed.
Matt Reynolds:Today was a day like that.
Matt Reynolds:I mean, I've been on podcasts and meetings for, like, probably eight hours today, and the Lord has just blessed me with conversations like this.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm like, thank you, Lord, for a day that wasn't full of thorns and thistles today.
Matt Reynolds:You.
Matt Reynolds:I didn't.
Matt Reynolds:You didn't owe that to me.
Matt Reynolds:That wasn't something that was.
Matt Reynolds:But.
Matt Reynolds:But there's still.
Matt Reynolds:There's still beauty in the days where the thorns and thistles are there, because you look forward to a day that is to come when those go away.
Matt Reynolds:And we also get to celebrate the fact that Jesus sits on the throne right now and is the king of the world right now, today.
Matt Reynolds:Like Jesus is Lord, period.
Matt Reynolds:Right now, today.
Matt Reynolds:And so these things, understanding as men, the ribbon that binds all those things together, I think is one of the most important things that you can possibly understand, especially for your listenership, which are probably mostly guys like 20s to 40s, I would guess, somewhere in that ballpark.
Will Spencer:A little bit older now, actually.
Matt Reynolds:Okay, it's 30s to 50s, whatever.
Matt Reynolds:30s to late 40s, whatever.
Matt Reynolds:To understand the ribbon that binds that all together, to understand, like, how does my Christianity, gospel, fitness, health, fathership, husbandry, church leadership, business ownership, there is a ribbon that binds all those things together.
Matt Reynolds:We are called to work well, to do the job to the best of our ability, but also to understand how all of these things kind of flow together.
Matt Reynolds:And they do flow together.
Matt Reynolds:They're not siloed.
Matt Reynolds:And so when I was a history teacher, when I recognized that I could, When I learned how to teach the ribbon that.
Matt Reynolds:That bound all of those stories together, that's when it.
Matt Reynolds:That's when it was internalized in my students.
Matt Reynolds:If it was just World War I over here and then World War II over here, it's like World War I created World War II, and here's how.
Will Spencer:Yes, it did.
Matt Reynolds:When you were able to unders.
Matt Reynolds:When you were able to explain that, like, the ribbon was the thing that I hope.
Matt Reynolds: ars I've haven't taught since: Matt Reynolds:And here's why.
Matt Reynolds:Because you, like, you.
Matt Reynolds:You made it all real.
Matt Reynolds:Like, you made it alive.
Matt Reynolds:And so this is why we watch documentaries as my family, because I'm able to.
Matt Reynolds:To build that and tie that ribbon together.
Matt Reynolds:But same thing.
Matt Reynolds:We do the same thing with, like, here.
Matt Reynolds:Here's why we follow the, you know, regulative worship as opposed to.
Matt Reynolds:As opposed to normative worship or whatever.
Matt Reynolds:And so we walk through those things together so they understand the.
Matt Reynolds:The tie that binds those things together.
Matt Reynolds:That ribbon is the thing that you literally can.
Matt Reynolds:It's almost like it's not a perfect linear line, but they are the major milestones of your life that you can see.
Matt Reynolds: nd looking back in hindsight,: Matt Reynolds:That's the point.
Will Spencer:So I want to take that thread idea and I want to be respectful I know it's late in the day for you and you've got some important family time, maybe to watch some documentaries, but I want to back to something that you said early in the beginning and see if we can tie it all together.
Matt Reynolds:Sure.
Will Spencer:You talked about how vulnerable it was to write the introduction to your book and you talked about at the beginning Mark Horowitz or Horowitz's book.
Matt Reynolds:Ben Horowitz.
Will Spencer:Yep, Ben Horowitz.
Will Spencer:His book, the Hard Things.
Matt Reynolds:Hard thing about hard things.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Will Spencer:About the, about the amount of failures that they've had to go through, that you've had to go through to build something.
Will Spencer:And so I want to, I want to take that and run it through the filter of what the ribbon is through the, through the lives and the careers of successful men so that people don't walk away thinking that like, oh, this is an overnight process, that it's all sunshine and rainbows and skipping down the yellow brick road.
Will Spencer:You know, the process of getting anywhere of value involves failure.
Will Spencer:It involves false starts, it involves treasured projects.
Will Spencer:Not working out involves mistakes and sin.
Will Spencer:So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and sort of tie it all together for that process for you.
Will Spencer:And now to here.
Matt Reynolds:Well, I think the thing that is required is an unwavering and brutal self awareness of your failures, which I think most people often don't want to talk about.
Matt Reynolds:And certainly our parents generation.
Matt Reynolds:The reason I had to have the phone call with my mom, the reason I had to have the phone call with my in laws who are both, love them both.
Matt Reynolds:If you're listening to this, love you guys both.
Matt Reynolds:But they are literally middle of the bell curve.
Matt Reynolds:Prototypical boomers.
Matt Reynolds:You don't talk about that stuff.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And I go, I gotta talk about this stuff.
Matt Reynolds:Because that's where the lessons were learned.
Matt Reynolds:And the hardest conversation I've ever had in my life was going to my in laws 15 years ago and saying I was unfaithful to your daughter.
Matt Reynolds:And man, I begged my pastor to be there because I was afraid her dad might shoot me.
Matt Reynolds:That's how scared I was, legit.
Matt Reynolds:But he didn't.
Matt Reynolds:And they were of course devastated.
Matt Reynolds:And it wasn't like, we forgive you and it's okay.
Matt Reynolds:It wasn't.
Matt Reynolds:It took some time.
Matt Reynolds:But the ribbon that binds it all together is the self awareness of there will be sin and there will be failures.
Matt Reynolds:And if you look at passages like Matthew 18 and church discipline and things like that, we often look at that in sort of a negative light.
Matt Reynolds:But the Reality of those sort of things is like the purpose of that thing is reconciliation.
Matt Reynolds:And by the grace of God, he completely reconciled my marriage by the power of the gospel.
Matt Reynolds:And so the lesson is learned in the failure.
Matt Reynolds:If you'll allow yourself to confront it, be upfront about it, confess it, repent from it, be open and honest.
Matt Reynolds:By the way, both my wife and I held that in for, I don't know, a year or two.
Matt Reynolds:And, and it just, it ate, it ate us alive like cancer.
Matt Reynolds:And until we finally were, were able to tell those stories, we weren't able to get freedom from it.
Matt Reynolds:And so, and so for me, telling those stories, there's freedom in that.
Matt Reynolds:It's not bondage.
Matt Reynolds:It's not bondage to the sin.
Matt Reynolds:It's that I, I'm no longer a slave to sin.
Matt Reynolds:I'm, I'm a slave to righteousness.
Matt Reynolds:I'm, I'm, I'm free from that, right?
Matt Reynolds:So that's not who I am.
Matt Reynolds:And still that's who the enemy sometimes comes up in the middle of the night when I wake up at two in the morning and, and the enemy's like that, that's still who you are.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm like, wait, that's not who I, that's not who my.
Matt Reynolds:That's not where my identity is found anymore.
Matt Reynolds:And so the ribbon that binds it all together is to understand that like we are, we are by nature depraved, we will sin and fail.
Matt Reynolds:And I pray desperately that most of the readers in my book don't sin and fail as much as I did in those years.
Matt Reynolds:But that if the lesson isn't learned, if the repentance doesn't come, if the turn away from the sin doesn't come, if the knowledge isn't turned to wisdom that's then passed down to others and turned into action, that it was all for naught.
Matt Reynolds:If I hide the sin my entire life, even if I repent it to my pastor and my wife and the people that it affected.
Matt Reynolds:But I tell no one, no one else who can learn.
Matt Reynolds:And so the reason that a book by a very secular humanist, Ben Horowitz, Hard Thing about Hard Things, is so powerful to me as he talks about the struggle.
Matt Reynolds:How much more powerful is our conversation about our struggle with sin and depravity and failure and not resting on God's sovereignty and his goodness and his grace and the atonement and his.
Matt Reynolds:And God the Father, wrapping us in Jesus's cloak of righteousness, like all of those things, like those are the lessons we have to learn and pass on to our community, to our family, to our people, to like everyone that's within our spheres of sovereignty.
Matt Reynolds:That's where the ribbon is that binds that together.
Matt Reynolds:And so, you know, also for me as a guy that owns a business, it's now, you know, a good sized business.
Matt Reynolds:I don't want those skeletons in my closet.
Matt Reynolds:I want to tell the story.
Matt Reynolds:I want it to come from me.
Matt Reynolds:I don't like.
Matt Reynolds:And I've told my wife, I've told my executive assistant, I'm like, listen, there may be a day you get an email from someone that I had a relationship with 15 years ago, 20 years ago, I don't know.
Matt Reynolds:But I got nothing to hide.
Matt Reynolds:I've told the story.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:So it doesn't come out and become church discipline because of something I've never confessed.
Matt Reynolds:It's a thing that I've confessed, I've repented of, I've told.
Matt Reynolds:And this has been a hard conversation even with my church, even my local body church, to be able to tell those.
Matt Reynolds:And as I'm, I'm, I'm an elder in training at this point.
Matt Reynolds:And your listeners may listen to this and be like, if he's ever gone through that, he's disqualified.
Matt Reynolds:You may be right.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I'm not an elder yet.
Matt Reynolds:So we're working through those things.
Matt Reynolds:But the reality is is that the gospel has the power to reconcile all sin.
Matt Reynolds:And so my job is to live a life faithful of a church leader and an elder and let God impress upon the heart of my pastors and elder and elders and church body if I'm worthy of that.
Matt Reynolds:And I'm not worried about it.
Matt Reynolds:But I think the real value comes in the lessons learned.
Matt Reynolds:And so I've learned lessons from more lessons from the failures than from the successes.
Matt Reynolds:And to give those lessons that I've learned in failures, I desperately hope that people learn some of those lessons and don't have to go through them on their own.
Matt Reynolds:They're going to go through their own failures.
Matt Reynolds:Hopefully they don't have to go through some that are as insane as the stuff I went through.
Matt Reynolds:And then what's beautiful about it, it's, it's almost like if I go back to the ribbon equation, the ribbon feels like tattered and dark and stained and black and dirty and gross.
Matt Reynolds:And then I was reconciled out of that.
Matt Reynolds:And for, and again, what the gospel says is like.
Matt Reynolds:And then God wrapped me in the cloak of Jesus righteousness and Jesus atoned for all those sins.
Matt Reynolds:None of those sins that I committed 15, 20 years ago were surprises to God.
Matt Reynolds:God knew that those things were going to occur in eternity past.
Matt Reynolds:And so that was, that's my story.
Matt Reynolds:That's part of my story.
Matt Reynolds:And so I'm able to take those things.
Matt Reynolds:I'm able to take those deep, dark, horrific, painful, often telling the stories.
Matt Reynolds:I feel okay right now, but I often tell, if I have to tell the details of those stories, even today, 15 years later, like, it'll tear my stomach up and I'll have to go, I have to be like, I've got to pause the podcast and go sit on the toilet for a few minutes.
Matt Reynolds:Like, it's that, it's that painful and for real is tmi.
Matt Reynolds:But that is what it is.
Matt Reynolds:And, but that ribbon goes from tattered and black and dirty and gross to, to white too.
Matt Reynolds:Like, even though I am still depraved and even though I'm still sinful, and even though I still struggle with sin, God still sees me as positionally righteous and sees me with the cloak of righteousness.
Matt Reynolds:And so then that leads me to the grace driven effort of then I want to tell people the story about the things that God has led me through and saved me from and reconciled in my marriage so that they don't have to go through it, so that they can learn those lessons for their marriage, so they can learn those lessons for their parenting and leadership and business and church and whatnot.
Matt Reynolds:And so for me, that's the story.
Matt Reynolds:And so that story is told in the book.
Matt Reynolds:And again, I would love.
Matt Reynolds:If you read the book and you feel that and you see that and you hear that, I would love to hear your own testimony about what that meant to you.
Matt Reynolds:And so, yeah, it was, it was tough, man, putting that stuff out to my family and to my friends and to my, my staff.
Matt Reynolds:Actually, my staff was very concerned.
Matt Reynolds:They were like, very nervous.
Matt Reynolds:Like, some of them still haven't read it and a bunch of them are going out.
Matt Reynolds:You probably saw on Instagram, I signed a bunch of books yesterday and they're, they're going out.
Matt Reynolds:One's coming to you and, and you know, they're like, what are the stories you're going to tell?
Matt Reynolds:And I'm like, here we go.
Matt Reynolds:I mean, what, what at this point, I've told it on the podcasts, I've told the stories.
Matt Reynolds:And so there.
Matt Reynolds:If without, without the depravity and the sin and the devastation of the sin, how good is grace?
Matt Reynolds:Grace isn't good without that.
Matt Reynolds:And so we, we understand how good grace is.
Matt Reynolds:And so when we get a day like today that I've had where God has just been so gracious to me and given me great conversations with people that I love, that means less without the sin and depravity.
Matt Reynolds:Now I wish it didn't.
Matt Reynolds:I wish I had all the benefit of the grace and the goodness without the sin, but I can't.
Matt Reynolds:That's the whole book of Romans.
Matt Reynolds:That's what it is.
Matt Reynolds:There is how good is grace without the sin?
Matt Reynolds:Like the potter that makes the vessel for destruction gets to also make the vessel for incredible benefit.
Matt Reynolds:Right.
Matt Reynolds:Like for this beauty and this elegance.
Matt Reynolds:Well, if every piece of pottery is beautiful, then is anything beautiful?
Will Spencer:Right.
Matt Reynolds:So you have to have some that are made for destruction.
Matt Reynolds:I've lived a life of both the elder brother and the prodigal son.
Matt Reynolds:And I think that's, I hope, the beauty of my story and that I can, I have a tremendous connection to both of them.
Matt Reynolds:I have lived the life of elder brother first, prodigal son second, and then hopefully somewhere where I'm not a self righteous older brother in my older age, but living more of a life of, of as close to holiness as I can.
Matt Reynolds:And so I think that gives me a unique perspective that I speak to in undoing urgency.
Will Spencer:Well, I just want to note one thing, that of course your staff members will be concerned about some of your personal stories, but the reality is that there will be a number of people, executives, staff members as well, who knows, probably not for your company, but out there who will have had their own episodes of unconfessed infidelity.
Matt Reynolds:That's right.
Will Spencer:And they will look at that and they will know and they're.
Will Spencer:And they will always be sleeping, wondering when the skeleton is going to come out of the closet.
Matt Reynolds:That's right.
Will Spencer:And as painful as it is when the skeleton comes out of the closet, it is always better to take that responsibility onto yourself and own it and step into a place of true humility and courage than it is to be confronted with it out of the darkness.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Will Spencer:And so, and so that courage that you showed, you know, yes, of course there might be a, I don't know, we might call it a reputation hit or something like that with it.
Will Spencer:But realistically, the reputation hit of when something is revealed, you know, that's the sort of stuff that gets so much worse.
Will Spencer:And so I applaud you for having the courage to put out that story in a book, in a published book, because I remember reading that section of the book and it just sets the stage of like, okay, this is a real guy.
Will Spencer:This isn't.
Will Spencer:This isn't a guy who's posturing himself as a master of the universe.
Will Spencer:This is a guy who took his licks and showed up and kept fighting, and this is what he built out of that.
Matt Reynolds:So even more than I think taking my licks, but I deserved them.
Matt Reynolds:I made my bed and I had to lay in it.
Matt Reynolds:And so it wasn't that I was an abused child that didn't deserve it.
Matt Reynolds:Like, I deserved every lick I got.
Will Spencer:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:And.
Matt Reynolds:And there were lessons to be learned from those things.
Matt Reynolds:So.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, man.
Matt Reynolds:So thank you.
Matt Reynolds:Thank you for letting me tell my story.
Will Spencer:You're welcome, man.
Will Spencer:Always a pleasure to have you on the show and to have these really heartfelt, brotherly conversations about the things that are most important to us.
Will Spencer:I'm always blessed by them especially so this time.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah.
Matt Reynolds:Love it, man.
Matt Reynolds:Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Will Spencer:You're welcome.
Will Spencer:Where would you like to send people to get the book?
Matt Reynolds:Real quick, the best place to go is probably Ryan mattreynolds.com so I go by Matt Reynolds.
Matt Reynolds:Ryan Reynolds is a famous actor.
Matt Reynolds:As you know.
Matt Reynolds:Matt Reynolds is an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds.
Matt Reynolds:I believe Ryan mattreynolds.com is a great place to go get the book, but you can get on Amazon or any place that you go buy books.
Matt Reynolds:I will say that Amazon probably helps us in the rankings more potentially for New York Times bestseller list and Amazon.
Matt Reynolds:But man, I would just be honored.
Matt Reynolds:It's not really about that stuff.
Matt Reynolds:It's about, I hope you read the book and it changes your life.
Matt Reynolds:If it does and it makes an impact, please reach out to me.
Matt Reynolds:I'm Mr.
Matt Reynolds:Reynolds, Barbell hyphen logic.com Again, my email is really easy to find.
Matt Reynolds:If you just search Matt Reynolds at Barbell Logic on Google, my email will show up.
Matt Reynolds:If you send me an email, I will, I promise you I will respond if you read the book.
Matt Reynolds:Also, if you read the book and you love it, I would love a review because it helps on Amazon as well.
Matt Reynolds:Tremendously with the algorithm, which is just the game you have to play these days.
Matt Reynolds:Um, but if you don't love it, like don't leave a review or leave a one star review.
Matt Reynolds:If it sucks, like, it's okay.
Matt Reynolds:Like, just be honest.
Matt Reynolds:I'm not asking for, you know, non honest.
Matt Reynolds:Like be transparent.
Matt Reynolds:That's totally fine.
Matt Reynolds:Tell me what you love.
Matt Reynolds:Tell me what you didn't love.
Matt Reynolds:Would love to have feedback on it.
Matt Reynolds:The memoir is probably coming in a couple years, so I might have to sell the business before I get to the memoir.
Matt Reynolds:But the memoir is going to be nuts.
Matt Reynolds:And so, yes.
Matt Reynolds:Yeah, just imagine the Intro expanded about 15 chapters.
Matt Reynolds:It will be.
Matt Reynolds:But I think I have to tell that story at some point, like, the full.
Matt Reynolds:All the details of all the stuff, because it's just.
Matt Reynolds:It's crazy.
Matt Reynolds:And it's not all just sin and craziness, but just the craziness of owning business and, you know, times that you.
Matt Reynolds:You're, you know, you're running a business that's, like, worth a bunch of money, but you can't make payroll and you put, you know, $50,000 of your own money, which is pretty much all you have in your account, into the business checking account to make payroll.
Matt Reynolds:Like, there's so many stories like that that are just do or die moments that could have broken the business and could have killed the business entirely.
Matt Reynolds:That again, by God's grace, he's allowed us to thrive and just change a lot of people's lives for the better.
Matt Reynolds:And so I'm very grateful for sure, both to him and to great friends like you and the rest of my reformed community.
Matt Reynolds:So thank you so much for having me on the show.
Will Spencer:Amen.
Will Spencer:Thank you so much, Matt.
Matt Reynolds:Thanks, bro.
