Transcription
How do you stay tethered to groundedness? Like, how do you keep what's important, the most important, front and center?
So, you know, something that's happened recently in the news in the last few days that is powerful, and I think it gets treated with too much lightness and like it's just clickbait. But the CEO of a company got caught on camera at a concert. Oh, yeah. With a woman that wasn't his wife. And what I thought about that is the tragedy of that. I mean, everybody thinks it's kind of funny 'cause it's commented on and it's all over the internet, but I just thought about how your faith, your marriage, your family, no leader can make their leadership more important than that. And it is so tempting. The world is going to try to draw you into worldliness.
And I, I just know that if you're not grounded, and I mean, I used to come home from speeches and I'd walk in the door and the first thing people would say is, "Casey needs help with his algebra." And the dog threw up on the carpet. And I thought, okay, these people don't care if I just gave a speech to people, and they don't care how many books I've sold, and that is such a good thing. And so it's really interesting how losing sight of what's really important. I feel so bad for that man and his family, that CEO, because no one ever is glad that they lost sight of what's most important.
And so, so to me, this is just one of those things that by the grace of God, He's protected me, and I'm glad. But man, I just want to tell leaders, never think that your reputation or your accomplishments. And when you know God, and you know, you know, humility is there is a God, and I'm not Him. So how can I think I'm special? Without that, um, I was thinking about this. There's a saying. St. Augustine said, "If you have God and you have nothing else, you have everything." Yeah. And if you have everything in the world and not God, you have nothing. That will keep you grounded. So for me, I don't know. I, that wasn't very eloquent. There were all lots of points in there, but I just, that's kind of how I feel about the groundedness thing.
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I was in the early 80s. I was about 37, 35. I saw successful people mess their life up. And I was, I, I was starting to get a little, not a lot, but books were starting to sell. Things were going good. And one day I thought, well, what's going to keep me from doing something stupid? And I decided that I needed to develop a personal definition of success. 'Cause here's what I found. If you don't personally know what success is to you, the world will tell you what it is. Trust me, you'll be regurgitating what they've given you. So, it took me about six months to kind of say, okay, get a personal definition of success, and I worked on it, and I have one, and I've had it for 50 years, and it's good for me. I'm not saying it should be yours at all. It's my personal definition. I really not asking you to agree with me, but it works for me.
My, my personal definition of success is very simple. Those who know me the best love and respect me the most. That's success. Those who know me the best. I mean, they know my strengths. They know my weaknesses. They know what I do well. They know what I don't do well. They've watched me do all my screwy stuff. Those who know me the best love and respect the most. Let me flip that. There's something wrong with me if those who don't know me well like me better than those who do know me well. But it all began out of that personal definition. When I found that for myself, what I discovered was, okay, I got it now. The standing ovations, that's nice. Doesn't really matter. Those people don't know me. They just heard a talk. When my family gives me a standing ovation, regardless of who I am, that's a bigger deal.
I have the benefit of having become wealthy in my 20s and losing everything I own. And in the process of that, meeting God on the way up, getting to know Him on the way down. And so I got this wonderful reset about what's real and what's important that most people don't have. It's an unfair advantage because I, I, I was the guy in the other day in that first chapter that cared tremendously what the audience thought. There wasn't an audience, but what other people thought. Yeah. I needed somehow the affirmation of so the cars or the Rolexes or the whatever I was trying to do, trying to play that game. And, um, then not only did I go broke, but I was also broken in the process. And so, and that's the key, isn't it, Dave? Yeah, it is. The going broke is a terrible thing to happen to you, but being broken is a wonderful thing to happen to you. There you go. Met God on the way up. Got to know Him on the way down. That's it.
And so it's, um, that did away with, um, to some extent, sometimes a negative point too far, but most of the time it's a positive. It did away with, uh, what the Bible calls fear of man, the need to please, the need to please. And so I just don't care what you think. It's, it's awful, you know? I mean, it's awful, Dave. I've, it's like, wanted your, some Ramsey personalities will read some of the comments after the YouTube or something, and it's like, if you read comments after stuff, you know why some species eat their young. I mean, some of the dumbest human, some of these people's parents are cousins, they don't, they live in their mother's basement. I don't, I don't, you don't need to read these comments. That's not customer feedback, this is trolling. And so my customer feedback's one thing. You are a soulmate. I 100%. They'll read. Surprised how little we care. Yeah. The amount of calories I have burned writing a comment on someone else's work is precisely zero. So it's just, I don't have time. I got work to do. So, but I'm building a wall. I cannot come down. I cannot come down.
But the, uh, I, and I, you know, I should care more about, to a degree, what people think. I mean, my wife's like, "Are you going to wear that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm actually going to wear this." No, I was just trying these clothes out, practicing them. I'm going to put them back on. Now you're going to tell me what to wear. But, but yeah, but, um, but I got, you know, I just, I gave up this need to please in an unhealthy way, and, and, and I'm self-admitting. I'm being honest right now. Probably sometimes even too far. I really, you know, somebody's angry at whatever, life goes on. It's just.
You know what makes you credible in that though is that you said, I mean, that you once had it, 'cause see, it's human nature. It's a fallen nature that makes us think we're supposed to please man. Yeah. But that's where the crash has come from, right? I'm trying to please someone else other than God. And so that, you know, when you just want to make sure the dog and the kids and the wife are happy, everybody's good, and that's all you care about, then all of a sudden, that's, I guess they call that grounded. I don't know.
I mean, you know, when I go to dinner with you and Sharon, and I go to dinner with you and Margaret, and you know, you guys are over at the house having dinner, you know, we're hanging out. We're friends, man. Absolutely. And it's not, there's not a, in there like somebody's, you know, nobody had to lay out some kind of red carpet thing or something. No. Oh, Pat's coming over. Oh my God. You know. No. And we don't have people in our house that have to do that. I don't want them over there. They bother me. No. It's so true.