Joshua Keith Craft

0:17 Testing. One, two, three. 1 2 3. We're doing this, man. We are doing this. We're recording the biggest uh Yeah. So, we're probably not going to release that other one, right? Okay. Yeah. Cuz I was like the wanderings of a madman. I was even kind of going like, "Dude, I don't know where we're at." You know, welcome to the insane asylum. I know. I was like I was like, "Wait, what are we doing here? What are we doing?" Yeah. Yeah. You ever just stop and like just ask yourself, uh, what am I even talking about? Yeah. I don't even know what I'm talking about or why we're doing That's like That's like my directional sense. We're just going to go for a walk. Like eventually we're going to come home and people are going to say, "What was the point of that walk?" That's what we don't know. We did it. Yeah. You got you got some exercise. I also could have gone to the gym and got exercise. We're practicing. Yeah, we're practicing. I mean, that's that's the that's a good thing. Anyway, welcome to welcome to episode 3. Oh, look look look at you, you know. Um, it's like the official start. Whenever you say welcome, that's how I know. It's like, oh, we better get serious. Yeah. Just so you know, me and Nick just sat on for an hour and did a podcast that'll never seem here because because we just we went down the rabbit hole and we were like, we both Yeah, we both ended that and it was like, what were we doing?

1:18 Yeah, that's probably not one for other people. So, we're learning, you know, but here's the here's the thing. I think uh welcome to the third episode. And what's so important about a third episode is uh I think you told me this or I learned this from somebody. 98% of podcasts don't make it past the third episode. So once we get to the fourth one, we'll have we'll have we'll be in the top 1% of podcast just based on volume. I don't think that's 100% true. I think the average podcast lasts six episodes. That's actually true. Okay. So we're still not there, dude. We're still we're still under average. We're below We're technically on episode four cuz we just did episode three, but that went straight to the can, right? So, this is going to be halfway to average. We're practicing, man. Yeah. Halfway to average. What a way to live. And I think but I think that's that's kind of to the to the premise of what we're talking about, what we wanted to talk about on this on this particular podcast is a lot of us treat life like a problem to solve. And it's like everything has to be right.

2:13 And I and like we were talking about that after we just sat and recorded this episode for an hour that we're never going to use. And that's all we're just practicing. like we're figuring out we're figuring out the flow of this and you're going to have you're going to have stuff like that and life's just kind of a messy thing, right? You know, and doing new things is a is a messy thing. Yeah. It's all it's all it's the joy of learning, right? I mean, but to the point I mean, you said this on a previous and you said Kerard Kirk guard Kerard. Yeah. You're coming up with stuff that I like you called me a uh what' you call me interlocutor. Yeah. I had a few people text me that and I was like I had to check and see if I caught that in Costa Rica or like what that actually meant and then I understood. So like I looked up thank you for chatting. be interlocutor, man. Yeah. Or as the as the young kids call it, chat. Like you're great at it. I mean, we announced the podcast this week to everybody. And uh you know, I'd always wanted to do that, but I think uh you're such a great like the the way that I wasn't fishing for compliments, man.

3:07 No, it's true though, man. I think the way that we the way that me and you talk, it's like, man, I I've wanted to do a podcast, but I know how important it is to have like the right conversational bounce it off. Yeah. And I love all the people in my life. I just don't think they can have conversations with me like you do cuz like what like what we're talking like me and you walk up to each other and we're like, "Hey man, how's it going? Everything go good in your week?" And then we end up in some Yeah. I tell you like two topical things. Well, I had this but this person said this thing on my car like, "Oh." And it's like hard left turn. Here we go. And then we both stand there and uh for like four like dude, even our home group like we talked to each other for like an hour and a half. I was like like R was like, "Who'd you talk to?" I'm like, "Josh." Yeah. And then everybody else nope. Then Courtney's like, "These people need to leave. Why are you still talking to neighbor? Like, too. We haven't finished this conversation. So, so picking up in the middle of our conversations is usually where we Exactly. I'm really grateful that you're that you're doing this making it better.

3:59 It's a good good excuse to spend more time with my friend. So, but like so are we experiencing life or are we trying to solve it? Man, I spent so much of my life trying to solve it. Like whenever I was uh you know depressed, the thought process was always like when I get to X or when I figure this out. For a lot of people it's money. Man, if I could just make a little bit more money or if I could make a like for me, I had a set amount. I thought that if I can make $150,000 everything else would be just incredible. That was like my number. I was like once I get there like in my mind I was like that's when I'm just going to take my foot off the gas cuz after that all the problems were taken care of. is actually how I thought like in my early 30s and you know I was living in Southern California so that was probably not a great number because San Diego is pretty expensive but that in my mind that made sense and so it was like if I can just get to this finish line it's like we're waiting for things to coast and like that's a very different if you're trying to solve it well once you solve it then what happens it's over whereas if you're trying to experience it well now what that means is that everything that comes and goes is like okay this is this is like the next thing there's a yeah there's a Haitian proverb that I love that says demon ginon and uh you speak Haitian as well. You're constantly surprising.

5:11 I just know what it says. It says behind these mountains are more mountains. Right. So, you know, uh the way life is is you solve a problem. Oh, there's there's the next one. Yeah. You know, you set an income goal, you get there, you're like, you know, it would be great if I made double this or triple this. Whatever whatever that is. Like you set a goal for, you know, people set physical goals. They say, I'm going to get to this fitness level. I'm going to find, you know, you know, it's like people go, I'm going to lose weight. And they lose a bunch of weight and they go, now I want to get jacked, you know, or I want to That's the nature of progress, isn't it? That's the nature of progress is there's always more. You know, there's always like another mountain to climb. There's always something else to do. And uh Kierkegaard said, we were talking about Kierkegaard cuz he said life is not a problem to be solved. It's a reality to experience, right? And Frank Herbert in the book Dune he he quotes that but then he says uh a process cannot be understood a process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join with it. We must flow with it. So the the the perspective you know Kierkegaard also said that life uh can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.

6:21 Yeah man ain't that the truth. So, so often, you know, we approach our life and we think, man, if I can just get to X. Yeah. Right. You know, whatever the problem is, we all have problems. So, whatever the problem is, if we could just get this problem solved, then, you know, we talked about happiness before on the podcast, but um if I can just get this problem solved, then I'll finally be happy. And and you know, we talked about happiness and joy last time about how the the joy is in the journey of it. Yeah. And so, God created life for us to live. He didn't create life as like a problem for us to solve, right? But if we if we go around I think if we go around treating life like a problem to solve, what we're trying to do is create certainty where really there's no certainty. Yeah. And you're speaking about like I'm kind of like digesting this as we're talking about it. But we talk you talked about how everybody has a philosophy of life. They just don't it's not very clearly defined and people have beliefs because they're living by them all the time. And you really what we hope from this podcast that people stop and take hold of their thinking a bit and kind of go wait a minute why do I do the things that I do because if you like us saying that life is not a problem to be solved but it's it's to be it's to be experienced sounds great but like like you said no I don't think people are going like yes I do believe life is a problem to be solved but a lot of people are living their lives that way without ever having clearly defined that belief because if you're if the belief is that things should be easy or I shouldn't have problems or you know your best day is when everything goes right for you and you don't and like if there's something that happens to your house you're like oh you know well do houses you know there's there's laws of nature there's like things are going to atrophy over time like you know that so why are you getting upset when this happens but people don't think they don't take hold of their thinking and go you know I'm a homeowner this is going to happen like most people get upset like I can't believe it happened and that's where we have to kind of go if it's something to be experienced and not to be solved you have a very different reaction to those to like that simple example I gave right yeah I mean I think the thing we have to admit is that the present and the future are just always cloudy.

8:21 Yeah. You know, you can't uh it's it's it's like the risks the risks that you and I are taking every day are not the risks that we're identifying and trying to mitigate, right? The risks that we're taking every day are the things we don't know about, right? You know, I mean that's that's what inherent risk is. Like if if people would have seen, you know, if you look at uh the economy, people can say, "Oh, we can predict crashes and we can predict what's going to happen with the economy." It's like, well, 1929 that wasn't true. 2008 that wasn't true. I mean, there were people that were saying it and you can watch the big short and all that stuff. But really, there's always some dude that's like, "This is going to happen." I mean, a broken clock's right twice a day. So, the crazy person is going to be right at some point, right? It's like if you're a conspiracy theorist for long enough, some of that's going to be true. Yeah. It doesn't mean every one of them's true, but you know, your odds of being right.

9:14 Yeah. It's going to happen eventually, then you write a book on it. Yeah. Maybe maybe 98% of what you believe isn't true and the two 2% is. So that doesn't confirm the other 98%. Right. Right. But that's how people think. They want that like, oh yeah, this guy said this. When you ask people like, "Well, who is this guy?" They're like, "Oh, he predicted this in 2016. What's he been doing for the last 9 years?" They want they want so much certainty about everything. I mean, when I was a kid growing up, right, it was like there was a book called the Bible code, and the Bible code was like you can there's a way of interpreting the Bible that predicts the whole future and the way everything's going to go. And and Da Vinci Code we Yeah. Well, it's like that, but you know, this guy was really serious. I mean, it wasn't, you know, the Da Vinci Code is a fictional I mean, I don't know, some people probably treat it as non-fiction now, but it's a fictional book, right? And but people are like all about that's a whole Yeah. Don't get sidetracked. Talk about Knights Templars and Masons and all that.

10:06 Yeah, I saw National Treasure as well, dude. It was awesome. You know that Nicholas Cage got to steal the Declaration of Yeah, Nicholas Cage is the future. Everybody knows that. So, so anyway, you know, people why why do people go down all these roads, right? The reason why people go down all these roads is because we really want certainty. Yeah. you know, and and saying life is a problem to be treating life like a problem to be solved is something that we all do because what we're trying to do is develop certainty. Like we have children and we want to make sure that our children are always safe. We have we marry somebody and we want to make sure that uh that marriage is always good or we want to make sure like in our in ourselves, we want to make sure we're always healthy. We want to make sure we're always, you know, in America, right, the country we live in, we want to make sure we're always free, that we always have these freedoms. We want to businesses want to grow forever. Every quarter is better than our last.

11:00 I mean, like you have companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's that are pretty saturated all over the world, but they're they're it's like we still have to experience to grow or die. Yeah. It's like, well, now you're now you're just at the point where the growth of your company is the growth of the human population because you're everywhere. Yeah. Put coke put Coke in baby bottles, you'll be fine. Yeah. I mean, that's you're just growing along with the next billion people that are going to be born because you're you're already everywhere. But there's such this thing of like I have to create certainty for myself and for the future because life is so uncertain. Yeah. And that's how we can treat things if we treat life like a problem to be solved. If I if I treat life like a problem to be solved, what I think is like what you're saying, what I think is is if I can just get this, this, this, and this sorted. Yeah. then I'm good. I'm finally good. And what what we realize throughout life is you aren't really you're going to solve this problem over here, but then there's going to be this problem over here that is going to pop up that you didn't even know was going to be a problem. You know, I think it's like I have three kids and every season has its own challenges that I got to figure out how to solve, right? Like when I was, you know, when my kids were like babies, it's like, oh, how are we going to, you know, navigate our life and have this kid that's, you know, just we got to change the diaper, we got to be here, we got to do this.

12:24 Well, then now my kids aren't even teenagers. My oldest is 8 years old now. It's like I'm navigating emotions with somebody how they feel at school. And we're just at the beginning of that journey. I mean, like a second grader. Yeah. But like, if if I treat life as a problem to solve, what's going to happen? It's like is it's like with your kids as soon as you solve the problem a new one shows up. Yeah. So, so what we actually have is a reality to experience like every day there's a there's just a flow to our life. Like uh La Su talks about this in the Tao the Tae Ching. The Taq Ching is uh the second most translated book in world history behind the Bible. Really? So yeah, eastern it's eastern philosophy and it's like where the yin-yang comes from and all. You're pulling out all the stuff. I'm I'm like I better go like learn philosophy as a hobby.

13:17 Yeah, but you're dude you referenced Haitian proverbs. Now we're like La Singh Kierkegaard. What about the Spanish the Spanish philosopher that said Pedro which means Yeah. It's like it means that you're always going to be looking for more knowledge. That's how I interpreted that. Yeah. See Oh man, we're I just wanted to Dude, you you're dropping all these. Okay, keep going. I just I had to, you know, so you could So the the thing with the towel, the interesting So the word towel means way. So he talks about this is the way to live is uh he talks about I've heard that before. He talks about life as a flow, right? And the idea of the tow is you should flow like water. So So not to be too like out there, but water the the flow of water is shaped by like think about a river or creek. It's shaped by all those all those rocks and everything that's in there, but then it also shapes those things over a period of time.

14:12 Yes. Very interesting. So there's this really interesting and and taloism is a really interesting philosophy. And uh so there's hang on just a second. Is that too loud? Okay, that's the fun. We'll just kind of cut there. That's okay. So talisoism is this really interesting philosophy that you know there's this other thought in Taoism. It's really interesting. It's called um we woo way. Okay, dude. Now you're just showing off. Way. No, I'm not. It's it's a it's a fundamental part of Taloism, which means do by not doing, doing, not doing, action, inaction. It's okay. Very weird. Yeah. But what the what the idea behind this is is that there's a flow to life and you flow with life, but also the way you live life kind of changes the things that you're flowing around. So people, for instance, are like rocks that when you're water, you allow yourself to move around those things. But then over time, you kind of shape those people.

15:09 And so zooming out of like all this deep philosophical stuff, there's externals and there's there's internals. There's stuff we can't control and there's stuff we can control. What a lot of people are trying to do, right, is if you treat life like a problem to be solved, you're always trying to fix external things. So, you're always saying to yourself, well, America needs to go this way, the economy needs to go this way, my kids need to end up this way, this needs to happen, that needs to happen. And you know, if you think about the things that give you the most anxiety, like all of us, all of us have anxiety and concerns and cares that we deal with. The things that cause anxiety are not things that we can control. Right? So, one of the ways to know that I'm not in control of something is if I have anxiety about it. If I have anxiety about something, it's pretty much a 100% sign I'm not in control of whatever that thing is. If I have anxiety about the safety of my children, the future of my company, what's going to happen uh in America, uh the economy, what that's all I'm trying I'm focusing on something I I can't control.

16:10 But you but you do have a part to play. parts cuz here's my question for that cuz like the one hand if if life's a problem to solve it sounds like you're trying to make everything adapt to be the way that you want it which is obviously a losing philosophy is what we're saying but there are things that you can affect cuz I also don't want to have like this is what's interesting about that water analogy you gave from uh Tiwangu uh Tiwatu was his dude it was his understudy okay you didn't know that I was reading books too but uh but you have many leather bound books yeah I do and my whole apartment smells up rich mahogany And I also don't have an apartment, but you know, if I did, but the uh but you know, there's so like because you have to influence some things, right? And so like, you know, I don't want to live with this like, well, you know, I'm just like a I'm like the forest gum feather blown in the wind. Like at some point you're like, no, I like I am here to make a difference. God's got a plan for my life.

17:02 And like I get that. That's where it's like really interesting because you're saying like the water flows, but it also shapes. So how do we know what we shape and what we flow? So, uh, well, like I said, I mean, one of the ways to know that you're not in control of something is if you have anxiety about it, right? So, um, what if I have anxiety about having anxiety because that's a real thing, then what what's happened is you've completely lost control of yourself. Okay, that's that's the death. So, so I've got to know what I can't control. But then what that does is that I don't just hang there. I don't go, "Okay, I can't control anything." in case what that's what a lot of people think that this stuff is about is like oh now I'll just drift through life right you know what you can't control and you don't focus on any of that you focus on what you can control right so there's levels to that it's like in the ancient in the ancient world like with the rise of Christianity in Rome uh no one voted yeah no kid for most of human history democracy hasn't been a thing right or republics whatever terminology we want to use for people participating in government.

18:03 Yeah. So the idea that you can participate in government of your school board, your city council, the the country that you live in, all of that is really new uh since the since really the founding of the American experiment 250 years ago, right? So for most of history, you have a king, you have an emperor, you have some person that is just they've just been put in place and they make all these decisions. really grasp that if you live in a country where you can vote and just be grateful for a second cuz that's that's a wild thing to think about. Yeah. And so it's not that you don't you don't control what you can. I mean our level of control society has gotten better and better over like history, but also it's having the right view of yourself in terms of um in the span of a whole entire presidential election. Okay, how much influence do I really personally have?

18:56 That doesn't mean I don't participate or don't do my thing, but that means that requires a lot of people heading in a certain direction and I can't control all those people. So the problem that like you know if you want to talk politics, especially an American in the west right now, the problem that a lot of people have is they they they think that uh everyone else is an idiot. So so we go, okay, I know all the truth. Both sides of the argument. Yeah. like say this, I know everything that's true. My job is to convince everybody else Yeah. of what I know to be true. And um there's there's a level of influence that we play with that and all that kind of stuff, but also the um and I don't just want to get into political stuff, but the idea that we exercise that level of control is cosmically and fundamentally like a little bit arrogant, right? Yeah.

19:51 Because the reason why we have anxiety, again, back to what I'm saying, the reason why we have anxiety is because even inside of ourselves, we know how much we can't control an outcome. Yeah. And no matter how much influence we have or whatever, you know, I can't control the outcome of events in my life that I think can really mess me up. Yeah. So, like for instance, when you know when we had our um our third our third child, Daisy, uh we're in the hospital and Daisy's born and all that stuff. And uh Courtney, my wife, she she she's bleeding and they she couldn't stop. They wouldn't stop bleeding. So, they had to take her back to emergency surgery. I mean, all this stuff. I don't know what's going on. These people aren't talking to me. And I'm just trying to be graphic in the story. It's like it's like a in this delivery room. It's like a war zone. There was blood everywhere.

20:41 Oh my goodness. Yeah. Right. So I have this baby barely cleaned off. I'm holding this baby. They all leave. I'm in this hospital room by myself. They just left you with They just left me. They took her to the operating room. Wow. They took Courtney didn't say anything to me. Took her to the operating room. We got to go right now. Take her to the operating room. And uh I'm just sitting there and of course man like I you know I the odds of a of a woman dying in childirth now in history are really small compared to history. But still there's a percentage there. So I'm like, man, this is crazy. And what what can I do? Yeah. You know what? That's that's where all the this is when your theology comes into real life. Yeah. That's where all the anxiety of like, what am I going to do? What can I do about Courtney? You know, is this is the day that she's going to die, then it's the day that she's going to die. And it's not that I'm just thinking that way, but here's here's where the thinking shifts for me because I think you have to train yourself to be this way.

21:33 Is okay, what can I control right now? Yeah. Like what can I do right now? Well, I can pray right now. I believe that uh God does miracles. I believe that God does all kinds of great stuff and he's he's ultimately in control of all the things I can't control. Yeah. But also, oh, I'm sitting here holding a baby and I've been sitting in this hospital room for 2 hours and she hasn't eaten yet. Yeah. So then I start walking around. I'm literally like I feel like I'm in 28 days later. Like I walk around this empty hospital. There's no one in here and I have to go find somebody to give me some formula and stuff. But that took my mind off of all the anxiety. So yeah, I see what you say. So So what most people do is or what a lot of people, let's not say most people, what a lot of people do is they ruminate on all the problems. Yeah. Right. So they treat life like a problem to solve, but then there's some problems in life you can't solve them. Yeah. They're just there and they exist, but that's not up to you to fix. And what people do is they ruminate on this stuff. They get overly focused on it and they lose complete control of themselves, which is like what you're saying about getting anxious about being anxious. Yeah. They lose complete control of themselves and they give they give control over to everything they can't control. And what what God has the assignment that God has given me is to control what I can control. So life is a reality to experience in that every day is going to have its own unique challenges.

22:50 Yeah. All the things I can't control, those create uncertainty for me. Yeah. Okay. And what a lot of people are trying to do is if you if you're trying to create certainty for yourself, you're trying to solve the problem. Yeah. And and I don't think so. Like I love that you said it's people trying to create certainty for themselves cuz here's what that looks like. An actual an actual thing, man. Like I thought this was going to happen and now it's looking like it's not going to happen. I'm going to go make it happen. And like and I'm going to sit there and I'm just going to like oh this guy said he was going to call me back and he's not calling me back. And like and you're sitting there and you're like you're just how do I get this guy to call me back? how do I get this guy? And like that sounds like, well, hey, you're solving the problem and you're doing what you know to do. But what it what it's boiled into is like an anxious need to like get this thing figured out, aka I need to have certainty on this. And what does this look like in everything in your in in your finances, right? In your with your kids. Like I just need to know that like little Johnny's going to grow up and be okay. Like, you know, I'll talk to people who have kids and like I just don't want my kids to grow up and be like this. And it's like, well, okay, you can look and learn some things and you can navigate some principles and come away with with a degree of certainty, but like there's always what what you here's here's the people that mess this up. Well, I knew this guy.

24:02 Parents were perfect, you know, perfect family, loved him, kid turned out to be a drug dealer and he's the head of the mafia now, right? Like I'm being facitious, but like there's always that's not a true story that we know of. No, not that we know, but there's always that person that has the story and like what do we do? It reinforces so much of our fears. What we never stop to do is go, hang on, perfect family says who, right? Like you don't actually investigate some of the details because this fear story has been fed to you and you already in an anxious state because you were trying to do it yourself and really solve the problem. And that's what certainty looks like is like it's like I can't approach God or I can't do anything else until this thing I I just if you would just do this then I'd be okay. And it's like that doesn't work. And that's what like so that's like when LA talks about uh being like water. It's you win with your mind, not your effort. So, we live in we live in western we live in the western world where you can just win by trying harder, right?

24:56 And um there's a lot to that. There's a lot to like the American ideal of um we're going to win because you can't kill us cuz we're unstoppable cuz we're going to do it no matter what. But then sometimes like your effort your effort like it's like trying to close a deal. You can you can push so hard that you come across as desperate and now the person doesn't want to do business with you. It's like it's like, you know, all due respect, it's like the people that drive around neighborhoods and sell solar panels to people. Oh man. It's like maybe it's maybe I would buy solar panels, but I don't want to buy them from you, dude. You're you're ridiculous how pushy you are. Right. Do you want some solar panels? Cuz I know a guy. No. Well, if he's No, I I'll connect to you afterwards. I'm just kidding. But like people are so they're so focused on create whatever that certainty is. Yeah. And so what do I what do I mean by you win with your mind, not your effort?

25:48 Yeah. Like what? Yeah. What does this look like that somebody should go, okay, this is what I could, this is how I could practice. The way a lot of people live life is they stand in front of a closed door and they beat their head against it and they think that if I just hit my head against it for long enough, like I'll open it. Yeah. Right. And the Bible says knock. Knock and the door will be opened unto you. But you know, so there's truth to like knocking at the door, but it doesn't say like with your head with your head and knock until your blood your your knuckles are bloody and you know, oh look, there's an open door over there. I'm not going to go through that one. I need this one to open. That's how a lot of people treat life is like they idealize everything. Yeah. So they they go to they they get married. They have this ideal of what marriage is and they think that this person who's a completely independent different person Yes. is going to fit into their little ideal box of what their marriage should be.

26:41 And then they lose it whenever this whole different person who has a completely different like life history, all that stuff doesn't fit into their little carefully curated box of what they think life should be. Yeah. And they treat that like a problem when really it's not a problem. It's just a reality to experience. Like you get married to somebody and you're marrying a completely different person than you. One of the things I I've seen in my own marriage, which I think is the most beautiful thing, man. It's like I I would hear people my whole life talk about, you know, it's two becoming one. And I thought when you got married, God did like this spiritual thing where all of a sudden you're like on the same page. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've been married for 11 years now, so I've learned from experience. 16, bro. I can tell you that. Yeah. No, but like one of the things that's so cool, man, is what God does over this period of time. Yeah. Completely is you work on each other. You iron sharp and iron, you flow with each other and you shape each other and you become one in how you process and how you think and how you flow. And it only gets it only when you when you treat and that that's that's I think the best way I have to think about it right now is when you treat life like a reality to experience, you're able to be grateful for that stuff cuz there's like a flow, man. Like Courtney's a completely different person than me. She cracks me up every day. Like the it it's it's just I'm so grateful that God gave her to me as a gift cuz our our relationship is exactly what I needed in my life to kind of like bounce off of. You know, I'm like Dr. Seuss said, now there's a doctor I can relate to.

28:11 Now you're speaking. Now we're talking philosophers I know. You know, he said he said, uh, we're all a little weird and sometimes life a life's a little weird and then we fall into mutual weirdness and we call it love. That like sums up your marriage, man. Knowing both of you guys, that's like I'm not going to call my wife weird, but I'm weird, bro. You just put it out on the internet. I'm weird and you have to be weird to be married, too. You guys are both weird. I love I love your weirdness. You guys are amazing. Bizarre. Yeah, man. It's great. But like that's what's so cool is that this mutual weirdness thing happens. So that only happens the beauty of that only happens when I don't treat my wife like she's a problem for me to solve. Right. And because but the underlying belief of this like you're saying is if life's if life's to be experienced not to be solved is that somebody has given her to you for a reason and that there's an author of of your story and it's not you.

29:04 And it's the same with your kids. Yeah. It's like my kids, you know, I could say here's what a craft kit is and here's how this functions and here's how this flows and here's who you're going to be. But like they're all these unique individual personalities that God's created with their own little in internal universe and world. You know that I'm given to not control that. I'm given to steward that and to help shape that. And my focus should be to help my kids maximize who God created them to be, not recreating them in my image. Yeah. Right. So if I treat So there's so many implications to treating life like a problem to solve because what I try to do is control the uncontrollable. Yeah. It's like it's like to use that example with kids. It's like when a person's like my kid's going to be a great athlete, but your kid's a horrible athlete. Yeah. Like it's not that your kid can't be a decent athlete, but they that might not have been the gift that God gave them.

29:59 But if you get so myopic and narrowly focused that this has to work out this way, then what you're saying is life is a problem to solve and here's how we here's how the problem's going to be solved. But you're not factoring in all the things you can't control as it relates to you can't control the gift the gifts and the talents and the abilities that God gave people outside of you. You can't control a person's own individual journey, even if they're your children. I mean, or your wife. I mean, gez. Yeah. You you you can't. So, like you you expand that into business or expand that into life. It's like you can't control the economy. You can't control what the market's going to do. But what you can control, so we're focusing a lot on that. So if I treat life like a reality to experience, then what I do is I understand that I like I said this a second ago with La Su, I win with my my mind, not my effort. And what that means to me is that I understand that my number one responsibility is to control what I can control. Well, what can I control? I can control my thoughts, my attitudes, and my actions.

31:00 Yeah. So, the decisions I make are led by my attitudes. My attitude is not how I feel. I don't I don't think an attitude is how you feel. I think an attitude is uh what you do with how you feel. Right. Right. So, if I feel sad, if I lean into that, uh then what I'm going to do with those feelings is those feelings are going to turn into actions and I'm going to act out of sadness. Yeah. So, uh works like an aviation. attitude is the direction that goes to the plane points. So, I can feel sad but not behave in a sad way, right? I can feel angry and not punch a hole in the wall. It It's so interesting that you say this, man, cuz this is such an unlock that you have to have at some point cuz I'm dealing with my 12-year-old right now and I'll just I I'm encouraging. I'm like, "Hey babe, you you know, you need to have a better attitude." And she's like, "You say that like I can just like I could just like I could just change." I'm like, "You really can." And I mean, that's William James. Look at me now. I get to quote some things. Father American psychology says one of the greatest uh foundings of our time is that we have the ability in any given circumstance to choose our attitude.

32:02 Yeah, man. Okay. That's that's when you start going, "Oh, the game's different." Yeah. And that's and that's that's existentialism. I mean, that's you have to you have to you have to not just believe, you have to know you have agency. Yeah. So what a lot of people do is so then the danger of treating life like a problem to be solved is some of these problems you can't solve and you just sit around and wait until they're fixed by some external force. Right. Right. So I've I've always approached it this way from like a practical perspective. So um if you're a stoic philosopher, Stoics believed that the logos logic governed the universe and that everything was going to work out for our good. Yeah. Right. That thought process came came before scripture. Yeah. So Romans 8:28, Paul kind of piggybacks on top of this thought process. So the belief is in stoicism especially that everything you can't control is going to work out for good. It's going to work out logically and what's logical is always the best thing. Um Paul piggybacks on this in scripture and he says in Romans 8:28, "God causes all things to work together for good of those that love God and are called according to his purpose." Well, we get to decide if we love God, but every person's called to his purpose.

33:17 Um, there's a bunch of theologians who are probably like, "That's not how it works." Well, you start your own podcast and you talk about it. I like those voices are in your head, though. Yeah. Well, I've lived my life with those voices around me. So, so the the question I've always had is if if God's going to work out all things together for my good, how come more things don't work out for my good? Yeah. Right. If all the things I can't control are going to work out for good for me, how thing how come more things haven't worked out for good in my life and the only thing I can look at because there's one of two things. Either it's external and I can't control it or it's internal and I can control it. So the only so if God works all things together for my good or even if you don't believe in God philosophically the the universe trends towards logic and everything's going to work out for your good. The only thing that stops that from happening is me not controlling what I can control very well.

34:13 Right? So I don't work things out for my good in my own life. Because your attitude stems from how you think. Yes. So that's that's winning your mind. That's winning the war with your mind, not with your effort. Because your effort So Jesus talked about how you should remove the log out of your own eye before you deal with the speck in someone else's eye. Our greatest problem is us. Yeah. So the external thing, the boss that you know unfair treatment, the teacher who doesn't like us, the the the friends, you know, with with your daughter, it's like the friends that mistreat you that you know, you get you have a decision to make as it relates to what you do with all that information that's coming in, right? So what a lot of people do is they go, "Okay, all this stuff needs to get fixed because in order for me to be happy or or feel good about myself, all these external things have to go a certain way. Everybody has to like me.

35:13 No one no one has to ever misunderstand me. Everyone has blah blah blah blah blah." When really it's like if I win with my mind, what I understand is life is a reality for me to experience. There's going to be in the river of my life, there's going to be big rocks and there's going to be small rocks. There's going to be people I can work with. There's going to be people I can't work with. But there's always a way for me to win because what I can always do is I can change my thinking. And the biggest problem is always how I think about stuff. Like Epic Teta said, you're not um it's not events that disturb us. It's our opinions about events. And so the biggest problem that I have is my perspective. It's like is this good? Is this bad? Well, all that's just a matter of perspective. Or like if you say something like this should happen or this shouldn't happen. What you're doing is you're saying this is how external situations need to go and if I treat my life like a reality to experience I'm not constantly trying to solve it. But what I am doing is I'm not trying to solve the problems outside of me. I'm trying to solve the problems inside of me. Mhm.

36:14 So the question I ask myself whenever I go through something that I really don't like is why do I why do I why do I dislike this so much? Why do I feel so why do why does this make me feel the way it makes me feel? And then I'm able to sit and kind of like analyze that and go man like is that a is that because then if I can sit down and observe that in myself then what I can do is I can go is that the right response that I need to have. So that's that's the land of the plane moment right there is for people to take away is that they need to start asking like is you know why am I when you feel an emotion is like why am I feeling this is to get curious about what's underneath it is that that's what you're saying. Yeah. And that's and that's what we'll talk about more because that opens up like a whole can of worms. But the but the the main question is like are you treating life like a problem to be solved? Cuz one of the problems that we often have is looking at our life and thinking uh and and I'll end with that like looking at our life and thinking okay all this stuff I'm uncertain about all this stuff and I'm trying to create certainty where 10,000 years of human history say we can't be certain about the future for sure. Right?

37:21 We can barely be certain about the present for sure. Okay. So what can I be certain about? It doesn't mean certainty doesn't exist. But people who are certain about themselves don't need certainty from external things. So people that are certain about how they would respond. Yeah. Like if I'm certain about my core values, how I live, my approach to life, who I am in Christ, whatever, however you want to define that. When a person treats me wrong or a person says something mean to me or or or whatever, I'm not I'm certain about who I am independent of them. So that doesn't move me my needle. Yeah. One direction or the other because I don't need them to reinforce my level of certainty about myself. I already I already have that. That's that's you focusing on what you can control. I can be really certain about my thinking, my attitudes, and my actions. So, I can know no matter what happens to me, I'm going to work really hard to have a positive attitude. I I'm going to work really hard to think uh positively about this situation. I'm going to do as much as I can, no matter what the external event is. I'm going to do as much as I can to do the right thing.

38:37 Yeah. So what people do is they they they'll they because they treat life like a problem to be solved and they get focused on externals. They'll go, "Well, this person treated me this way, so then I'm going to respond." Yeah. I'm going to respond in kind. And that's just never like a winning strategy. And so you have to instead of spending our life, so when you spend your life treating when you spend your time treating life like a problem to be solved, you're trying to become certain about things you'll never be certain about. But when you treat your life like a reality to experience, what you do is you look at all the experiences in your life and you can become certain about yourself, certain about what you believe, certain about your approach to life. And if you're certain about those things, then what you're certain about is in the midst of all the uncertainty, you know how you would respond, right? So with my kids, yeah, like when they exper they're going to one of the truths of you have this this uh so Charlie's in in second grade and uh she's at this point where like kids are being mean to her, you know, and they're really sweet and stuff. So they're they're they're being they're being mean to her, but they're not I wouldn't call them bullies.

39:47 So my my conversation with Charlie is different in that okay, people are going to be mean to you. They're going to mistreat you, but what are you going to do about it? Yeah. So what are you going to do about it in yourself? Is that going to become something that you start to look at yourself this way or you like you allow the external thing because that's the danger is allowing the external thing to define the internal thing so we can't solve the problem so now my life will never be right. Yeah. Or I get on the side of life that says you know what I'm experiencing this. This is going to shape me but also I'm going to shape my life through how I how I think be and do or my thoughts, attitudes and actions. And that's what we're going to talk more about. Well, I look forward to talking to you again. Thank you for listening to The Dialog. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And also, if you think someone else would enjoy this, please send it to them. If you want to get in touch or learn more about me, what I think, speak, and write, you can go to joshuacraft.com.

40:41 Or you can also follow Nick and I on Instagram. Our handles are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.