An exceptional leader on hiring, journaling, and Bezalel
Jordan Raynor sits down with Luke LeFevre, Chief Creative Officer at Ramsey Solutions, to discuss how a copy of Called to Create at Goodwill led to their meeting, the importance of hiring mission-focused people, and why Luke so strongly recommends journaling to anyone looking to master the art of leadership.
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[00:00:04] JR: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their absolutely most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every single week, I'm hosting a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We’re talking about their path to mastery. We talk about their daily habits and routines, and perhaps most importantly, we’re talking about how their faith influences the work they do each day.
So we’ve been on a run of excellent episodes. Last week, we had Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis's stepson. This week is an exceptional episode with Luke LeFevre, the Chief Creative Officer at Ramsey Solutions. Yes, that's Dave Ramsey's company. Over the last year, Luke and I have gotten to know each other pretty well, and I’m just really impressed with him. He’s an exceptional leader, he has incredibly well-formed thoughts on faith and creativity, and he’s just a good dude, and he’s really fun to hang out with.
So in this episode, we talk about the crazy story about how Luke and I met, which involves somebody finding a copy of Called to Create at Goodwill. Incredibly humbling. We also talk about the importance of hiring mission-focused people, so in the hiring process looking for people who are all in on your mission. And we talked about why Luke says journaling is the one thing that he recommends for anybody looking to master the art of leadership.
I’ve thought about Luke's advice on this front so many times since we did this, since we had this conversation. I’ve started journaling as a result of it. So without further do, please enjoy this excellent conversation with my good friend, Luke LeFevre.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:53] JR: Luke LeFevre, my friend, how are you?
[00:01:55] LL: I’m good. I’m great. It’s good to talk to you.
[00:01:57] JR: Yeah. It's really good to talk to you. We were just talking about this crazy sprint of podcast interviews.
[00:02:02] LL: You’re brave.
[00:02:03] JR: That's one word for it.
[00:02:04] LL: You’re brave.
[00:02:04] JR: That's one word for it. Hey! We’ve been getting to know each other a little bit over the last six months, and I love – This sounds like a chick flick. I really love the way we met.
[00:02:14] LL: Me too. I do too.
[00:02:16] JR: I love the way we met.
[00:02:17] LL: Me too.
[00:02:17] JR: So can you tell that story to our listeners who have never heard this before?
[00:02:19] LL: I would love to. I would love to. I was looking for some of the notes that I had from that time. I was actually giving an update to the company about creative. As I was looking into some things I had been reading, I read about Bezalel in Exodus. That was probably two, three years ago that I read it. But it just was really profound. In this Bible I have, it says, Exodus 31, “The Lord spoke to Moses. See, I’ve called by name Bezalel, son of Uri, son of Hur from the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the divine spirit with ability, intelligence, and knowledge of every kind of craft to devise artistic designs.”
I have probably read that many times over the course of my life. But this Bible I had at the time, underneath in the little commentary it says, “The first person the Bible mentioned that is being filled with the spirit of God is an artist.” I was like, “What? How do I not know this?” It’s like, “How have I never learned this?”
[00:03:24] JR: You’re the chief creative officer of Ramsey Solutions.
[00:03:25] LL: Yes, right. How does the world of believing creatives – How are we not shouting about this from like, “Oh, no! The first person the Bible mentioned that is being filled with the spirit is an artist.” Okay.
So I was just sort of dumbfounded for months and I even – I think I wrote an article to the team a little bit and talked about it a little bit. Then I had a staff meeting update and I said that verse and I told the whole company about it. Then I think it was the next day. One of the designers on our team, he sends me a text and he says, “Hey, Luke! My wife is reading this book,” and he sends me pictures of some stuff highlighted, and it’s Bezalel. When I read the Scripture, I was Googling like crazy Bezalel. Nobody’s talking about it.
[00:04:10] JR: Nobody’s read about this. Yeah.
[00:04:11] LL: There’s no books. I found a book on Amazon, but it was like a self-published little pamphlet sort of thing. I bought it and I read it and I was like, “Oh, okay.” But then he sends me pictures of this book and he’s highlighting. It’s this thing, and he’s like, “Yeah. It’s about this guy. I don’t know. Jordan Raynor.” I hadn’t heard of it, and he said to me. He goes. “My wife was standing in the Goodwill.”
[00:04:30] JR: This is my favorite part of the story. This is the humbling part of the story. The book, a year and a half after launch, was in Goodwill already.
[00:04:37] LL: No. You know how when you go to a used CDs store, and they have all of Pearl Jam’s first album?
[00:04:42] JR: Yeah.
[00:04:43] LL: That means it’s sold a ton of copies. It’s actually a badge of honor. It’s a badge of honor.
[00:04:46] JR: Sure, yeah.
[00:04:47] LL: You will always find Automatic for the People.
[00:04:49] JR: Yeah, that’s true.
[00:04:49] LL: R.E.M.s and the [inaudible 00:04:50].
[00:04:50] JR: Yes. So this member of your team, his wife is at Goodwill.
[00:04:53] LL: She’s staring at – You know how you go to Goodwill, and there's just a vast, nasty, wrinkled books of old John Grisham things. She said – He told me that she prayed and asked God which one she should read. This teal book stood out to her, and she bought it and she was reading it, and he was telling her about the staff meeting and whatnot. She goes, “Oh, yeah!” So she was reading it, and then I was like, “That is awesome.” So someone has written about it, and I read it, and it really inspired me, and I read that part of it. I didn’t have the book yet. Then I sort of told the team about that and said, “Hey! There's book out there and this thing.” I just was like, “I should email this guy and just tell him good job at life.”
[00:05:38] JR: Good job!
[00:05:38] LL: I randomly – I just found your email somehow and sent you an email. I said, “Hey, man! This is really cool. It’s been an encouraging thing to see other people talking about.” I think that was it, and then we got on the phone, and you said that it was like when I emailed you was the Friday you –
[00:05:52] JR: Yes. So I'll pick up the story from here, because it was encouraging to you, but it was wildly encouraging to me. So March 1st of 2019 was my last day as CEO of Threshold 360, this venture that I have been running for two and half years. I transitioned to be chairman of the board and I think you sent me the email on like March 4th.
[00:06:12] LL: Yeah.
[00:06:14] JR: It was a book-long email. I'm like, “Oh, my gosh! I got this book-long email from the Chief Creative Officer of Ramsey Solutions, who I never heard from before.” So it was an incredible encouragement to me. Now, I was just talking to one of my buddies here, Casey Cox, who’s a director of marketing here at Ramsey Solutions. He’s like, “Oh, yeah! I was just walking down the hall and I saw your book on a bookshelf.” I’m like, “I love it.” It’s like made its way to the rounds here at Ramsey Solutions.
[00:06:35] LL: Very cool.
[00:06:37] JR: Hey! Back in October, we had Rachel Cruze on the show, Dave Ramsey's daughter. So I want to start here. I think most of the listeners of this podcast know who Dave is. They might not know what Ramsey Solutions does. They might not realize this place has a thousand employees, which is mind-boggling. How do you succinctly describe what Ramsey Solutions does?
[00:06:59] LL: Oh, man!
[00:07:01] JR: What do those thousand people do every day?
[00:07:03] LL: Man, I don't know what each one of them specifically does. Let me start with why I work here and what I want our company to be doing. I work here because in 2005 I fought with my wife and had one of the biggest fights we ever had, and it was about money. It was one of these big things, and I didn't know what to do. I just felt like we had no –
I was a designer, she was a teacher, and we made good money. This was 2005. We made good money for two people with no kids. But I was like, “Why don’t we have any money? I just want to go to Applebee's for dinner.” Like, “Why can’t we just – This isn’t that hard. Why don’t we have any money?” So one night, she was out and I just gathered up all the credit cards we had, and we had 9 or 10. I can’t remember the exact number but I added up the money, and it was $13,000.
Now, the people that call in the show, these are like – People got some big debts to overcome. So when I see 13 on credit card, I’m like looking back. I’m like, “You could knock that out. Do it.” But at the time, 13,000 was like a massive amount, and I had – I mean, when you couldn’t save 500 bucks a month. So I just was like, “We’re going to pay this off,” and I didn't know about Ramsey at that time. We’re going to pay this off, and I kind of went dictator on it. I was like, “We’re going to put our receipts in this bin at the end of every day and we’re going to enter them into QuickBooks and we’re going to pay this thing off.” We did it. We spent six, seven months and we knocked out the 13, and I was just very happy with us.
Overtime, we were just like, “Oh, okay!” In 2006, I had my first daughter. I grew up a believer. My parents were believers. I was a believer, but it wasn't yet like mine. So I was probably 26 at the time, and this pastor came to the church I was going to, and he – At the end of his talk, he just goes, “I dare you to ask God to rock your world.” I got a Bible and I added it to the stack of Bibles I already had. But this one was going to work. So I wrote a note in front of it and I said, “God, I dare you to rock my world. I look forward to seeing what happens.”
Looking back, I realize my wife and I were probably not on a trajectory of unity. We were kind of spreading apart. Overtime, he started to soften my heart in two nudges I got. One was about my work, and I was bellyaching and complaining about my work all the time up to that point. I got this nudge that was, “You know you have a pretty cool job.” I was a designer. I had my own office, I got to listen to music all the time, and I had friends, nothing against these professions, but that worked in factories, who were physical therapists, and they weren't – It wasn't me and I bellyached about it. He started to reshape my heart and say, “Hey! You know, this is pretty cool. Why don’t you embrace this work I've given you?”
The second one randomly was you should figure out what a 401(k) is. So I started Googling what is a 401(k) and I came across Dave's podcast. This ‘07 about, and I started listening. The combination of getting out of that credit card debt and then reading his book was he put words to what I felt in my gut and knew that weird feeling I had when I was signing the card note that I shouldn't do this. This isn’t right. Something’s off here. He gave me permission to do that, and once that happened I was hooked. I listened every day while I was designing, and I’ve worked here for 11 years and I've known about this stuff for 13. It’s transformed my life. It’s transformed my marriage. It's transfer my relationships.
So what does Ramsey Solutions do? They facilitate that story. I want every person here to do that. We do it through businesses in our SmartDollar program. We do it through our education team, getting into high school so that people don't have to go through that pain that I had, if we can just get to the root early. We do it through our consumer products in Financial Peace University and some new stuff we’re working on. So really the money side, that is what we do, and we give people hope.
Like I said, we facilitate that story through the money side. Then I also – For businesses, we have our entrée leadership brand. I think small businesses have some of the most impact in our entire country. If we can figure out how to help these small businesses who are just kind of good at a thing and all of a sudden they have 10 employees and they’re like, “I don’t know how to deal with people issue.” If we can help them transform their lives so that they transform the businesses, I think that will help transform America.
So facilitate that story that I just told you, bring them hope, and ultimately disrupt the culture. That's what I want to do.
[00:11:42] JR: I love it. That's a pretty darn good description of what the company does. I like putting that in that personal narrative form. What do you do as chief creative officer?
[00:11:53] LL: A lot of things.
[00:11:54] JR: A lot of meetings.
[00:11:55] LL: No. There are a lot of meetings, but they're good. Right now, what should we be doing in the future? Right now, I'm thinking a lot about documentaries. Okay, we put out a lot of great books. We put out a lot of podcasts. We put out a lot of YouTube videos. We put out a lot of live events. We do talk radio really good. Culture right now is on Netflix and Hulu. I’m like, “Okay. How can we teach and show millions of people what we found in that story that I just told you? How can we facilitate and teach them these principles? And what’s the best way to talk to the most people and show them that?”
I’m thinking about documentaries and I’m thinking about that kind of stuff. Also, that’s one big thing, and the next thing is what we’re calling our global branding. So we have a bunch of different things that go in here, and there is a potential for all of them to start to spread. The kids’ education product might not relate it all to the consumer product or the radio show or the anything. We need to make all that go together better.
So over this last couple of years, it has been just starting with, “Hey! Let’s just make all this go together better. I want when someone goes to a class, gets on every dollar, listens to the radio show, goes through a personal finance course to know that, ‘Oh! This is from that place that does that good stuff for me.’” Versus thinking it might even be a different company. So we’ve been working on our global branding, which is, “Hey! Let’s audit everything we put out, let's make some guidelines around what we want it to be, and then slowly work towards making it all go well together.”
[00:13:35] JR: You and I have talked about the brand a little bit. I think in a personality-driven company like Ramsey Solutions, trust is the currency. People trust Dave. Thus, Dave and team were able to introduce other products, which need their own brands for marketing purposes. But you have to kind of be able to pass that baton of trust in-between those [inaudible 00:14:01].
[00:14:01] LL: If Jordan says, “Hey, Luke! I want you to meet this friend of mine.” I’d be like, “Sweet! Let's talk.” If we as a company, and people trust us and trust Dave's advice, if Dave says, “Hey! Go trust this other person,” people will do it. So we really want to make sure everything we put out is a continuation of that trust.
[00:14:22] JR: How big is your team now?
[00:14:23] LL: The creative team is a round 130 people.
[00:14:25] JR: That’s a lot of people.
[00:14:26] LL: But that’s not just designers. It’s writers. It’s copy editors, copywriters, video team, designers, project managers, all of them.
[00:14:33] JR: So you guys have a lot of leadership content here at Ramsey Solutions. You don’t get to be chief creative officer at an organization this large with 130 people in your org chart without being an exceptional leader and being masterful with the craft of leadership. So a very broad question but I’m interested to see how you answer. What do world class leaders do that their less masterful counterparts don't? What's the delta there?
[00:15:01] LL: I can tell you what it has been and is for me. Two things come to mind. First is I have done my own work on myself. So how could I possibly lead a large team of people if I haven't learned to lead myself really well and learn to control my thoughts, learn to communicate with my wife really well? I’ve done the internal work that it takes to be able to take criticism, to be in tough conversations. That's the number one thing, and we can go into how I’ve done that if you like.
The second thing is I work to create a safe place for the people on my team to say what they're thinking.
[00:15:47] JR: How do you do that?
[00:15:48] LL: For example, I've got creative directors come in and I want them to feel like, “Hey! This is what I’ve been thinking about the last couple days, and it's not fully baked.” Here’s the whiteboard, and we’re just talking, and I'm thinking. I'm frustrated by this and then the other. If immediately I was like, “What? No.” If immediately I shut –
[00:16:05] JR: Come back to me when you have a memo.
[00:16:06] LL: Yeah. If I immediately just smack them in the face with pain, it’s just like when you touch a hot stove. You flinch. So if their thinking is way off, I want them to get it out and I’ll be like, “Okay. Either let me think about that for a minute or, boy, I got some hesitations here, and we need to just not do that.” I'll have that. But if I immediately just comment and, “What? Why are you even thinking that,” and make it a painful thing. Or if they are struggling through something.
We’re not machines, and so stuff goes on at home. Sometimes, you’re just more overwhelmed than not and you can’t explain it. Seasonals, stuff like that. So I want them to be able to tell me what's going on. So relationship with my leaders and then as much possible on the larger team as I can but a really good relationship with the direct reports where –
[00:16:57] JR: It goes back to trust. I mean, your – those relationships and caring about them as whole people, not just employees, establishes that trust in that relationship to be able to talk about those sort of things.
So you guys talk a lot in your entrée leadership content about how to get employees, so basically helping business get their employees to care about the business as much as they do. It’s like you guys have got to have some really good data about how big of a pain point this is. So I’m curious for you. Just within your team, just within your 130 people, how do you get them to care as much as you do, because, of course, you care? You’re on the operating board here at Ramsey Solutions, which helps run the company day to day, your chief creative officer. How do you get them to care as much as you do?
[00:17:42] LL: I try to hire people that already care a lot. So really, in the interview process, most of the time I say, “Hey! I'm not looking for the coolest creative. I'm looking for someone who is on fire for this mission, and it has transformed their life, and they want to help other people find it and they happen to be a really good writer or they happen to be a really good designer or they happen to be a really good video editor.”
So if I hire people that are already pumped about the mission, then it's us trying to go out there and disrupt the culture. I’m not having to convince them this is a good idea. They’re already on and it's like, “Okay. We’re going there. How can we get there farther?” I don't hire people who aren't on board with it.
[00:18:27] JR: Yeah. So it's very much mission first.
[00:18:29] LL: Yes, mission first.
[00:18:30] JR: Culture first. Skill set second.
[00:18:32] LL: Yeah.
[00:18:33] JR: You just built a heck of a company doing that. It seems like most teams kind of follow that model. It’s not just your team, right?
[00:18:39] LL: Yeah.
[00:18:40] JR: Yeah. That’s interesting. I know a lot of people who disagree with that advice.
[00:18:44] LL: Good for them.
[00:18:44] JR: Good for them. Good for them.
[00:18:45] LL: I mean, honestly, I don't win when I have made different choices or I've met people who have their own agenda, especially creatives. I love creatives. I want people to have an internal fire to create. But if it becomes about your personal vision over what we’re trying to do here at Ramsey, you’re not going to fit in. I’m just trying to be okay with that in the interview process and be very open with that. I want you bringing your vision here, not trying to get us to get on board with your creative vision.
Now, if you’re making a movie or you’re writing your own book, you should be, yes, cultivating that. But we have a very specific thing we’re doing here and that comes first. Bring your talents here. Love to have your talents here. But if I'm trying to struggle through you and you being annoyed that I'm not letting you just do whatever it is because you feel like it is your creative vision, that just doesn't work. It doesn’t work here.
[00:19:46] JR: Yeah, right. You guys have figured out a formula that works, so why change?
[00:19:50] LL: We’re trying to.
[00:19:51] JR: So as I’ve gotten to know you and some of the other members of the team here at Ramsey Solutions, I've been a little bit surprised by how missional you guys are. You guys are not very faith forward. You're not overtly evangelical. You don’t hide Dave's faith but you’re also not leading with it. Yet there is this very shared deeply kingdom-minded purpose to the company. Can you talk about that and your appreciation for that as an employee here?
[00:20:21] LL: Man, if we really believe that there is a Creator who is trying to create with us, we should be seeking him first in our lives, and he will manifest his creations through us. So here at Ramsey, I think as far as money goes, as far as business and leadership goes, I think everything that the American culture is going through our symptoms, and they’re like, “I have a money problem. I have a work problem,” if they’re on The Ken Coleman Show. Or, “I have a business problem and I can’t get my people to show up on time.” These are symptoms. They come to us for help with the symptom, and we help them with the symptom. At the same time, if you listen to Dave’s Show or Ken’s Show, all of our shows, we try to dig just below that surface layer what's really going on here.
I think if we help people get control of their money, they then are like, “Boy! My relationships need a little work here,” whether they're married or not. Maybe there's some other relationship there with their parents or something. They start to get their relationships better, and their marriage starts to get better, and they’re like, “Boy! I’ve got some work to do here.” Then they start looking inward and then they find out that all this was based off these biblical principles that have been around for thousands of years. Really, it’s the Word of God that leads them to be like, “Oh! This isn’t about all these things I've heard that Christianity is about. Wow! It actually worked. My life is transformed.”
[00:21:56] JR: It's an operating system for life.
[00:21:58] LL: Exactly.
[00:21:58] JR: So you bring them in to the company with this just with loving your neighbors as yourself.
[00:22:03] LL: Exactly.
[00:22:04] JR: I have this money problem.
[00:22:05] LL: This has helped me. You can deny anything. If I go up and ring someone’s doorbell and, “You should believe this.” Door salesman's another thing. Maybe it would work.
[00:22:15] JR: Will it?
[00:22:15] LL: Rarely. Yeah. I’ve never seen it work. Usually, when people come to my door, I’m like, “I just want it to stop.”
[00:22:21] JR: Please, stop. Please.
[00:22:23] LL: But if I start talking to my neighbor or the person at the restaurant or whatever and I start saying how this stuff has changed my life and I tell that story I told you at the beginning, how in 2006 I prayed this prayer and my life has been transformed over the last 14 years. How can someone deny the story? It’s based off of this, and I got up early and I started reading this Bible book and I tried to do what it said. How can you deny the story? So that's what we’re trying to do here.
Absolutely, the Bible is a foundation. I mean, there's a Bible in the foundation of this building. They buried one in the walls.
[00:23:00] JR: Really?
[00:23:00] LL: Before we built the building, yes. So it’s in the foundation, not hiding it. Even people called in. Dave read a letter from the stage I think the other day, and he’s like, “Yeah. You know, I came to the FPU class that I was in and I –” This was actually really helpful if you can just ignore the religious stuff. It’s not even overly religious in the class but it's like it worked, and this guy who was an adamant atheist started to be like, “Whoa! This actually helped, and we’re addressing things that I need help with.” He actually came to be a believer, and I think that's amazing.
[00:23:35] JR: Yeah. In business, I mean, this is what the show is all about. It’s what the podcast is all about is how business, how work in general can be this powerful means of, first and foremost, loving your neighbor as yourself to the ministry of excellence. When you're masterful at your craft as a leader, as an entrepreneur, as an author, as a janitor, you are winsome. You're attractive. People want to understand more. You're fulfilling Jesus's command to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
I do think it leads to very natural curiosity, because frankly mastery is rare. The ministry of excellence and loving your customers more than you love your bottom line is rare, exceedingly rare. Without Jesus as the core, that’s hard to pull off, right?
[00:24:22] LL: Yeah. It’s true.
[00:24:24] JR: I love that. So I got to ask you three questions before we close. I try to ask these if we have time for every guest. So I'm really curious. We really haven’t sat down and talk books. So I’m very excited to ask you this question. What books do you gift the most or recommend the most to others?
[00:24:43] LL: Oh, man! I could go lots of places.
[00:24:45] JR: Yeah. Go all those places.
[00:24:47 LL: Three that immediately come to my mind. The number one that I give away the most is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He was actually –
[00:24:53] JR: Second time that's been mentioned on the show.
[00:24:54] LL: He was in here the other day.
[00:24:56] JR: That’s awesome.
[00:24:56] LL: I got to meet him and talk to him.
[00:24:57] JR: That’s incredible.
[00:24:58] LL: Another one that I go to often and I gift is called The Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen.
[00:25:04] JR: I love him right now and I’ve never read that book.
[00:25:06] LL: Yeah. It’s these daily just little things you read. It’s not a long thing, but I do give it away quite a bit. I go to Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. That one was pretty profound to me.
[00:25:16] JR: Yeah. Me too.
[00:25:17] LL: Back in the day. There’s a story there. Do we have time for a story?
[00:25:20] JR: Yeah.
[00:25:20] LL: Okay. So I was reading, and this was 10 years ago. Someone gave it to me and it was – I was reading it, and it was profound. I get to the end of one of the chapters that after I was reading it, I was lying next to my wife and I'm just getting chills, because it was such an amazing chapter. I’m like, “Oh, my goodness! This is awesome.” I get to the end. At the end, the very last sentence says, “Yes, Luke. There are dragons. Here is how you slay them.” I was like, “Did I get a custom book? Did the guy who gave it to me gave me a special one? Is there a way to – How did he do this?” Because it was so awesome.
Then my name was in there and all that stuff. I'm looking around and I looked at Mandy and I’m like, “Is this real? What happened here?” Then I go back to the beginning of the chapter, and it starts with him in the mountains or something, walking with his son. His son, Luke, says, “Daddy, are there dragons?”
[00:26:16] JR: I love it.
[00:26:16] LL: So I was like, “Oh, well. That's great too but –” That’s great too but it was really written for this.
[00:26:21] JR: Any other books that you give away a lot?
[00:26:23] LL: The one I'm talking about all the time right now is called I Don't Want to Talk About It.
[00:26:27] JR: I don't know this.
[00:26:28] LL: It’s a ‘90s book about male depression but it’s really good, and how and why men medicate their covert depression through sometimes alcoholism, anger, achievement, and it’s really good.
[00:26:48] JR: Interesting. I Don't Want to Talk About It?
[00:26:50] LL: That's what it’s called.
[00:26:51] JR: It’s from the ‘90s?
[00:26:52] LL: Yeah.
[00:26:52] JR: You can still buy it. It’s probably not on Audible.
[00:26:55] LL: Somebody recommended it to me a little while ago, and I bought it, and it has been really cool.
[00:26:58] JR: Yeah. I have to check that out. All right. What one person would you most like to hear talk about this intersection of faith and work on this podcast?
[00:27:09] LL: My mind goes to Denzel Washington.
[00:27:13] JR: That's a fantastic answer.
[00:27:15] LL: I want someone who has made stuff the culture knows about and has alluded to being a believer. That’s who I’d want to hear from.
[00:27:27] JR: That's great. I feel like more recently, I thought I read something where he’s trying to be a little bit more forward about his faith publicly. That would be interesting.
[00:27:35] LL: I honestly feel like there are a lot of people in Hollywood that – And I love Hollywood. I love movies. I love it all and I don't think like I want movies to make me feel closer to God. Some of them do. They make me want to create. So I'd love to hear somebody who makes things that impact culture.
[00:27:55] JR: Are you familiar with this concept of thin places?
[00:27:59] LL: I’ve just recently heard about it.
[00:28:00] JR: Did you really?
[00:28:00] LL: Yes.
[00:28:01] JR: I was talking to this author of this book called God and Hamilton, a book of musical which sounds kitschy on the surface. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. It’s exceptionally well-written.
[00:28:12] LL: Remind me where the thin places was, because it was just within the last week or two.
[00:28:16] JR: In the book, he talked about going to see Hamilton for fun and he talks having this transcendent, like spiritual experience, and it being a thin place. He goes on to explain that in Celtic spiritual practices, they have this concept of we get to see into heaven here on earth in these moments of time, and art is like the ultimate usher into those thin places, which I love. I see a lot in Hollywood. Not a lot. It’s rare. I don't want to over publicize it. But like, “Yeah, it’s a thing. I love this.”
[00:28:46] LL: When you go to a concert or some movies some Sunday mornings, there are moments where you’re, “Oh! This is it.” Even sometimes in my morning times, I’m like, “How do I not leave this?”
[00:29:02] JR: I feel in those moments, it feels like stranger things. I think that’s the analogy.
[00:29:06] LL: Yeah. You just –
[00:29:06] JR: In the upside down, I see it for just a second. All right, last question. You’re a masterful leader. What one piece of advice would you give to somebody who like you is pursuing mastery of that craft?
[00:29:17] LL: You have to learn the, I don't know if I would call it art, the skill of journaling and writing out what it is you actually think. Not what you think people want to hear, not what you think your wife or husband or whatever. You have to get to a place where you’re writing what you actually think to God and giving yourself space to actually be quiet.
After you journal over years it takes to get through the cloud of chaos that are our minds, eventually you can get to a place where you can be quiet enough to listen. That’s where I think you say, “Okay, God. What are you thinking today? What are you feeling? What are you doing?” Then you start to capture.
[00:30:12] JR: I'm confident there’s a lot of wisdom in this. Actually, last night, I was thinking about this. I was like, “I don't sure know like almost. I don’t just sit and write down my thoughts unless I’m writing with a purpose, writing a chapter of a book or something like that.” I felt for years this need to do it, so I might just start.
[00:30:30] LL: Last night?
[00:30:31] JR: Yeah. Literally last night because I had three speaking engagements yesterday and I was exhausted. I was just like, “I can't hear myself think. There's way too much noise.” So, yeah, literally last night.
[00:30:42] LL: Sometimes just writing them out. Here's all the noise that seem so heavy and big. Once you write it out, it’s like, “Oh! It’s like three sentences.”
[00:30:50] JR: I love it. Luke, I just want to commend you for the work you're doing. Thank you for being an exceptional leader and serving your team through the ministry of excellence. Thank you for reviewing the character of our creative God. The God who put his spirit into – How do you pronounce Bezalel? Bezalel.
[00:31:07] LL: I don’t know. Bezalel. That’s what I think.
[00:31:08] JR: Bezalel?
[00:31:09] LL: Yeah, whatever. We’ll get some clarity on this. Spell like with the A and the E in the wrong place all the time.
[00:31:14] JR: Yeah. But thank you just so much for working to build a great company who loves your customers, who loves your neighbors, who loves your employees really well. Hey! If you want to see Luke's work and learn more about Ramsey Solutions and maybe joining his team, visit daveramsey.com. That’s a pretty easy URL to remember.
Luke, thanks so much for having me.
[00:31:31] LL: Thank you for having me. Thanks for what you’re doing.
[00:31:33] JR: Yeah.
[00:31:34] LL: This is really cool.
[00:31:34] JR: Thanks, man.
[00:31:35] LL: Smashing this together.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:31:37] JR: Now, I hope you guys see why I'm such a big Luke LeFevre fan. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. That was so, so, so deep, so much fun.
Hey! If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor. Make sure you subscribe to the Call to Mastery, so you never miss an episode. If you’re already subscribed, take 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever. Go review the podcast for me. That’s the number one thing you can do, other than telling your friends, to ensure that this content gets into the ears of more listeners. So thank you so much for listening to Call to Mastery. I’ll see you guys next week.
[END]