It’s the little things that make all the difference.
Andy Andrews is the author of the book The Little Things: Why You Really Should Sweat the Small Stuff. His perspective may go against culture in a lot of ways, but it makes so much sense. I enjoyed interviewing Andy and hearing why he became so passionate about this idea and the difference implementing some of these concepts really does make in the life of a leader.
I’m giving away 5 copies of Andy Andrew’s new book, The Little Things. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for your free membership. If you’re already a member at Leadership & Development, then you’re already entered! Sign up by June 7 at 11:59pm CT. We’ll email you directly if you win.
Andy Andrews has accomplished much more than just writing this book. The past 9 college football national championship teams—Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Florida State, Auburn, and the University of Florida—have all used Andy Andrews books and/or strategies to maximize their performance. I think leaders can learn more than a little something from this remarkable coach of coaches.
He is also a bestselling novelist, speaker, and consultant for the world’s largest organizations. He’s one of our nation’s most sought after speakers and he has spoken at the request of four different United States presidents. Andy is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including two of our favorites, The Traveler’s Gift and The Noticer.
The U.S. Special Operations community and those in command of America’s most elite military personnel and intelligence agencies use Andy as an ongoing resource.
Companies and organizations—large ones and small—have more than doubled their results within a year after hiring Andy.
As a New York Times reporter said, “Andy Andrews has quietly become one of the most influential people in America.”
ZC – Zach Clark
AA – Andy Andrews
ZC: Thank you so much, Andy Andrews. I am honored to be able to introduce you to people that would be watching this video. Andy, for the half a dozen people that do not know who you are already, you are a best-selling novelist, speaker, and consultant for some of the worlds’ largest organizations. You have got multiple New York Times best-sellers including two of my favorites, The Traveler’s Gift and The Noticer.
We were just talking a little bit about the shocking influence that you have grown. I like what the New York Times reporter said, that you have quietly become one of the most influential people in America. I don’t know how you quietly become influential, especially when nine of the past football national teams have been directly influenced by your books, your teaching, and your work. It is just incredible. God has really positioned you, but also you are working very hard to make a big difference and that comes through in everything you do.
I am thrilled to be able to introduce you to the leaders that we serve, and thrilled to be able to have this time to dig into a lot of what, I think, is on your heart to share and teach, which is in your recent book. Thank you for being here today.
AA: I am honored, Zach. Thank you. I appreciate the time. I appreciate the opportunity to hang with you. The ‘quietly’ thing, you know, come on. It is like the last nine national championships, and ‘yes, and who is he?’, but that is quietly. It is just like when ‘The Traveler’s Gift’ came out in 2003, I think, a newspaper said it was the biggest book of the century. I’m thinking, it has been a very short century. I mean, I am honored to be here with you, and I think the ‘quietly’ thing comes from the fact that I work mostly with leaders. I coach the coaches, kind of thing.
ZC: Yes. That is where my heart is. Investing time in leaders and really helping people to see and realize that God is still doing impossible things in their lives, and desires to do impossible things through them, but we get in our own way, big time. I know you have got a lot to share about that.
I have to tell you that I was thinking this morning, and I don’t know why this came to be, but years ago, I think I was an early teenager at this point, there was a book that came out and it was a huge best-seller called ‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’. It is all small stuff and my mom got obsessed with this book, and in simplifying our life. She cut her hair shorter, she stopped making up the bed and all of these various things that the book suggests.
Your latest book is called ‘The Little Things – why you really should sweat the small stuff’. So, you have a completely alternate view, or I guess you are calling to question this so-called conventional wisdom of sweating the small stuff. So, I would love to hear why you are obsessed with this. Why have you gone to the trouble of writing this fantastic book about this?
AA: We have some time. So, I will give you a little bit of a longer answer than I gave Robin Roberts, last week. There is a very curious answer to this, especially for your audience, Zach. Really, a lot of it goes back to the the fact that I am kind of a nobody. I am not a celebrity. I don’t have a super-bowl ring. I don’t have a gold medal like the hero of some national disaster. I am a dad and a husband, and I work in this arena. There is only one way to differentiate myself and that is that I really have to have results. I mean, you could bring Paton Manning in, and Paton is awesome, but he can get by on just taking pictures of everybody and then everybody goes home and tells people he was there. That is worth a lot of money. I can’t get by on that. I have to have results.
When I started asking God years ago to help me find the things that would help other people. I asked God to help me understand some things that you want your people to understand, and give me simple ways to explain these complicated things that are
confusing your people. I began to find the answers in the opposite direction from where everyone else was looking. There is a biblical basis for this. It is the bible verse that says, ‘Don’t conform to the ways of the world’. So, by looking in the other direction I began to find incredible results.
I knew and needed results, in what we laughingly call ‘my career’, and I could not get by on regular results. I couldn’t get by on 17% growth or something like that. I had to have companies that were double and triple that to get any attention at all, or get any traction. So, two years ago I started working with a company that had been running for 19 years to get to 5.4 billion in business, and in the past two years they went to 11.4 billion in the first year and over 17 billion in the second year. I don’t know anything about their industry. It is just some little things that I found about the people part of it, about their focus part of it, and about their leadership part of it. So, these little bitty things become so incredibly important.
Now, for years, you talk about ‘not conforming to the ways of the world’ and so for years we have bought into this ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ thing. Most of us are drawn to
people who have the big picture, we want to promote people with the big picture, and we hire people with the big picture. Who do you want as the leader? You know, hire him because he really has the big picture, but a lot of times ‘big picture’ people seem to forget that there are little bitty things that have to be taken care of and understood, before this big picture can come into view.
You know, when Leonardo Da Vinci was creating the Mona Lisa his friends took him to task because he had chosen the smallest paintbrush available. Nobody ever used a paintbrush like this and his friends wondered what he was doing because you have got to sell this stuff and this will take forever. You can’t make a living doing that. He said, ‘I am creating a masterpiece’. Now, there have been a lot of masterpieces created, but I wonder how many of them were intentionally created. You know, before it was done, ‘I am creating a masterpiece’.
ZC: Yes, ‘This is my purpose’.
AA: Right. So, now we look and we know the Mona Lisa was a masterpiece. You can go and see it in the Louvre, and if you hold a magnifying glass up to the picture you can’t even discern individual brush strokes. It is of photographic quality, art historians say.
The point is that in your life, whatever you are creating, whether it is your business, your ministry, your family, or your very life, at the end of it all you have created a disaster or a masterpiece, either way it will have been done one tiny moment, and one tiny brush stroke at a time. So, to create a masterpiece one can’t just
visualize it and grab the biggest paintbrush and slap it out there really quickly. You can have the big picture and totally screw it all up. So, it is some individual little things that make a massive difference.
ZC: Yes. One of the things that I learned with a leader that I worked with side-be-side for years, that I share with others is very much in line with what you are saying. He would always say that having the vision is the easy part. Usually, because people don’t do anything to get the vision. Oftentimes, God gives that to them. This idea of where we are going, but it is all the little steps along the way, bringing all of these people along with you, that is the hard part and it is where the real work is.
You are right. We live in a culture now that is all about setting the goal, which is important. Know where you are going and be clear about creating a masterpiece is important, but the obsession with those smaller steps along the way. I am curious. Did you have a particular day, or moment in time that you can take me back to that you realized that this is something profound, that I am seeing with these companies and leaders, and I have got to get this down on paper? You have written multiple books, but not one, in my view that is quite like this one. This is a new level, a new step.
AA: This book, Zach, was written because six months ago I broke out into a cold sweat. That is why I wrote it. I will tell you the day that happened. I was in my office. I had just come off the phone with a football coach and I started jotting down some of the successes we have had with this material, with some businesses, some ministries, some football teams, with a world series baseball team, with some Rider Cup stuff – golfers. It was just all over the map with special operations with our military. I realized that the way we had done these things was not written down. It was all in my head. You know, I have a fourteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old, my wife and I have two boys, and I suddenly became aware that if I suddenly croak today my boys will grow up and never know how this happened. They are never going to know how to pull this off in their own lives because this is just as important for a family, an organization, or a church family as it is for a major corporation. So, that was when I started.
I called ‘The Robert D’ and said that I was putting some stuff aside, and I am about to dig in. You can publish it if you want, but I have to get it down. So, that is really what happened, but the actual pieces of that puzzle came in several different ways. A lot of them came as a result of the prayer that I pray every day which is, ‘God, help me to understand things that you want your people to understand, that if they did understand, they would live the lives that you want them to live, which means they would have a relationship with you, which means that when they are in trouble they wouldn’t go to ‘Oprah’ or the government, they would go to you. Give me simple ways to explain complicated things that are confusing your people’. The simple ways to explain things is a very important part of the process because most people, I have found, would rather stick with something that doesn’t work very well that they understand, instead of moving to something that will work incredibly that they don’t quite get.
ZC: Getting stretched like that, great.
AA: They have to understand it. One part of that came one day when I was in a hunting camp in the woods, my boys were out in the woods and I was inside writing. It was February. I heard a turkey gobble outside. Now, this is early for a turkey to be gobbling and I was excited. I wondered where the boys were and if they heard it. I’m thinking that I need to call Kev, my best friend. Then, I need to call Joe to because this is very early. We are all turkey hunters, we are all very excited, crazy people. I couldn’t find anybody. I suddenly realized. You know that old song ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’? I thought, I bet they aren’t singing, ‘What a friend we have in Andy’ because I am evidently not a very good friend. If Jesus is with me all of the time, and I am running all over the house and trying to find these people to tell, and I all of a sudden imagined ‘Jesus’ following behind me saying, ‘I am right here, you can tell me, if you want to’. I took that and started realizing something that is very profound. It is that most people, when we say we need to dig in and seek wisdom, just seek wisdom. That was the second thing in The Traveler’s Gift – to seek wisdom. Most people think about seeking wisdom through reading, being around wise people, being very intentional about the surroundings, and about what you allow yourself to watch. I am going to seek wisdom, but that is seeking knowledge.
We can read and grab knowledge. We can listen to other people and grab knowledge. The bible says several times that wisdom comes from God. It doesn’t say that most of the wisdom you will get in your life will come from God. It doesn’t say a lot of wisdom will come from God. It says, ‘wisdom comes from God’. So, if you look at what wisdom is, wisdom is a deep understanding of principles. All of the principles are God’s principles. You can understand how principles work. There are plenty of people who understand how principles work and there is a lot of knowledge out there about how to harness the power of a principle, but until you have a deep understanding, not just how a principle works, but a deep understanding as to why it works as it does. It is at that point that you can begin to harness the power in ways that other people don’t even see.
In different contexts and in other areas of your life that seem not to have any connection to what everybody else is using that principle for. So, if wisdom is a deep understanding of that principle that means that wisdom is a deep understanding of a knowledge. So, if wisdom comes from God, that means that a deep understanding of the knowledge that we gain comes from God. I realized that most of the time, all of the time, my entire life when I prayed, my prayers were timed and I would also pray during the day to thank the Lord for this, this day, thank you for being here in my life, thank you for your Son, Father. Now, I’m worried about this and if you could take care of this, and help me with this, and help me to understand this, or do this, and if you could please, or be with Joe because he is having a hard time, or be with Joe, or Father, thank you so much, guide us today and bless us, Amen. Now, let me get on with this email.
My point is that if God is my friend and God is with me all of the time, and I really desire something from God, I desire wisdom from God. Yet, I never showed up. So, I wonder, and I have had a lot of people in my life, just like you Zach, who come to me and say, ‘I need your help, I need to understand something, please help me with this, help me understand and do this’. They don’t want you to think about it. If you and I had somebody that came to us and said, ‘Listen, I am in a tough spot and I need some counsel, I need you to help me to understand, be with me and help me through this. Here is what I need, and I need this specifically, and I need to understand this specifically, so thank you very much’ and they walked out the door. You would go, ‘Okay!!’. Maybe a week later they come back and say, ‘I just want to remind you that I am needing some help here. and I haven’t got any answers at all. I really need your help and I would like to go over again what I need the help with. Please help me’, and then they say, ‘Thanks’ and walk out the door. You would wonder what is going on. So, I wonder how many times God has rolled his eyes at me when I have asked for understanding, and I have asked for wisdom, and just left the room.
I have found ‘Type A’ people, people who are trying to become better, people who are focused on improving, people that are focused on making more, and become more, and influencing more. We tend to think that we have got to use every moment and the more we work and peddle, the faster we will go. Yet, I have found, in a lot of cases, the opposite is true. There has to be a time.
I had somebody tell me that they meditated. Okay, I understand what you are saying, but you have got to understand that when meditation teachers teach you to meditate, they are teaching you to empty your mind. I am not talking about being quiet and emptying your mind. I am talking about being quiet and opening your mind. Allowing your mind to be directed, and allowing your mind to be movable.
So, I have a ton of answers because I have learned that during those quiet times to ask a ton of questions.
ZC: Yes. Well, I am so thankful that you had that burden come on you. Primarily, it sounds like it was motivated firstly with you boys, to take your advice to maybe stop or slow down a little bit on doing all of this stuff with these other corporations and leaders, and make sure that you have taken the time to write it down.
What you are sharing there is one of the big ideas that challenged me in reading this book. It is that, if wisdom is a person and I am seeking wisdom, and the big idea right now in culture is to know your ‘why’, and why you do what you do as an organization, but you are putting a finer point on it which is that if it is wisdom, understand why it works. The verse that came to my mind is, ‘let not the rich man boasts his riches and the strong boasts his strength’, and not boast in Alabama football – I think, is what it says.
AA: I don’t think is says football.
ZC: It should.
AA: You look at the nine national championships. If ‘nick’ wasn’t in there, it would not be that long of a string.
ZC: That is true, it would be a shorter string. So, ‘let he who boasts, boast in this that he knows and understand me’. He doesn’t just say, ‘know me’, but ‘understand’. I think, it is very easy to say, ‘Oh well, He is God, I don’t understand’, but you are really challenging me and anyone who reads this book to go a little bit deeper. Not just to understand why you do what you do, or why you are working to do these things, but to understand why these principles are true, and why they work. That is a totally different level. To me, that one idea, digging in that in the way that you guide the reader through is worth a whole book.
AA: There is a whole chapter in there on ‘A little thing called, why?’. As you know, people would normally see that and they normally think that the ‘why’ is because they want a big house, or I want to have more influence, I want to make more money, I want to make my family free. This is way beyond that. This is actual harnessable power. When you understand how you are supposed to use that, and you look at the enemies’ forces against us, it is shocking to see how most of us have that question knocked out of us as children. Our parents say, ‘Don’t ask me that anymore, don’t ask me anything, you are driving me crazy’. So, what happens is that as adults, we tend to only ask ‘why?’ when something is not working. You have got this line. Everybody is competing in the same way, and then all of a sudden there is a dip and we say, ‘why is this not working, why are we not having success here, why are Thursdays so low, what is going on here?’. Then, when we get the answer and we get back up to street level, we quit asking it.
The time for wisdom and understanding, the time when you want to ask God, ‘why?’, is when it is working because that is the only way you are going to double and triple your results. Not, why is this not, but to know ask, ‘why does this work like it does, why did we have that success on Thursday morning, why did the people respond in that way, why did that happen?’. Then, you can begin to understand, to have a deep understanding of the principle that is guiding their behavior, or the reaction, or whatever it is.
ZC: Now, one of the things I want to ask you about, as we are shifting. Okay, we are focusing on why something is working, and seeking wisdom and understanding, and then something is going to happen. That is going to begin if we are serious about this and it is going to change our perspective. I don’t want to share in the book because I wouldn’t do it justice, and the way you have put it in the book is far better than I could ever put it, but the idea here is, I think, that if reality or facts may be very fixed, our perspective of those can dramatically change what we are doing. I am curious. I know, you can talk a lot about what you have shared in the book, but I am curious about your own life and what are the disciplines and habits that you believe help you to gain that perspective, or apply this wisdom with that perspective?
AA: Okay. Well, this is in the book too, but the key about how you apply perspective, and what you said a minute ago is absolutely right, that perspective is the only thing that can totally change the results without changing a single fact.
ZC: Yes, it is so massive.
AA: Now, people think when they hear ‘perspective’, if you say what is perspective? Most people say it is how somebody sees something. It is how they see the glass. Is the glass half full, is the glass half empty? So, their perspective on it is how they see it and that is true, it is just not the truth.
So, one of the tiniest pitfalls that has the massive resonance in our lives is that we do not understand, most of us, that something can be true and not be the truth. The truth connotes the bottom line. That is the bottom line, the foundation. Many things can be true along the way.
If you took a blind person and say, ‘Okay, I know you have never heard of this animal but it is called an elephant. Just feel around for a minute and tell me what an elephant is like and what it can be used for’. A blind person may come back after five or six minutes and say, ‘Well, an elephant is very tall, it is very wide, it is flat, it could be used as a barrier, perhaps a gate, several elephants as a wall’. Well, it is true, it is not the truth. You know, until you get to the truth about an elephant, you are not going to have a complete picture, or have any idea of all of the many different uses an elephant can have, but you can stop right there and have a true picture, and a true use for it. You can stop right there, which is what most people do.
ZC: But, you are still missing the elephant.
AA: That is right. So, when we say that perspective is how somebody sees something, that is true, but it is just not the truth because the truth is the revelation about how you can harness it.
Here is what I am talking about. Knowing that perspective is the only thing that can totally change the results without changing any of the facts, think about that glass. One person sees it as half full, one person sees it as half empty, well the facts never change, the glass is what it is. We know that one person who sees this as half empty, if we look at the results of that life we know that the person is more likely to repel some people, they are less likely to get promoted, less likely to get hired because they have that glass ‘half empty’ view. You know, they are less likely to get opportunities because people just don’t want to be around them. There are opportunities out there but they just don’t hear them.
Now, there is the person who sees the glass as half full and those are the kind of people we are drawn to. We want to hire them. We want to promote them. That is who I want to lead this task, and because there are so many people around them, if there is an opportunity to be shared, or an idea that comes up, they hear it first because everybody is just swarming around them. So, the results of their life, because of their perspective, are totally different even though the facts remain the same.
Here is the key, perspective is not just how you see a thing, that is the truth. That is true, but the truth is that perspective is how you choose to see it. You choose. You choose to see it a certain way. I mean, it is your thinking that determines your choices. For years, we have heard that choices determine our destiny. You want to make sure your kids make good choices because their choices are going to determine where they end up. That is true, it is just not the truth because there is a foundation below choice. I mean, if choice is there and you tell somebody to make their choices, you might as well tell them to take this coin and flip heads every time. Right. Make a choice. If you have no idea where good choices come from or choices in general come from, what chance have you got there except flipping a coin.
If you understand that there is a foundation below choice and that foundation below choice is your thinking, it is your thinking that is the truth. That is the foundation. You can’t go any further down than your thinking and if you ever doubt that your thinking determines your choices, you have got to remember that every choice that you have ever make, and every choice that you will ever make in your life is totally determined by what you think and how long you think about it, what you thought about. Once you decide that you are not going to think about it because you cannot be distracted from thinking about what you have got to think about, so that you can decide and start thinking.
Now, here are two ways you can think. God’s greatest paradox our thinking determines our choices, but you have been given ‘free will’, and so you can choose how you think. You can choose it.
ZC: So, the self-leadership take-away for me as I listen to what you are saying, and it sounds like this is what you work really hard at in your own life, is making choices about what you think rather than just thinking about what choice you should make.
AA: Right. People will say, ‘How do you choose what you think?’. A lot of it is choosing. If you look at what things lead your thoughts. What are the things that get in there somewhere? Well, you have got to understand that you can choose how you think because you can choose what you read, and you can choose the people you will be around. You can choose what you watch. You can choose what you listen to, and maybe more importantly, you can choose what you will not watch, you can choose what you will not listen to, you can choose what you will not read, and who you will not be around.
When you choose those things, you are choosing. The video that will, or will not run in your head at moments that you don’t mean for it, it is our thinking. We are choosing to shape our thinking with choosing our life experiences.
ZC: I think too, that it is evident in our world today, that the choices that most people are making, and this is not a political statement because, I think, it holds true on both ends of the spectrum of political views or even moral views, people are more and more choosing to listen, or put their attention to people or media that is already just reinforcing what they already think.
AA: Right.
ZC: So, here is what I think, and the choices that I’m making are just reflecting a re-validation, a constant affirmation of what I already think, rather than, I am going to choose to put myself in some situations, or around some people that are going to shape me. We were talking about our mutual friend, and although for you he is far more significant a friend, for me he is a friend, The Robert D. The Robert D, is one of those people that, if I am going to be around him, he is going to encourage, he is going to affirm somethings, but if I am around him long enough he is going to say some things that shake me up a bit. He is going to say some things that stretch me, or that maybe I don’t even like. Then, I have to go back and say, ‘Where is wisdom here?’, right.
Let me ask you. I am trying to be respectful of your time, but let me ask you a question that, I think, is extremely important to the leaders that we serve, and this may be my only ever shot to ask you this question. I think you know, but if not, let me be the first to tell you that your ability to tell stories is superior, and I am assuming you weren’t a born story-teller, there may have been some innate talents there.
In our work with leaders is that we try to help them grow giving, we try to help them move things forward, and what we are really trying to help them do is to grow their
influence. So, here I am, talking to a superior story-teller, who has also ‘quietly’ become one of the most influential people in America, do you think there is a relationship between your story-telling ability and your ability to influence people, and what would you say to someone like me, or another leader who wants to grow that part of their toolkit?
AA: Okay. I am normally nervous about telling somebody to buy one of my books, but if you had to get one of my books it would be ‘The Little Things’ right now because that is my latest, and it has distilled everything I have learned.
I think, The Traveler’s Gift is valuable. I think, that is still my book that does the best, but I wrote that a number of years ago and one day I realized that a lot of the stuff that I am doing in those ‘seven decision seminars’, the vast majority of it, I learned after I wrote the book.
So, this latest book, you can get it anywhere, it is hardback and less than $10. It will
explain some stuff that most people do not understand, and if you don’t understand it you can’t possibly harness it. So, the story-telling and influence thing, and where that collides, ‘yes’, I think, that has a big part of it and I am very excited for you and the people who connect with you, Zach, because you understand influence. You talk about influence.
I hear a lot of people talking about leadership and what leadership is, but if you go to the bottom of the pool, to the truth about leadership, the essence of leadership is influence. That is what it is. The essence of leadership is influence. The essence of influence is agreement, not disagreement. This is why you can see the two different sides in the republicans and democrats, they yack at each other until Jesus comes. Have you ever seen anybody right in the middle of a conversation go, ‘You know what? You are right, I am on your side now’. That doesn’t ever happen because they are so conditioned to disagree.
What stories do, is stories touch people in a place that nobody has ever gotten into.
Stories find common ground and stories create influence. I will give you a perfect example. The other day I was somewhere and I did a podcast with a guy and it was live. I was in his city. We sat at the table and did this podcast, live. After it was over, his assistant gave me this bag of goodies and thanked me for being on the show. You know, as you travel around and speak, people give you that stuff a lot. You meet somebody and ask them if they would like the stuff because you can’t travel with all that stuff. If I want a bag of peanuts, I will go and buy them somewhere, but right now I want to give them to the ‘maid’ as it will make her happy, whatever.
So, they gave me this and I was just going to glance through it, and I hate to say it because I am not ungrateful, but you have that stuff. I give a lot of it away. There was this bag of coffee beans. It was just a black bag and it had a sticker on it with his show name. I thought it was cool, but I’m going to give it away. I flip it over and it said, ‘Four generations ago, in the hills of Guatemala, Lopez’s great-great-grandfather planted three coffee trees. Over the years…until now, only one thousand pounds of these coffee beans are produced every year and they are put into small batches and roasted in small, little things, and we bought all that was imported to the United States to give to our…and you will notice the so and so, and that is because the soil…in the mountain.
There was this whole story and I was like, ‘I am keeping this’. It was nothing in the world but the story made that valuable. To be honest, when I tasted it, if somebody had just given me and said, ‘Here’s a coffee’, but now I am thinking I can taste the hill. I do see that chocolatey thing coming through from the ground. The story influenced me so much and so the same is true that you can connect people, you can create influence with a story.
ZC: Yes. Well, you have done that in this book, over and over again. That is one of the things that I really loved about it. The first chapter is great. ‘Oh, ouch, I need to work on that’, then the second and on, it is story after story, principle after principle. I just wanted to share one of the things that struck me the most as we wrap up because it really goes to what we are saying about wisdom. You said: “Sadly, it is the wise voices among us that are being marginalized”
That is really why I wanted to ask you to take this time. I am so grateful that you did because the leaders that we serve are really going to resonate with that idea. They are trying to do meaningful work, really trying to lead people to think more deeply about how they invest their time and their energy, and their resources to do something meaningful, lasting, and eternal. I just want to thank you for that and do you have any final thought, or anything you would maybe say as a challenge, or a request, to a leader who might be watching this saying, ‘Yes, I want to do that, I don’t want to be marginalized by this crazy culture’?
AA: I think, the best thing that I could urge you to do is to dig into chapter thirteen because chapter thirteen is, ‘A little thing like change’. Our society has been wrong about change which is why everybody has a hard time with it. I want you, as leaders, to understand that everything you deal with hinges on this one understanding, and society has it wrong. If you understand how this really occurs and how you can help it along, how you can influence a change. You have got to understand that right now, if you have a teenager and there is a behavior that basically you want to change, there is a specific way that will happen. You have got somebody that you know, they don’t have a relationship with Christ and you would like them to have a relationship with Christ, what you need them to do is to change. How are you going to make that happen? How are you going to influence that? You have got people who do not come to choir practice like they ought to, or they don’t come to church like they ought to, they don’t participate in church. You want them to change. You want them to become people who do those things. There is a way other than nagging, and other than pointing things out. There is a way that you can influence that and that is my ground-breaking chapter. It has never been written anywhere else and so I would really urge people to dig into that because that will help you, tons.
ZC: That is so inspired and I am glad that you would point them to that because I literally have my finger in chapter thirteen as we have been talking this whole time, because of the importance of it. So, thank you for that. Again, the book is ‘The Little Things’, by Andy Andrews. It is available everywhere. I would also encourage you to check out Andy’s website, www.andyandrews.com. Also, you can contact me. We will actually be investing in some leaders by giving them this book so if you are interested in that let me know. Otherwise, go out and buy it. You will not be disappointed by the impact this will have on you if you seek wisdom as you are reading it.
Andy, thank you so much for this time. It is a huge privilege and honor, and I have been altered and changed through our interaction here today, and I’m sure that many others will be as well.
AA: Thank you for the time, I am honored to be here.
ZC: I appreciate it.