speaker-0: Life was not designed to be in confusion. Life was designed for us to be stewards of a relationship with the real God of the universe. Well admit that you're lost. That's a good place to start. Contentment is a learned experience.

speaker-1: Today's guest is Larry Onan. Larry is 82 years old, and he is the author of a new book called Intentional Living and Giving. He has spent more than 40 years helping people think about stewardship, generosity, and how to use what they have been given. In our conversation, we talk about how to find direction when life feels confusing by taking responsibility for what you have been given and choosing to live more intentionally. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Larry Onan. Larry Onan, thank you so much for being here.

speaker-0: So good to be with you today. Thank you and

speaker-1: Yeah, I've been looking forward to our conversation. So Larry, ⁓ I want to start with ⁓ kind of a personal question that I think will resonate with the listeners. But I'm twenty six years old now and I'm just beginning to take my relationship with God in a higher power more seriously. I wasn't raised with religion and I'm grateful for that because it gave me the opportunity to explore that part of myself and that part of my journey on my own and try a bunch of different things. But At this time, right, there's an endless amount of sources that I can turn to with opinions about what I should pursue and what a successful life should look like. But I think before we even get to that, like what should I do? ⁓ I think there's a more fundamental question to explore that I've heard you discuss in other podcasts. So, Larry, before I decide what I want to do with my life, what should I understand about what my life is for?

speaker-0: ⁓ you're asking a good question. And I liked what you were saying. You're 26. It was 26 when ⁓ life started getting a little bit more clear to me. I was actually a University of Colorado student in my early twenties when I was majoring in theater arts. And I went to a class one day and sat down and realized that 20 other people in the room were acting twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. They didn't know who they were. And I thought, do I really want to live the rest of my life not even knowing who I am? I became so good at the craft that I could put on characters and avoid who Larry O'Nan really was. And that was the University of Colorado experience. And when I went through that, I thought, you know, there must be something much more deeper. And I ⁓ got my act together. I ran into a couple of engineering students of all people and how you run into engineers as theater arts majors. That's a task in itself, but a different story. And those guys were so real in their personal faith that it really attracted me. And I sat down and I said, ⁓ now tell me exactly, are you real or is this just another way of fake living? And engineers didn't know how to be fake. They were just engineers. And I discovered they had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And it was just living out their life every day. One of them went into after they graduated, their both of their degrees took them into all kinds of places in the space world and whatnot. But I I realized these guys were real and I was the one that was fake and I was learning how to play the role. And it was a few years later. So at twenty-six I got married. So you're not quite there yet, but twenty-six is when I ended up marrying the my best friend. Although in that life experience, Ian ⁓ at forty-five years of marriage, she came down with a ghelioblastoma brain tumor, and eighteen months later changed addresses on me because she left this world and transferred to eternity. And ⁓ that was probably a difficult time, but one of the greatest times in my life because I grew a lot in the crisis of dealing with those kind of things. But ⁓ yeah, my my life was, you know, trying to figure out what purpose was in life. And ⁓ I'd learned that sometimes people think their purpose, you wake up and you got it. But I think if you start, you have to realize, first of all, that you're lost before you can be found. And ⁓ that's the first thing. So it's like I don't like where I'm at. That's what happened to me at the university. I didn't like who I was becoming and playing roles that I could pick up and try on and take off, but I didn't know Larry. So part of it is ⁓ come to grips with I don't like where this is going and I want to figure out the answer to get there. So number one is admit that you're lost and then get a roadmap. I live in Southern California yet, and so If I'm going to go to Dallas, Texas, I'm going to drive toward Phoenix, Arizona on Interstate 10. Or another alternative is Interstate 40 through Prescott, Arizona, and go east and go east and go east for two whole days. But if I decide I'm going to go to Seattle, I don't get on Interstate East. I go north on Interstate 5. And that's a choice that I make because I've got to decide if I want to be in Dallas or if I want to be in Seattle. And driving north on five is the slowest way to go to Dallas. You can get there by going from Dow from Seattle down Kerb and across the United States and end up in Dallas, but that is a stupid way to go. If you're deciding to go to Dallas, you don't go to say Seattle. And I think many people got to come to grips with life that says, I don't like what I see created for me. What is my purpose? And how did I end up here in the first place? The purpose, you know, I'll give you a spiritual perspective on purpose, Ian. And that is, I believe every one of us were created to be stewards. In fact, if I go back to the Old Testament, the first five books of the Old Testament are the law of the children of Israel, the Jewish people today either or very highly esteem ⁓ The third chapter in the book of Genesis talks about the creation of a couple of people. And they were they had given job descriptions back there. They were not given creation. God said to Adam and Eve, Take care of this stuff. Even name the animals. You've got the garden to live in. You are living in my property. Take good care of it. So in its one sense it was theirs, it was home, that's true. It was theirs, their abode. But God didn't turn over everything to them at that point. He gave them the privilege of Living in what he had created. And if you realize who you are, is you are a steward of God of the universe, and he puts you here to live a life that would manage the affairs of somebody else. Because a steward, by definition, is a manager, managing somebody else's affairs. So if you're an accountant, you're managing people's money and you're a steward of their money, but it's not yours. And you're being held accountable. And if they don't like how you're managing their money, they can make a change. Or if you're on an airplane flying from Wisconsin to see to Phoenix, you're gonna find some people called stewards and stewardesses inside of a cigar-shaped cocoon that you're gonna spin 30,000 feet up in the air. Their purpose there is not just to make you happy, but making you happy is very important. To keeping the plane on track and you don't go berserk up there. So they serve you stuff, they're watching stuff, they know far more about the airplane than they act. They're acting like waitresses and waiters. But that's not their job. Their job is to ensure that the plane gets where it belongs on behalf of United or whatever airline organization you might be flying on, Southwest. They're working for that company because they're stewards of that plane for a period of time. And when they walk into that plane as a as their task, they're taking over control and they're reporting to a guy up front in the cockpit. Because he's the ultimate boss of that particular flight. So that's a steward. That is what a steward does is takes care of somebody else's affairs. And when I woke up one day in in my early thirties and realized that I don't own anything. I don't own a house, I don't own a car, I don't own clothes. But I've been entrusted with all kinds of stuff. Now it's a question of how I'm choosing to manage what's been entrusted to me. So my experience in nonprofit worlds, and you know, you can tell by the white hair of my head, there's more years between us than you might think. I'm eighty two, incidentally. But I've had a lot of life experiences, and not all of them have been the fun experiences to live through. Going through the death of a spouse is not fun, but it can be a victory if you know why it's there. So, you know, even the the the downside of losing a spouse, it's not about me, it's about the bigger picture. I went through my job experience with nonprofit organizations. I would say I got fired three times from my job with very unexpected ⁓ solutions. I just was removed. They didn't call it firing, but basically you're out of this office and you can go find a new one. You know, that kind of experience. But every one of those experiences, I was being entrepreneurial in many respects, because what I was doing nobody had ever done before. And each time I picked up and said, What am I gonna do with what I've been handed today? And then I began to build off of that. So my life has been ups and downs and backs and forths, but When I realized I'm really a steward of everything that's been entrusted to me in that made a huge difference in my whole perspective of things.

speaker-1: So our life is here to be a steward of that in which is entrusted to us. So

speaker-0: And he and you, whether you like it or not, you're a steward. Either you're gonna be a good one or you're gonna be a lousy one. And ⁓ and the compensation for a lousy steward is you have probably less to deal with. Because God's not gonna waste resources and his ⁓ capacity on a person that's not doing a good job at being a steward. We are all stewards. You can't get away from that reality. You were here for a season to accomplish something. With a purpose of existence. And then we check out of this life. But the life doesn't stop just because we checked out, because we are eternal creatures. So there's something beyond the grave. That's why when I mentioned my wife, she changed addresses on me. That's all she did. Her spirit left a body. I watched it go. But in watching that go, all she did was move to a different home, a different place. So I think we got to realize that we are born for eternity in mind, and we've got a plan. We better get ready for what's coming. And that's what's that's what's fun about my entrepreneurial experience is every day's a new day. Every day is a new challenge. At eighty two, I'm still full of challenges.

speaker-1: Yeah. And you mentioned that being a a poor steward or a bad steward might actually end up being easier, right? Because God's not gonna entrust you with more things to to deal with or more things to steward. So it might be more challenging being a good steward in the sense that you have more to deal with or more that you're responsible for.

speaker-0: Some years ago in Phoenix, I met a guy. He was very generous with a nonprofit. And we were meeting because of his generosity in an area. And in the middle of our meeting, he said, You know, this is a pretty challenging job. He says, I've got resources to give that's not mine, and I've got to evaluate where it's gonna be used most wisely. And he said, That's not an easy task because he says it's easy to give it away and forget it, but it's a different dynamic when you know that you're stewarding somebody else's affairs and you're going to give that to somebody else to a steward. He said, it's not an easy task. I enjoy it a lot, but it's got its challenges to it. In Southern California and probably other places around the United States, you'll find people on off ramps begging for money. You can give a buck to them here and there and that relieves your conscience, but that's not helping solve the problem. So you throw a buck in there lap and you say, okay, they can go buy a cup of coffee. They'll probably go buy drugs or alcohol. And in Southern California, they disencourage that because they know there's a network of people that are working the off ramps. And when you collect money for an hour on the off ramp, if you do well, you're sharing a 20 to 30% with the manager that puts you on the off ramp. It's a money making scheme. So you've got to realize that even doing that, you may have released your guilt for a moment. But you may have had no impact on a person that needs help. Yeah. So it yeah, there is a responsibility, but the downside, if a person says, I don't want the responsibility of being a good steward, you're going to live a pretty depressed life because you were designed to be a good steward. And if you're not fulfilling your design, you're going to be frustrated, you're going to be feeling hopeless, you're going have no direction in life. You're going to be looking for alcohol and drugs to satisfy a longing in your heart. I think the great philosopher Pascal said there's a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and that vacuum can only be filled with a relationship with Jesus Christ. Now that's a great philosopher that's saying in my whole life, no matter what I tried to do to fill that hole, it can't be filled but one person. Okay, so we need to come to grips with that. That's an it I say, I will choose to. Think this way. I'm going to shift my gear and look carefully at the real solution. Now, you don't have to follow a solution. You can go wander all you want, but I find most people that wander aimlessly are pretty miserable people that are wandering aimlessly. So I'm not going to let you hook by just having an easy go by not being a good steward.

speaker-1: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think we all can kind of ⁓ maybe I'm just projecting myself, but I can definitely connect and relate to that idea of just wandering, right? Like last few years it's kind of been almost a recurring theme. I don't know, there's been moments of like real engagement, feeling really connected to the work that I'm doing, the things that I'm doing, but underlying it feels like there has been a void, there's something missing, there has been wandering. And I don't know, I'm new to this Yeah. Building a relationship with

speaker-0: But at least you're realizing you're right where I was and when I realized in that class that everybody in the room was acting twenty four hours a day, seven days. We were all good actors.

speaker-1: Yeah. What did you see when you saw like the when that struck you that everyone's being just a good actor? What what

speaker-0: What did you see? I thought, you know, nobody in this room knows what life is really all about. They're just playing a role. And they've become so good at it. And I started off, you know, I was in high school when I really got into theater. So I had five years of it by the time I woke up to this reality. But life was not on the stage. That was picking up a role for a couple of hours. And early on, I could step out of that character and go back to being Larry. But by the time I was a junior, I was realizing we had confused life so much by all the characters that we could play that we didn't even know ourselves. And that was just kind of a turning point of I don't want to live the rest of my life being confused by who Larry O'Nan is. And that was the first place that says, I want to take a look at an alternative. Now, the alternative, I love the results. I really gained a lot. I've got sixty years behind me now and all that kind of stuff.

speaker-1: Mm.

speaker-0: Life has been great. But at that particular point, all I knew is I don't want to stay on this track. Yeah. I thought that being in theater in New York or Hollywood or someplace in between was going to satisfy the heart emptiness. And that didn't satisfy anything. All that did was added one more character and I could play like I was a drunk and an empty person because I knew how to play that role, but I could turn around and play a really nice guy too.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: And so we don't have to live that way. Life was not designed to be in confusion. Life was designed for us to be stewards of a relationship with the real God of the universe. Not somebody just the higher power is a term we can sometimes casually use, but there is an infinite God that's ever in charge of every bit of this stuff. I thought it was interesting a couple of months ago, somebody asked Elon Musk about his journey of faith. His first comment was, I know one thing, this has got design behind it. Now, ⁓ for a long time it was, I just live and exist. But he was concluding at his own journey that design is critically at the foundation of everything. And the human body, everything about the universe, everything has got design. Who designed it? There is a designer. Now People take different routes and how they f try to figure out who that designer is. And some of them are useless and empty because even some of the great religious leaders of history said, I don't have this thing figured out yet. Only one said I've got the answers to all this. So, yes, we can follow the one that's got a plan, or we can follow others. That's a choice. What I did I spent 40 years consulting, helping people, but early on. In my experience, I was in a meeting. I'd been pretty successful in fund development, classic old fashioned fund development. And ⁓ I was new at it. I didn't know what I was doing. I started off with twenty-eight boxes of pledge cards from a major event in Dallas, Texas in nineteen seventy-two that were ninety days old from teenagers that many of them were making pledges for their parents. And I we didn't know this. And I was introduced to it that says, I got this problem. The guy that was the vice president of the organization. And I went to his office and he says, Maybe you can help me, but I don't know what to do. Come to my bathroom. Now, the bathroom was a converted hotel, so every hotel office wa had its own private bathroom. I walked into his bathroom with the meaning pulled back the shower curtain, and there were twenty eight boxes of pledge cards packed full from eighty five thousand students that were taken ninety days before. And he said, I don't know if there's any value to any of these, but they were shipped back to my office and I stored them here, and nobody wants to take on the task of figuring it out. Could you and your friend here take these boxes to a different room and see if we can fulfill a two million dollar commitment that these boxes represent? I didn't even know how to spell fund development then. All I did was haul 28 boxes of of Boxes out of a bathtub down the hall, and we started opening pledge cards and thought, what in the world do we get ourselves into? It's only two of us. Well, a year later we had exceeded the two million dollars of pledge commitments from those cards. We had done the right things. We had to figure it out from scratch. I mean, you talk about entrepreneurial going at it. Nobody cared what we were doing. Nobody even knew we were gonna be successful. It was a wing and a prayer if it ever was one. But we figured out how to use some technology. We were the first individual groups to ever use ⁓ computer technology to control list management and things of that nature. And it worked. And then there was another event that I did, and I had to raise $10.5 million in about 15, 18 months. And those two experiences were. Led me to a meeting that I didn't belong in. I was with the leadership of this organization, and they were hearing a presentation about raising tens of millions of dollars over a next decade. The consultant said, this could be done if you teach the people you're going to what's called lifestyle stewardship. And if you don't do that, you're going to create competition if you teach that. You're going to open up many, many, many more options of people giving. And everybody's going to thank you for it. But you got a choice. And they were insisting that we figure out how to do this. Well, the organization was saying, we don't want to start something new. That wasn't what we were all about. And somebody in the room, there was about 10 or 12 people there, and they said, you know, Larry's had some success in that. Let's assign that task over to figure out what lifestyle stewardship is to Larry. And all I remember to this day is I had a yellow pad that I'd walked into the room with and it'd written nothing on. And I wrote down, figure out what lifestyle stewardship is. And at the very bottom of the page, I said, Larry, Colonel you've got the freedom to fail. And I think sometimes we are so afraid of failure that we don't step out and take bold steps to accomplish something. And I was learning to fail because I had always seen it as a negative. And my mentor that was kind of my coach and direct report said, Larry, you've always got the freedom to fail. Nobody's ever done what we're asking you to do. And if it doesn't work, you can tweak it and try it again. Don't look at failure as a negative. I think many times we stop our potential of growth because we're afraid of the outcome that we project negatively on ourselves. Well, I was learning to see the freedom in failing. Because if it didn't work, I could tweak it, I could try something else, and it worked the next time and I made it better and I kept on fixing it. So that statement at the bottom really helped me. Well, about a month later, nobody had called me and asked me if I was making progress on my assignment. But I pulled four or five of the guys that were working with me together and I said, we need to figure out what they meant by lifestyle stewardship. Because if we know what that means, it might help us do a better job of what we're doing. And I was given the assignment, so let's figure it out. And we worked as a team. So even the content that we came up was team driven. I wouldn't say that I came up with all the principles. I the team worked on it together. And we came up with principles of what created a lifestyle stewardship. A person that chooses to live their life against these core principles. And it transformed what we were doing. We were raising more and more resources. People were no longer called donors, and that's a common term in the industry is the donors. Gotta get more donors. You gotta get donors for feeding children and everything else. I don't like the word donor. Now I can't erase it from a vocabulary of technology and whatnot, but I choose, and every place I go, I say we don't have donors in this organization. We have partners. Because a partner does this. A partner joins hands and he's equally as concerned about the outcome as the one that's needing the resources. So I want financial partners. I want people to utilize their stewardship to help us accomplish that goal, but they are equally owning the outcome. It's not just the full-time person that goes off on this mission. So if you're giving to an organization like Samaritan's Purse, they do a lot of help around the world for helping lots of people. The partners of Samaritan's Purse are Impacting people while they're making money in the United States and they're giving to ship goods to someplace else. And they're equally involved in the outcome of changing a person's life in Ethiopia or in the middle of a disastrous earthquake in Colombia or whatever the place is, because they are partners and they continue to give because they're seeing that kind of a relationship. And so I like to work with organizations and help people say this is a partnership.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: This is not about us extracting money from a person that doesn't want to give it. And it changed how we did things, but the core principles is what we came through in that particular period. And if a person understands those four key principles, then their life starts to transform and they become what I call authorized wealth distributors. They're authorized to give away what's been entrusted to them to others. So there there are five principles around what that is, but It's not so much that we came up with something new as we just put it together in a way that people could remember it. And I've spent forty five years of my life helping people become authorized wealth distributors. And ⁓ there's challenges to it. There's up days, there's down days. Right before our our visit today, I was talking with a guy that's the fund development director for a very significant ministry. And we were dealing with what does he do next? And how does he build vision and how does he engage the his partners? So there's tactics to this work. That the tactics is the how-tos. But the choice he was making is I want the people that give to my organization to be partners with us. I don't want to offend them. I don't want them to feel that that they are less than. Two hours earlier today, I talked to a guy in Dallas, Texas, and he's a young guy starting a new organization. And my question to him today, you're only starting, how many partners do you really have? And he admitted he's got six to eight right now. I said, starting in September, you need to be writing to them every month because they're equally involved in the ministry that you're trying to organize and create as you are. And if you don't write him and keep him informed, they're gonna have donor regret. Yeah. And they're gonna stop giving. But if you keep them involved as partners, twenty five years from now, they'll still be a partner with you. Because they are feeling equally involved with you. It's it's an ownership of of it's literally partners holding hands.

speaker-1: Yeah. That I Yeah. And I think that idea could be applied to a for profit business as well. Like something that we did in ⁓ in the first business that I was building without really knowing it, but it was a marketing agency and the first clients that we would get, we would always write like handwritten letters to, right? And just keep them engaged and keep them aware of our journey. Right. Like when you start a business, the first few clients that you're gonna get are taking a big bet on you, right? Like you're just you have no proof, you have no history of proven performance.

speaker-0: And you and they don't even know what you believe yet. Exactly.

speaker-1: Exactly. Yep. So if you can treat those early clients the same way that you're describing you should treat those early partners for a non profit, they'll be with you for experience.

speaker-0: And your mindset is that you are entrusted with something that I could utilize, but I'm not going to take it and become the owner of what you've got. I'm going to recognize that you d you have not given up your ownership. So you know, you if you have stockholders, I I'm I'm involved in a startup organization. I'll I could lose every dime I put into it. It may take five years before I see anything come out of it. If it happens, it will be multiple multiplication. If it doesn't, I've lost every dime. I mean it's can go either extreme. But the key thing is every month I'm getting something from them that's a little hint of what they're doing. I'm interested in reading it because they've got part of my investment over there working for them. And I'm hoping for the best outcome. I want to help more people. I love giving money away and I love Leveraging. But I don't know if that's going to happen. But I'm curious and interested because they are choosing to treat me this way. So whether you are an entrepreneur in business and you need stockholders to start the process or investment portfolio, don't look at them as somebody that I'm going to stick a needle in and extract blood.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: And then you're going to keep them informed forever because they are owning part of what you've got going. So that would be true there. It's right. And it w it anybody that's doing wise thinking is going to erase the word donor out of your mindset and start calling them partners. Yeah. And then you're going to think, what does a partner feel?

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: So a steward is number one, let me just give you real quickly, I'll give you five principles to it. Number one, it says God owns it all. So I may not know who God is. You're saying as I'm on a journey and I want to figure this out. Okay, I don't know who you are for certain. Reveal yourself to me. I really do want to understand who you are. Now, I believe there's a very personal relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ. So I've got a relationship with God because of what Jesus Christ did for me. But the point of it is he owns it all. I don't own anything. So my house, my car, my clothes, anything I have with the name of Larry O'Neill in the state of California is not mine. So I live in a place that I'm being entrusted to take care of a property at an address. I pay taxes on it because the state of California wants me to pay taxes and I'm obedient to the state. But it's not mine. So I don't live in a world of it's mine, it's mine, it's mine. I'll get it. If I can just get this away from you, I'm ahead of you. No, I'm saying it's not mine, it's not yours either. So I'm realizing that stewardship is there. Number two, when you look at God, he's a giver. When you look at the first book of in Genesis, you see that he was giving every day. Even if you argue with the way the creation occurred, it was God giving and Leon Musk's Design is there's a designer here. And he created all the universe that we don't even know how big the universe is. And he created everything that we've got here. So the mindset is, my gosh, he is a giver. And he told us that he wants us to do what he does. He wanted he made us in his image. Well, if he's a giver, then I need to be a giver. I need to learn how to be giving rather than taking. So there's a whole principle if I am choosing to be a giver. Third point of that is that I need to learn how to ask. So if you're an entrepreneur and you're going to get people involved, you've got to sit down and present to them an ask so that they can be involved with you. You know what happens if you don't ask? You don't receive. Yeah. So I was at a I was speaking at a men's breakfast some months ago, and I was picking up after the meeting, and there was about 40 men there. And they were dismissed and see you in the next month meeting, blah, blah, blah, you know, type of stuff. And ninety percent, ninety-five percent of the men got up and left the room. And two guys were picking up trash from table to table, getting things cleaned back up. And I thought, how sad that he didn't say at the end, Men, I'd like to ask you to help me do one thing. Before you leave here, would you help bust the tables, get the trash off, and in fifteen minutes we could all be out of here? If he would have asked, 90% of the men that left would have stayed around for 15 minutes and cleaned up. But we're dead creatures. And so if I don't ask God, which is what we call a prayer, that's talking to him, that you have access to talk to God. But that's a little bit spooky and kind of mystic and all this kind of stuff to many people. But then I also got to learn to ask other people. So I'm asking God for direction. I'm also asking you for help. So I need to learn how to ask because God is the one that created me that way. The next point is that God says, watch carefully the law of the harvest. The law of the harvest means you plant a seed and it takes time before the harvest comes in. And the harvest is always much greater than the seed that you plant. So there's time involved, and entrepreneurs need to realize that time is not against them, time is for them. And sometimes what we want to see happen quickly, and we are living in an instant gratification culture. I've had people say, I will never go to that drive-in again. It took me two minutes to get my food. Why? Because instant gratification was driving them not about the meal, but just about how fast they could drive through the drive-thru. That's a sad way to live because life is not instant gratification. In fact, if you and I are going to grow We're going to go through some pain to get there. We probably both been to the gym. And you we don't like to go to the gym because it takes a little bit of muscle tension to create muscle. Yeah, it's kind of like you've got to do that. You've got to go through that process and you've got to say, I'm going to push it to the limit so that I can benefit on the outcome. I don't like to go to the gym, but I like to walk and swim. So I've learned how to play. two yeah I can do two mile walks and I can swim three days a week. And I'm learning a different way, but I do know that that is what sustains my health at 82. Is what I eat and while I exercise is critical to the outcome that I want to see. I started swimming twenty some years ago. Three days a week at five AM I'm in the pool. Now does that mean I want to do that every single day? No. In fact a lot of times I would prefer just to sleep an extra hour. But I am going to be intentional on doing what it takes to see the results I want to see. The harvest. So the harvest is going to be out there. And if I do the right things, water, control the planting. I went on a trip to the Philippines. I was gone for three weeks, just came back last Sunday. But there's places in my yard that did not get the water they needed in three weeks of Southern California heat.

speaker-1: Harvest.

speaker-0: And I'm suffering the consequences of not getting the right water to that area during that particular time. Now, will I get it back out? Yes. By evening watering every day, well, going out with a hose, going through the routine, doing the right things. I've got some gophers I don't like. There's other things I've got to do. By in being intentional, I can conquer the issue. But if I don't be intentional, what's going to happen to my lawn area that went bad? It's gonna be a mess. It's gonna be a dry piece of desert. So even in my life, I've got to say if I'm gonna be intentional and I'm gonna be watching the harvest, I'm gonna be doing all the right things so that I hopefully will maximize a good harvest. Now, there's gonna be kind sometimes a disappointment on how much you get. There's gonna always life is full of disappointments. Life is full of confusion. Life is full of de of wondering what in the world's going to happen next. But those are the experiences that cause you to grow the most. This morning I was walking and I was listening to the last ten chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible. Now this is a very famous sequence about Joseph was a captive. He was a a prisoner in Egypt. And over a series of time he was seventeen years of age when he was taken captive by a A merchant train going into Egypt. And he became faithful in what he was doing, taking care of somebody else's household. He was a steward and he was faithful in doing that. At 30 years of age, he was he was assigned to be the second in command in the land of Egypt. Only person that reported any place else but him was him to the Pharaoh. And the children of Israel ended up eventually in Egypt because of him going to Egypt at age 30. He did not want to be in Egypt, he wanted to be in his homeland. He did not want to be separated from his parents, but he chose to make the best circumstances of where he was at at that time. And because he was faithful in doing the right things, regardless of his circumstances, he was rewarded by protecting the entire Israel population, the what we call the Israelites. Because they moved to Egypt at Pharaoh's invitation and moved into an area that is even now known as a very fertile part of Egypt called the land of Goshen. But he was thirty years of age when that happened, but he spent between seventeen and thirty some of the time in prison, and he was always, while he was in Egypt, a slave. He was never his own person. Even though he was the second in command in the country, he was still not his own person. His assignment was in seven years, create as much food as you can because there's a famine coming to our nation that's gonna wipe everybody in the central part of the un of the world there out. It was a massive regional famine. And in he had managed and stewarded the capacity to store enough grain for all of Egypt to live during the worst seven years of the famine. And the story is historic. Very famous and where it's stole, but you're watching a guy just be faithful in his bad circumstances. You know, we a lot of times do in bad circumstances is get up and leave in the middle of them and try to change the circumstances or take drugs or alcohol or change the environment or change a marriage or anything else because we are not living according to the law of the harvest. And it's only when you see those four things start to work. That you start to realize when God sees it, you're faithful in that he makes an abundant supply of what you need at the point of your need. So he's not going to make you rich. It doesn't mean prosperity does not have anything to do with money. It's an attitude of the heart. So you can prosper and not have very much, or you can have a lot and still be very, very poor. But you know, you take those five principles in and you start to put those together and say, if I choose to live according to those five principles. I can be an effective steward and I can grow regardless of the circumstances. There is a memory verse that I've memorized for some years. It was the Apostle Paul said it. It's in the New Testament, but he says, I've learned to be content in whatever circumstance I'm in. And contentment is a learned experience. You don't get contentment because you're just existing, it's because you're learning how to be content. So there's a choice. In the book I wrote called I called it intentional living and giving for a reason. It takes intentionality to live and give. So you mentioned to me as we were starting the conversation that you were going back to Phoenix. Well, that's an intentional decision. You made it also an intentional decision to leave the worst heat season of the last decade and get out of Phoenix during the hottest time when it was 120 degrees. But you made an intentional to go to another cooler place to some ways avoid the heat. Now you may have accomplished other things while you were there, but your intentionality puts you in another state rather than Phoenix, Arizona. Okay, we've got opportunities every day in our life to be intentional. How am I gonna wake up this morning? Am I gonna go swim at 5 a.m. or turn over and sleep for another hour? That's a decision. And I think. Many times the successful entrepreneur is the one who is being intentional on driving toward the goal of what he wants to accomplish. And in spiritual terms, it's the same way. I am getting up every morning with an intention of how can I be living a life that reflects my four my values of being an authorized wealth distributor. So I don't need to live in despair. I didn't live in despair.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: When my wife died of a brain surge, bra brain tumor. That doesn't say I didn't miss her. It doesn't say I don't miss her now. That's been eleven years and I still wish she was around. But I don't need to live in squalor of, ⁓ woe was me. I can say I can get up tomorrow morning and live against how-tos. One of the things that I discovered in my experience of entrepreneurship in my life is if it's not in writing, it does not exist. I learned that early on. So, you know, we got thoughts in our minds. I think I will go do X. And sometimes we pull it off. But many people are thinking in their mind, but they never activate on their thinking. And one of the things I learned, and I had people still do it even in the conversation I heard earlier today. Okay, you need to get this in writing. Let's talk next week. We talked ideas today in my coaching mentoring. And I'm going to have one more follow-up. With him next week because he's going to write down actions that what we did, and he's preparing for a high-level meeting the following week with his organization. So the meeting next week is really an accountability to see what he wrote down. Today it was ideas that were flowing back and forth. Ideas are cheap. Ideas are ideas. When you start to write, you become accountable to what you wrote. You also can edit what you write. Shortly after my wife died, I said, okay, I've got maybe 20 more years of life to live. What am I going to do with 20 years? And over a period of a day, I came up with 20 or 10 I wills. Now they're not spiritual things always. I mean, there's one or two that are, but I will have I will maintain good health. Okay, that's just a statement. Okay, what am I gonna do to do that? Because I wrote it down and I'm committed to my I wills, I'm gonna be careful what I eat and I'm gonna be exercising to to accomplish the lifestyle that I need to live as a person at eighty two years of age. I've got six grandkids. So one of my I wills is I will find a meaningful way twice a year to engage with every grandchild. One of them is eleven years old and one's twenty four. And I've got in the middle of there a eighteen year old Downs granddaughter. Now every kid is very different. And I've had to sit down and think, what can I do twice a year to meaningfully gauge with every one of them where they're at? And you do something different with a twenty four year old in Dallas that's married and an eleven year old that just started the sixth grade two days ago. So you you have to stop and think, I will intentionally engage with this child to where he knows grandpa really cares or she knows grandpa really cares. My biggest challenge is how do I engage correctly with the Downs child that has limitations? But I'm learning how to do that too. But at 18 years of age, she is the one that's my biggest challenge because I'm not always sure if I'm really engaging. But when you have those I wills, and I've edited them a couple of times in the last 11 years because I have that freedom. I can look at my I wills and say, I don't like that one. I'm going to change the wording on that one. But it keeps me focused on my outcome. So if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to start something new, what are the five things you're going to do every day this year to accomplish your goal? When it's in writing, you can put it on the mirror and say, Am I accomplishing it? And if I'm not, I'm probably starting to fail from my goal and my purpose. So I put it in writing, and then I I said, ideas are free, but boy, putting it in writing, and sometimes writing is the difficult part. I help organizations put together proposals. It's the hardest thing in the world to put a proposal that can be read in five minutes worth three million dollars. If you can't do that, you're not ready for the money. ⁓ but I got this great idea. Well, let's get into writing so that you can convince me in writing, and I can read it in two or three minutes. And if I see that you've got it all there, then I get over the emotional issue of I get more toward the feeling side of engaging. Other than that, I've got to think about the paper that you didn't give me. Life is full of discipline. My challenge is, man, how do you wake up every morning with intentionality to live a day that you're really proud of? Yeah. And I'm living a day against my purpose. And I w know what that is. I'm a lifestyle steward. I'm a authorized wealth distributor. I got a relationship with the king of the universe. I'm in pretty good shape. I've got there because I made choices to get there. You don't end up connecting with the universe by just Staring at the stars.

speaker-1: Yeah. Or you planted the seeds.

speaker-0: You you you've got to plant the seeds and let them grow. Somebody said, Well what do you do first? And I said, What do you do first? Well admit that you're lost. That's a good place to start. And once you know that then

speaker-1: Yeah. Humility have the humility to do so.

speaker-0: And that is tough one. That is really a tough one. Cause sometimes it's I am pretty good like I am, you know. But no, I kind of blown it here and I don't know where I'm going. So tell show me how I get where you want me to be. That's the beginning. And then the rest of this stuff falls into play. But I don't care if you're a leader of a large Christian organization, a humanitarian organization, an entrepreneur, a member of a church, or not a member of the church. These principles work any place. And when you abide by the principles, it's gonna bring you to the solutions that you want. And the reason I even wrote the book a couple of years ago, I was writing it for not guys like me, I was writing it for guys like you, Ian, because I thought this is something it's designed the book is actually at the advice of the publisher is the young generation wants to get right to the meat, and then they want some how-to's based stuff they agree on the meat. So the book is in two parts. And the first nine chapters is let's dig into what are the core principles behind being an authorized wealth distributor, being a steward. If you buy into that, then you're going to be curious about how do I live as an effective steward? And the next nine chapters are about how do I become an effective steward. So you can read half the book, and if you disagree with what I've said, you can throw away the book and Or give it to somebody else, put it put it in the goodwill or wherever you want to put it. But if you'd if you want to go further, it's got the roadmap and how to go from San Bernardino, California to Phoenix, Arizona and on to Dallas, Texas, because it will get you there. But those are choices we make. So choices, intentional living. Intentional giving. It my life has been a great a great run because of that kind of stuff.

speaker-1: Amazing. Yeah. I'm excited to get my copy. It's in the mail right now. So I'm ⁓ excited to get my hands on it. I think our conversation, you know, maybe covered those first nine chapters and I would love to have you back on again and we could maybe go through those second nine chapters and kinda get into more of the how to nitty gritty of things 'cause I think these conversations and I think you're totally you found a sweet spot 'cause I I know a lot of other guys my age and around my age and not even guys, but people my age and it feels like There's something missing for our generation and we're all kind of yearning for more direction, more things that are like real and that we can like really sink our teeth into because there is so much that's artificial and just fake and like digital and like ⁓ it's just like we're overwhelmed with all that stuff. So I'm excited for the impact that this ⁓ conversation will have on the audience and the listeners and your book will have more broadly on people of all generations. But I think before we ⁓ wrap things up, I got one final question for you. Recurring question I ask every guest. We'll get to that in a second. But I think if you could just kinda go back through and give us the five principles of being an authorized wealth distributor, I would appreciate that.

speaker-0: What you can do is draw yourself a five-pointed star. One of those points is that God owns it all. Number two, God wants me to give. He designed me to be a giver, not a taker. Number three, he wants me to ask him. He wants me to ask others. This is not hocus pocus in the sky hoping you're going to get an answer. It does come that way, but it but there's there there's two ways of giving. Number four, you follow the law of the harvest. And number five, you tap into God's abundant supply. Here's the illustration of that. Why would God ever give you an abundance if you wasted it all the time? Think of pouring yourself a cup of coffee. It's filled to the brim. And in your stupidity, you keep on pouring coffee into the cup that's already full. What God basically is doing with his economy, and he's got abundance. He's got the universe, got all kinds of stuff. He fills you to the brim and he's saying, What are you going to do with what I just gave you? And once you learn how to either consume it or give it to somebody else, I've got plenty more coffee, but I'm just not going to waste it on the floor. So as I become a giver, I have a resource that continues to fill my cup abundantly. I'm not talking about getting rich. I think sometimes we think abundance and prosperity all mean money, money, money, money. That is one expression of that. But I think God's prosperity and God's economy does not work just on money. Now he knew that money was valuable to us, but you know, money is one of a hundred things that you and I can give today. Money is the one thing that we can give that's tangible enough that we see it. We see it go out of our hands. Or we push a button and Zell takes it and pushes it someplace else. It does move around and we understand it because when I give you a listening ear, I can't see that. Or if I give you eye contact by putting away my phone and listening to you as a person, that's real giving. If I got my phone in front of me, I'm not really concentrating on you. It could be something in my house that you need. It could be other things, because if I don't own it, I need to be looking for where I put it. So, you know, even the abundance of what God can provide is not numerics and dollars and cents. It could be, well, Paul, I mentioned it already. Paul said, I've learned to be content. You know when he wrote those words? He was in prison in Rome writing to a twenty six year old kid that was leading the church in a place called Phil Philippi. And he was writing in the context of I've learned in despite my circumstance of being in prison. To be content in whatever circumstance. I've learned to live with much and I've learned to live with little. This is not a way to get rich quick. This is a way to to thrive in life. And sometimes it means riches, financial riches. There's nothing wrong with those. But if that is our goal in life, we got a pretty empty life to live. If that's all you're after, it's gonna go down pretty quickly.

speaker-1: For sure. So it's been recurring.

speaker-0: I encourage people, you know, if they want to get the book, they can go to Amazon or any any place that sells books can get the book. You can get it through LarryONAN.com. My website, I even have a little tool that's free for anybody to use. It's called the Stewardship Inventory. And it's 15 questions and you evaluate yourself on how am I doing in this fifth these 15 categories? And you just give yourself a grade. And then as a result of you grading yourself, I give you feedback on where you're at and what to do next. But it's a free source that just says, man, this may help me know where to step take the next step. Now the book is gonna be a guidebook, so it's gonna help per person take practical steps. And I'm glad you got one ordered. But it really is just following the map to get where you need to be. Purpose is around the corner when you decide you're really serious about going for purpose.

speaker-1: Yeah. Amazing. We'll have the links to your website, to the book on Amazon in the description. ⁓ go to his website, check out that tool. ⁓ if you're in that situation where you've crossed that bridge of recognizing that something's off, you need to change, you've had that moment of humility. Go check that tool out for sure. ⁓ I'm excited. I'll go test that out as well myself just to kind of see what it spits out. Love to tinker with it. But yeah, everything links in the description. Larry, my final question for you is a recurring question that I ask every guest. If you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for ten seconds with one message to the world, what would it say and why?

speaker-0: God loves you, give yourself away. Yeah. Now that you come to grips with that, now you can give yourself away because you got something to get.

speaker-1: Yeah. Everyone does. That's a good way. God loves you. Give yourself away. Yeah. Amazing. Larry, thank you so much for the time. Would love to have you back.

speaker-0: Well, any time let me know and we can have another visit.

speaker-1: Thank you for listening. My main takeaway from my conversation with Larry is the idea that purpose isn't something that you is less something that you need to find. And it's more about learning to take responsibility what each of us have been entrusted with. ⁓ so I've spent a lot of time assuming that purpose is something that I'm eventually just going to kind of figure out and find for myself. You know, obviously it's going to take an active search. But Larry's idea gave me a different way of looking about ⁓ thinking about it. Right. I can start by looking at what's already in front of me and asking whether or not I'm taking care of it well, right? Am I being a good steward? Am I being a good shepherd of what's already been entrusted with me? If you want to get connected with Larry Onan, you can find his links in the description of this episode, including the link to his new book, Intentional Living and Giving. If you run a coaching program, course, or mastermind and you want more of your clients to actually follow through and get results and get and kind of engage with the ideas that you teach, I put a free resource in the description that will help you get more execution support for your program. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.