Master of One: Find and Focus on the Work You Were Created to Do - Hardcover

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Bestselling author Jordan Raynor helps Christians respond to the radical, biblical truth that their work matters for eternity. He does this through his books (The Creator in You, Redeeming Your Time, Master of One, and Called to Create), podcast (Mere Christians), and weekly devotional (The Word Before Work)—content that has served millions of Christ-followers in every country on earth. In addition to his writing, Jordan serves as the executive chairman of Threshold 360, a venture-backed tech startup which he previously ran as CEO following a string of successful ventures of his own. Jordan has twice been selected as a Google Fellow and served in the White House under President George W. Bush. A sixth-generation Floridian, Jordan lives in Tampa with his wife and their three young daughters.

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Chapter 1. Excellence in All Things.

There’s no denying that Tony Dungy was a master of his craft. During his twenty-eight-year career, Dungy rose to become one of the most successful and beloved coaches in the history of the National Football League. In his first job as a head coach, Dungy did the seemingly impossible by turning the perennially pathetic Tampa Bay Buccaneers into a playoff-bound powerhouse. Then, after a move to Indianapolis, Dungy led the Colts to their first Super Bowl victory in thirty-six years, making Dungy the first African American head coach to ever hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

As anyone close to Dungy will tell you, the soft-spoken coach is intensely passionate about the pursuit of excellence, holding the highest standards for himself and his players. But what inspired Dungy to work with such a passion for exceptionalism? Much like the other masters throughout this book, Dungy’s motivation for excellence in his work stemmed from something much deeper, more sustainable, and more God honoring than the pursuit of fame, fortune, and trophies. Dungy was inspired by his parents—both of whom were masterful educators—to pursue excellence as a means of glorifying God and serving others. Remembering his parents’ example, Dungy said, “My parents were definitions of excellence in teaching. It was important to them to be the best that they could be—not for personal reasons, but that was their concept of serving. They wanted to serve people in the best way possible.”

That commitment to mastery had a lasting impact on Dungy, who has thought a lot about excellence throughout his career. “Excellence is doing something at the very highest level it can be done using all your capabilities and everything God has given you,” Dungy said. “I talk about excellence a lot, because I think from a Christian perspective, that can get lost sometimes....We don’t always think of excellence as a Christian concept, but I think God does desire us to be excellent at what we do....Just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean we should take the approach to just move forward and let the Lord handle it....He wants us to be excellent in what we do. He’s placed us in our careers....We do have a responsibility to be the very best we can be in whatever field we decide to take up. We all run to receive a prize and to win. I never want to forget that part of it. We should run to win.”

Throughout his career, Dungy won a lot. If there was ever a doubt that Dungy was a master of his craft as a coach, his induction into the NFL’s Pro Football Hall of Fame certainly removed that skepticism. As Dungy took the stage in Canton, Ohio, to receive the Ring of Excellence, the audience of adoring fans, family, and former players erupted in rapturous applause. Clearly these fans were celebrating Dungy’s excellence on the field. But as anyone who knows Dungy will tell you, they were applauding something much more; they were celebrating a man who understands that, while he is called to be excellent in his work, his faith commands him to be excellent in all things, including as a husband and father.

In a moving speech, Marvin Harrison (Dungy’s former player and fellow Hall of Fame inductee) addressed his former coach directly, saying, “Coach Dungy. My final head coach. I could sit up here for...fifteen minutes and tell you about how important it was to have you as my coach and talk about football. But what you brought to our team and to me was more important than anything. You taught us how to be teammates. You taught us how to be men. But the most important thing is you taught us about fatherhood....So, I want to thank you for that.”

Harrison’s sentiment has been echoed by countless players Dungy has coached and mentored throughout his career. But Dungy didn’t just tell others how to be an excellent father; he modeled it. I grew up in Tampa Bay, and I still remember seeing Dungy with his kids at sporting events where my friends and I were playing. Even at the height of his career, Dungy always seemed to make the time to cheer his kids on from the sidelines.

“If you’re only focused on excellence in your job or excellence on the field, you will get totally out of balance and out of whack,” Dungy said. “Yes, I need to be excellent as a coach. I need to be excellent as a Christian. I need to be excellent as a father. I need to be excellent as a person in the community and strive for that excellence everywhere and not just in one area.”

Dungy’s comments bring to mind the motto of the late great pastor, Dr. D. James Kennedy, who encouraged his congregation to pursue “excellence in all things and all things to God’s glory.” While this book is primarily about excellence in your chosen work, Kennedy and Dungy remind us of a biblical truth that is critical to understand before we progress past this first chapter: As Christians, God has called us to be excellent in all things, not just in our chosen vocation. 1 Corinthians 10:31 makes clear the standard we are called to: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” In whatever we do, we are to do it all for the glory of God, never settling for anything short of excellence.

Glorify is a word we throw around so much in Christian circles that it has become tragically difficult to define. In fact, one of the most highlighted passages in the Kindle edition of my previous book is John Piper’s definition of glorify. Since so many people found that definition helpful, allow me to reintroduce it here. According to Piper, “‘Glorifying’ means feeling and thinking and acting in ways that reflect his greatness, that make much of God, that give evidence of the supreme greatness of all his attributes and the all-satisfying beauty of his manifold perfections” (emphasis added).

You and I are called to reflect God’s greatness and imitate his character to the world. This is the very essence of what it means to glorify God. But what is his character? Scripture describes God in many ways, but it is his character of excellence that is perhaps most visible to us. So, when Scripture commands that in “whatever you do,” you “do it all for the glory of God,” we are being called to the passionate pursuit of excellence in whatever we commit ourselves to.

All of us have been called to multiple roles in life. We have been called to be excellent wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, friends and church members. If we are going to fulfill all these callings with excellence while also pursuing excellence in our chosen work, it is going to require a tremendous amount of focus in our careers. Again, recall Dr. Anders Ericsson’s study, which states that mastery of any vocation requires roughly ten thousand hours of “purposeful practice.” The reality is that excellence requires an unusual amount of hard work and dedication. Given this, and the many things outside our careers that God has called us to be excellent in, there is simply no way we can pursue mastery at many things professionally at the same time. It defies the laws of science and time. It is precisely because we are called to be excellent in all things that we can’t commit to being excellent at many things.

You and I have a choice to be either a master of none or a master of one. We must pick a path. The path to excellence in our work is the path of singularity. If we want to make our greatest contribution to the world for the glory of God and the good of others, we are going to have to adopt the mind-set of a craftsperson and get really focused and insanely...