If you can start with who is God in my life? What did he do for me? Who am I today? When you have that peace with God's source, you get to look at things differently. You get to look at things with more grace, more confidence. And the ride, the step, it is just so much more enjoyable.
Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Doug, good morning.
It's a new day. It's a wonderful Could be the best day of your life. That's what Jeff Shreve would tell me when you walk out the back door, going to visit kids and help service their band instruments, could be the best day of your life. And he's right. Like, what is
the best day? Right? Like, I couldn't even tell you what the best day would be.
I can tell you I've had some pretty good days, but I would be okay with this being the best day of my life, Laskal.
I think it we interviewed a guy, Doctor. Warren, a few weeks ago, and he talked about a thing, neuroplasticity is two neurons making a connection and building a pattern there to the way you think. And I think if you think every day,
this is going be the
best day, then probably it is. Probably it is. And if you think the other way,
it probably is going to be that too.
I told my son-in-law the other day that Winston Churchill, he had a quote that he didn't see the point in being a pessimist, because if you're a pessimist and right, or an optimist and wrong, you get to the same place.
Who said I've never met a wealthy or I'm sorry, a wealthy pessimist? Somebody said
It feels like William O'Neil, but I don't
That sounds like a William O'Neil. Yeah. Yeah. That guy's book was a good influence on my life. Which guy's? William O'Neil's. How to Make Money in Stocks. It's kind of a nerdy book, but it it is a it it was a good influence on my life. Man, I did not read until
I got out of college. I mean, read, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Unfortunately, it makes complete sense. Yes. And
I started reading
Based on experience.
Yeah. I started reading, and it revolutionized my life by reading and and pondering and thinking and navigating new things. I threw out the idea for today to discuss my favorite book. And it is one that we both have gone through, and it is a non traditional book. It didn't look like this when I got it, but it says, The Foundational Truths of Romans one-eight.
And it was written by a man by the name of Bob Warren. And Bob Warren has the distinct history of a lot of things. Bob was a pro basketball player.
Yeah, I've got one of his basketball cards in my desk drawer over there.
Yeah. And that's fun because he played for the ABA, which I love, you know, basketball, but they didn't really get much cooler. ABA was wild. Yeah. That was yeah. And while he was playing in the was on the dating show. The dating game? Dating game. The dating game. I I've looked What a player. Yeah. I'm like, he had the big hair,
the big mustache.
And And he drove a VW Bug. He also drove a Corvette during his playing days.
Okay. Okay. Yeah.
That was when young people could drive.
Yeah. Okay. Nothing against our senior friends. Hey. I'm starting to like them more and more.
And so Bob, he was in the league along with a lot of the former kinda coaches that kinda ruled the NBA for a long time. Those guys were his friends. And I don't wanna go into the details how I met Bob. It's just a miraculous thing. I I was in Murray, Kentucky for five years of my life, and Bob's ministry was 10 miles north of there, and I never crossed paths with him.
And a little bit about what our podcast a few weeks ago was thinking better was with Doctor. Warren. And that's one of the key principles we talk about is think differently. And when I needed to think differently as a 31 year old man, I was introduced to Bob, and he became a mentor of mine for a good twenty plus years.
You're 31? When this all went down? Yeah. That's cool. I was 33 when I read it.
Okay. Yeah. And and Dang.
That was a long time ago.
It was it's a long time. Not for you. For me. And the the like a lot of you, young people, maybe have never seen this kind of a publishing.
Well, got these things out here. They've never seen this. I mean, look at these things. These, these. Yeah. Yeah. Kids, actually kids might think these are really cool, but, yeah, this was the, this is how you did Audible back in the day.
Yeah, yeah, and that's why I brought them. And Bob had some passions later in life and he rewrote this. I'm a fan of the original because of my attention issues. Like this one is probably 30 or 40% more effort to get through than the original one. And I would encourage you, if you're interested in this, reach out to us, or you can reach out to lifethehill dot org and you can buy them there.
But if you've got attention issues, I bet we can help you find the original one. So when I think about this, I had just done a number of things in life and had success. I'd had success in at a relative level in most things that I'd tried. And at the same time, I realized that I was never, I never felt like I was enough. And I had a low self esteem, but I didn't talk about that because you wouldn't do that thing.
Did you even know you had one? I did. I knew What happened to me, I might have told you this before, was I'd had probably 90% success in most things I did, whether it was academics, business, athletics, or whatever. I I I was higher up on that. But my self esteem, if I were to tell somebody honestly back then was 10%.
And when I went to work at Texas Instruments, I was working around 90 to a 100% people liked performance wise. Like, I've not been around that centralized group of high performers. Yeah. And being in conference rooms with some of those, I realized, oh, their natural intellect is far beyond what I could even aspire to. Even if I read every day, I couldn't get to where they're at.
And if I even if I could, suppose they were a 100 in the performance thing, if I could get to that 100, move up 10 points from 90 to a 100, my self esteem only goes from 10 to 20. And I'm like, this performance thing is a futile endeavor. That's where I was at. Yeah. And then miraculously, one day I was introduced to Bob, and that really opened some new doors, so.
Yeah, but that was five years after you got into this business, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another five years in the performance world with some tough thinking battles.
This industry, I think, will like doing what you and I do performance wise will crush your soul Yeah. If you don't figure out some things.
There's some lonely drive home or drives Yeah.
Because we appreciate our clients and things, but everybody that looks to us for help has different expectations, and that performance grid can really cause you some challenges. And it, frankly, there's been a number of times I consider leaving the business because of that. But this thing put some groundwork in place. It took time for all those ideas that were in this to elevate in my life to where I could have the confidence to take feedback that I didn't feel comfortable with and still sleep at night, move forward. And I really loved the people that were giving me feedback that maybe it was honest, maybe it was true, but it still hurt my feelings.
And to this day, that's probably hard for most people to get feedback opposite of what they'd like to hear, but it doesn't set me back nearly what it once did.
Yeah, yeah, I'm the same way.
Yeah, I think most people probably are if there aren't others.
And I think most guys specifically are, and I'm speaking from that perspective, but I just think about this, Keith, I think about So if I pull out my wallet here, I've got an identification card, driver's license. Years ago, state of Indiana gave this to me, they still allow me to do it. I've got a motorcycle endorsement on here, that's a stamp of approval. I've got another thing in here that tells, a pink slip, if you know what that is from Indiana, it tells you that you're able to carry some stuff around. But there are all these licenses out there that a person could have, maybe it's a pilot's license, maybe it's you pass your Series seven, so you have a license to be a stockbroker, you could be a licensed electrician, I mean there's so many licenses person could chase to say, hey, this is who you are, you belong to us.
And what I found is the biggest challenge to that is you get one, and what's left? Well maybe there's something else there that I could get that would be another add on to who I am, that makes me more valuable, and it's all these licenses that are out there for us to have a stamp of approval or an achievement, and it was this book that really helped me see, I'm good, I don't have to chase much. And that's not, I'm not interested or curious in things, I'm actually okay, I'm enough.
And it it I think when I was working on my MBA in graduate school, there was intermediate level economics class that I had to learn calculus. Like, I hadn't had calculus, and I had to know calculus to pass it. And and I was looking exhausted coming into and I I knew I had to get through to this. It was the only non a I got in graduate class. But when I think of how convoluted and complicated it was, this book, I had to go, I bet I've gone through it 10 times over the years, and it took me two or three times before a lot of the power of it started igniting in my life.
And I think why I had to go through it so much to get to that point was the fact that I had things that weren't true stored in my brain.
Things in the way. And I thought
they were true. And I've heard quotes where that's the most dangerous thing. It's not what isn't so that gets you in trouble, it's what you think is so, but it's not so. And so when you think something is true and it's not true and you're operating with that, you can get in a lot of trouble.
Yeah. And so if you can operate on what is true, you can have a lot of fun in the world, you can read a lot of books, you can listen to a lot of music, you can see a lot of movies, you can go to a lot of plays, you can go on nature experiences, and you can see things differently now.
The ideas presented here have opened doors that I never knew would be open for me, and I think having training as a computer programmer, a lot of what I would think through, how I thought through as a young man was really logical. Because when you're writing
a computer program, you have to be logical. Left brain, black, white, zeros Yeah. And
so the ideas of doing that that I learned in school also helped me sort through. There was a lot of noise and what, like a lot of people feed us information to help our clients. And so in all of that, I had to be kind of cynical and skeptical of things to do what I thought was best for people. And so I found this verse in the book of Acts, Acts seventeen eleven, and it said those that were in Berea were more noble minded than those who were in Thessalonica because they would search what they were taught to see whether it was true or not. And when I saw that, that's really what I had to do.
I had to go and assume what I thought about certain things were false and then reprogram to see whether they were true or not.
Did you say assume what was false?
Well, I don't know if that's exactly what you said. That's just what I heard. Yeah. Had to assume what I knew about certain things were false. Yeah. Yeah. Because the Shreve kids know I love the word assume. I just, I think it's an awesome word. Well, I had assumed they were true before. Right?
And that's what got me in the problem. Yeah. So I had to rethink how I was thinking. It was really, it was really hard, but my friendship with Bob, I I loved I wanna share this picture. This is one of my favorite pictures.
I got some other ones that were fun. This is our financial adviser, Caleb Tyner here, and he is on the John Deere with Bob down in Hardin, Kentucky. And it looks like the sunset there, and I just love the idea of the genuine love in Bob's eyes and the rascally look with no front tooth of Caleb. And and Bob really became kinda like an uncle to a lot of our kids. And even Caleb, you can tell by that picture. I'm pretty sure one
of the Shreve kids wore that that shirt that Caleb's wearing.
That's really funny. The New York Police Department. Yes. That was so good. But that that's really, Bob died too young, but that's Yes.
That's how I remember him forever, probably, that young, vibrant man. And so when I first met him, I think a long distance phone call was 20¢ a minute. And when I started reading this and studying through it, I would have just small questions. Some questions would hit maybe a ten minute phone call to get kind of clarification. Because the way he wrote this is he gave daily activities assigned to do so that there's just a homework assignment every day.
And then he had the answers in the back according to what he thought the answer was.
It's a workbook about a book.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I would using that filter, I would still be skeptical towards his answers. A 100%.
Yeah. So Actually, when I did it, they offended me. His answers did. Yes. They offended the religion that I
built up over the years. Yes. And I think that is true for Bob. He was a man acquainted with pain, I think. And I think the religious people a lot of times came after him, and he got a lot of negative feedback.
But key to that thinking differently, I think Bob got to see so many revolutionized lives that he could take the negative feedback and keep plotting forward. And I have too, I've been able to introduce these ideas to a lot of people over the last thirty plus years, and see people's lives revolutionized, including family members, right? Yeah, including mine. I was having dinner with my daughter Kelly, and she went through this. I was teaching this to a group when she was 12 years old, and I think she understood.
It's a complicated process to understand a lot of the topics there, but I think she got the gist of it at 12 years old and has just lived in a way that I've not seen in many people. Like, she is one of the most confident, joyful people I've ever met. And so even though I said it was complicated to understand, she picked it up as a youngster.
Well, makes sense. I mean, this is a tutorial towards the Bible. Yeah. And so the Bible is simple enough for a child to understand and complex enough for someone to keep wondering and being curious their whole life. It is. And when think about this, one of the first things that jumped out at me that kind of
shook my world was Bob went into great detail describing a phrase in the Bible, the phrase the bond servant. I don't know if you recall that Yeah, part of
the seven years?
Yes, yes. Yeah, so there was slight
The opportunity for freedom to choose. Yeah.
And so if you're just reading the beginning of the book of Romans, you'll see Paul says a bond servant, matter of factly. But what that meant was just a really rich word picture that can change your way of seeing things. And ultimately, I took away with it is once the bond servant had paid his debt, they took in awe and put a hole in his ear and put an earring in his ear that pointed out his freedom, but the bond servant wasn't just a slave, a bond servant was one who paid his debt and told his master, I love you so much, I'll serve you with my life. Not out of duty, out of love.
You'd look good with an earring.
I've thought about that. I thought about getting a tattoo of a freckle on my ear.
You make a hoop.
A hoop. That's sweet. Sorry, I got distracted. So that really helped me, just thinking that you can walk this life out of love rather than duty. Yeah. And and that's that's week one, probably question one or two. That's right out of the gate, so it was revolutionary to me. Anything like out of the study that kinda jumped out?
Yeah, yeah, I mean the game changer for me was just actually believing in forgiveness, and that it is possible for me to be 100% forgiven. That seems pretty elementary, but used to go to bed, Lord, forgive me for this, that, and the other times a thousand every night. And through studying the Bible and through Bob's lens there and his tutorial, I realized that I'm good, I'm okay. Not because of anything I did, but I've been forgiven by the one who hovered over whatever was here in Genesis one. And, if that's what happened, it's a game changer for me, so now it's an expression of thankfulness most nights before I go to bed.
And it's also an expression, I don't get this right all the time, forgiven anyway, but I can look at somebody else and say, hey, they're all good. And they might annoy the crap out of me with their tendencies or their habits, but they're okay. And when I can see somebody that way, it helps me see them from a, eternal point of view. And that is a complete game changer to just be forgiven.
I was texting one of the people that I had kind of shared this with years ago, and our friend Matt, when I just asked him what were some of his highlights in it. And the one thing that jumped out that kind of goes in parallel with that was the fact that he is at peace with God. And once you realize you're forgiven, then you're not an adversary of God, that you are at peace with him. And then the secondary thing that he alluded to was the peace of God, that you can go about your days with the, you know, the stock market getting smacked around and still have peace in the midst of the uncertainties of this world. Yeah.
Or the stock market doubling or tripling and be at
peace with that too. Exactly. The Is it okay if we go into OT, or are
we gonna be all right? We've, yeah, we've got
So this morning I met with some guys, and I said, Hey, what book or books have influenced your life? What comes to mind? Like, what are the greatest ones? And I want to share these. One guy said, Who Moved My Cheese?
Maybe you've read that one, but it's about, you know, hey, you're going to have some challenges, and it's about the journey. Another guy said, The Comfort Crisis, and it's basically to take an event that you totally are unprepared for, and then go do it. The other guy, and this guy, I really like his, the outer limits of reason. And the reason why I like this guy so much is completely different than me. He's really smart.
And was saying that he was trying to understand his spouse because she thinks from the heart and he thinks from like the zeros and the ones and all that stuff. And he said it helped him view the world bigger than just black and white. And then another guy said Flourish by Martin Slagman, I believe. And his thought was instead of shooting for the thirty year plan and trying to get the thirty year plan tomorrow, just realizing that's a bad idea and to enjoy the journey. So I share all of these with you guys because if you can start with, hey, who has God in my life?
What did he do for me? Who am I today? Then you can take some steps in life with a different worldview. Can acquire all the knowledge you want through books, through music, through plays, whatever, through friends, but when you have that peace with God's source, you get to look at things differently, you get to look at things with more grace, more confidence, and the ride, the step, it is just so much more enjoyable.
That's so beautiful. Now, you know, when I think about that, one of the things Bob said, I'm sure I've heard him say it a 100 times, What you do isn't who you are, but who you are has a big influence on what
you do. Yeah. The point- You might need to hit the back fifteen second button on that one. Yeah. That is a really great phrase.
Yeah, so I'll say it again, what you do isn't who you are, but who you are has a big influence on what you do. And an example of that is I've got to leave here shortly for training in Florida, and I was scheduled to fly back Saturday morning, and I turned the dial because I've got a friend that I want to go get some time with, and so then what I want to do is to spend a little more time in Florida, and I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I need to go from that place in Florida this weekend to Houston, Texas to help another friend do something. And all of that is a function of who I am. And maybe what people see in Keith is what he did.
Yeah.
But it isn't anything about what I did. It's who I am. It's who I am. I'm looking for the things that are much greater than what the world system will tell you.
Yeah, looking for the miraculous stuff. Exactly. Like unexplainable stuff. So I would encourage you,
if you want an adventure, if you want something life changing, give this Romans book a shot, The Foundational Truths of Romans one through eight. And it doesn't matter whether you're a follower of Christ or not, maybe some ideas that you've been told about who Jesus are, are things you need to unlearn, just like I needed to unlearn a lot of things thirty some odd years ago. And I have a feeling you won't be disappointed in the amount of time you put
in it. Money back guarantee from Keith Tyner right there.
I bet if you bought it, I would subsidize it for you. That's how much I think about it. And I hope we don't have too many people watch this.
Send all requests to k tynergimblefinancial dot com.
In the meantime, you guys live your best life and know we're big fans of you. Take care.