Jonathan Acuff

“I don't want you to wake up at sixty-five and realize, 'I spend forty of my best years doing something that just funded my life.”

“Burn your dream bright. Pursue it with the best of who you are. But don't confuse hustle with burnout. Hustle fills you up. Burnout empties you. Hustle renews your energy. Burnout drains it.”

“If I miss a goal, which sometimes happens when you set huge ones, I want the reassurance that I did everything I in my power to make it happen. I want the peace in knowing that it wasn't for lack of hustling that I missed a target for my dream. I want to know that the one thing under my control was under control.”

“Hustle isn't just doing the things you love all the time. Hustle is doing the things you don't enjoy sometimes to earn the right to do the things you love.”

“I know sometimes it's scary to think that you might do the wrong thing. It's terrifying to imagine wasting your "one shot". But let me assure you, nothing you do will be wasted. Every decision you make, every path you take, has the ability to contribute something you need to succeed at your dream.”

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.”

“Your dream might not be as extreme as Bono's, but like him you may meet yours before you're ready to run after it.”

“More often than not, finding out what you love doing most is about recovering an old love or an inescapable truth that has been silenced for years, even decades. When you come to your dream job, your thing, it is rarely a first encounter. It's usually a reunion.”

“Quitting a job doesn't jump-start a dream because dreams take planning, purpose, and progress to succeed. That stuff has to happen before you quit your day job.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but people with jobs tend to have more creative freedom than people without.”

“When you keep your day job, all opportunities become surplus propositions rather than deficit remedies. You only have to take the ones that suit your dream best.”

“The golden watch has become the other end of golden handcuffs. We now look at steady jobs as less of a goal and more of a necessary evil. They aren't fun; they simply fund our lives.”

“We started seeing motion as a sign of success and transition as a sign of progress.”

“Conversations, much like Saturday Night Live skits, are often difficult to end.”

“That's why I always keep a handful of silver glitter in my pockets. If I get pushed into a conversational corner I throw the glitter into the air, and while the person I'm talking to is distracted, I run away. An additional benefit is that I look like a cool magician, so I've got that going for me.”

“God is an early bird; satan is a night owl. Everyone knows that.”

“Sometimes when jerks become Christians, it's like a bully learning karate. Instead of having Christ transform our hearts and attitudes, we now have a new method with which to beat you up....what was once just 'forcing everyone to agree with my opinion' is now 'forcing everyone to agree with my opinion in the name of God.”

“Pastors are starting to get wily. When people tell my friend, 'I'm not being fed,' he replies, 'I'm prefectly happy to spoon feed my one-year-old. But if I'm still spoon-feeding him when he's five, we've got a problem. Here's a fork. Feed yourself.”

“....And then you get some jerk for a boss. And you think, 'I wish God was my boss. That would be awesome. He wouldn't care about my sales sheet. He would care about my soul sheet.' Then you feel a little embarrassed because that was such a low-quality joke.”

“We didn't try to force God's hand or do the "I just heard a sermon about David and Goliath so I need to quit my job right this second" leap of faith that's so popular in Christian circles. We took our time with the decision, like another guy in the Bible, named Jesus. He spent thirty years in obscurity before he started his adventure. Often, we're not willing to spend thirty minutes in preparation, never mind thirty years, especially when we come home from a conference and find our day jobs waiting for us on Monday morning. I'm not sure why Christians sometimes think the maturation of our own missions will be radically shorter than that of Jesus. But it happens and in the past I've certainly wanted to take wild, unplanned, possibly-not-inspired-by-God leaps of faith.”