The Dialog

I spent months and hundreds of hours on a book. Then the people who were going to help me sell it told me it probably wasn't the book. Not a bad book. Just not a good first book.

My co-host Nick Surface has been a marketing consultant for ten years, and he says the hardest thing to do is convince somebody they need your product. You have to find a known need. That's where this dialog starts: what to do with feedback you don't want, and why how you say something matters as much as what you say.

What do you do with feedback you don't want?
Connect the dots. What my agent said, what people who love me had been telling me for five years, and what I'd spent my life avoiding all pointed at the same place I need to grow. Nobody else is going to connect those dots for you.

Does it matter how you deliver the truth?
Horse pills are real, and one is about the size of my hand. A lot of people have true, wonderful things to say, but they try to make human beings swallow a horse pill. People reject the message not because of its content but because of how it's put together. Jesus came full of grace and truth (John 1:14), and love is finding the balance between the two. Nick adds that it takes humility. Jesus met people where they were.

Why is binary thinking immature?
Most of life is not either/or. It's figuring out where you fall on a spectrum. Truth matters. Whether the message can be received matters too.

So what's the new book about?
Prosperity. A lot of people feel forced to choose between two bad options: the prosperity gospel, or the idea that poverty is a virtue, which is also unbiblical. The better question is the one that actually affects people's lives: does God really want me to be successful?

Scriptures
Zechariah 4:10 · Colossians 4:6 · John 1:14 · Luke 15:1-2

People
Alex Hormozi: a market has to have a known need
J.K. Rowling and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul): the rejection stories everyone brings up

Chapters
0:00 Cold open and show intro
0:53 How do you sell medicine to someone who isn't sick?
1:36 Back to the drawing board on my book
2:12 Nick's marketing principles: find a known need
3:31 Months of work, then "this is probably not the book"
4:36 Publishers are a lot like retailers
5:02 Don't despise small beginnings
5:27 Connecting the dots in your feedback
6:46 You're paid to serve the client, not your vision
7:43 Politics: the message and the packaging
9:05 The horse pill problem: grace and truth
9:56 It takes humility (Jesus and the tax collectors)
10:54 Binary thinking is immature thinking
12:24 "A fine book, but probably not a good first book"
13:21 What about J.K. Rowling and Chicken Soup for the Soul?
14:36 The new book: prosperity
15:30 The prosperity gospel or poverty as a virtue?
16:15 A better question: does God want me to be successful?
16:51 You have to be the one who connects the dots
18:14 Wrap-up

Previous: 1.38 / Whatever you blame controls you
Next: 1.40 / How should a church be run?

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Go to my website / https://jkc.is

What is The Dialog?

Ancient philosophers used the dialog to find answers to life’s greatest questions. The Dialog is a search for truth in modern life through the lens of ancient philosophy, history, and theology. This podcast will challenge your assumptions, change your thinking and show you how to master modern living.

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. I'm interested in one thing, the future, and believe me, I know the only way to get there is to get. What we've got here is failure, milkcake. You may think you know what tribute, but believe me, you don't what the truth. You can't handle the truth. For centuries, philosophers have used the dialogue to search for truth, because it's through conversation, through the logos, that we find it. This is the dialogue where ancient philosophy, history and. Theology meet modern life. Together, we'll wrestle with big questions and give our answers to the way we live. Let's start the conversation. Right, I've got the medicine for it. And they're like, I'm not even sick. I'm not sick. Just give me some more sugar. Right, Yeah, And so how do you write? How do you present the solution that people need that to a problem that they don't realize they actually have. So people, we live in a culture that struggles more with meaning and purpose than ever, right, And people are less concerned about meaning and purpose than ever. They're concerned with fame and influence and mean, so, so it's hard to sell that book because it's like selling bad tasting medicine to somebody. Yeah, I mean, this is this is where my marketer in me. I'm actually, these people are great for you, and like, I love that because I've watched you wrestle with the feedback because it was hard right to get that because basically, what's you know to spoil the story? In some respects, You're not that book's not being released right coming out, You're you're going back to the drawing board. Yeah, and I'm actually curious, guy, I don't know where you're out with that. But dude, so I talk. So I work with a lot of different companies. I've actually I was thinking about this the other day. I've been a market consultant for ten years now, dude, which I'm actually really proud of that. And I've been working with a relatively larger agency for the last five, which means I get to work with companies you've heard of, like Ticketmaster and plenty of companies you have that still make like, in some cases billions of dollars in other cases hundreds of millions. So I get to work with all and I also work with startups. I have all sorts on my radar what I've become because of the way that I think and the people on around and being rooted in the scriptures. I'm very much like, hey, let's find the principles. So I have my principles of marketing, which are marketplace, product and story. Now, one of the marketplace principles is that you and this is I got this from Hormosy because he's amazing at navigating principles. He's like, he's like a true principal person. I believe he's going to come to christ Man. There's been some seeds in there anyways. But when you one of the principles of a market of marketplace is that they have to have a known need. Now, I've worked with so many companies that they have a product, they fell in love with product, They fell in love with the product, but they did not fall in over the consumer. So the hardest thing to do is to convince somebody that they need your product. If you're if you're willing to pay the price in the time to shift a paradigm, you can maybe eventually, but if you actually want to make money, you're going to find a no need and you're going to find the people like you need. They need to be easily targetable, they need to have a no need, they need to be able to afford it, and they need to be a growing segment. There's even four keys for a market. Yeah, or even beyond making money, if you want to have an impact, especially when you're unknown, right right, when you're when you're an unknown, you have to have a very clear problem or very clear problem that you're solving. Yeah. Right, So I'm I'm relatively an unknown, right, and I'm a person the way, and I want to take on really big challenges, really big questions. I think God does a great job of answering those and hey, wired you for it, draw those things out practically. So after talking, I mean I was, I was. It was like just so frustrating, Right, you spend you spend months of your life working on something and there's not It's not like I'm getting paid for this the whole time, hundreds of hours, right, I mean just a lot. Right, And this is like this in my mind, this is the book, this is what I'm supposed to come out with. And then the feedback from the people who are going to help me sell this book is yeah, this is probably not the book, right, And they don't they don't dislike the book, they're just like, this is not what. I want to have your best interest, you guys shared interest? Ye, and it's astually my choice. Right. So if I if I go back to my agent, I'm like, no, this is the book. We're going to take this publishers. He's going to try his best to sell it. Oh right, okay, right because he gets paid off, yeah, getting the book deal done that. He's like, man, if I'm just telling you right, like, we could go with whatever direction you want to go. But the challenge, I guess the challenge is with with with a situation like this, you don't only get one shot. But if you go sit in front of publishers for the first time, you show them an idea they're not interested in. They're not going to be interested in your next idea either. Yeah, publishers are a lot like retailers. By the way, if you're trying to sell a product, then you get it into retailers. You know what retailers really want, Josh. They want people to walk into their store and just poll stuff off the shelf and pay them for it. They don't want to have to do anything to sell it for you. I've worked with Dick Sporting Goods, I've worked with a lot of big companies, and I'm yet there's there's very few retailers that are so forward thinking that they'll put their own sales marketing behind you to sell your product. They just want people to come and be like, Hey, I want this product by Josh Raft. Great well, and the and the and the thing that you know, we were talking about this a second ago before we started recording, but the Bible says, don't despise the day of small beginnings. Yeah, And a part of being part of small beginnings, as like a thinker or a person who has new things to say, is you've got to spend the time not just developing your ideas and developing what you have to say. You've got to spend the time developing an audience who wants to hear that and how you say it as part of it. And I've never done that. So that's what I'm sitting here saying, is like, and when we when we get feedback, we have we have to be the ones that connect the dots on everything aligning. Like no one sat down with me, and it was like, Hey, what this guy's saying, what your friends are saying, what people who love you said, and what you've spent your life avoiding all come together to help you realize a space you need to grow in. Right. So I've spent my life of you know, to connect these dots. I've spent my life avoiding marketing and saying no to opportunities. Okay, recently, like past five years, people who love me, who are close to me are like, hey, you have such great things to say, but you're not really thinking about the audience. Right Again, that connects. Now, someone who's completely external to my world wants to work with me, wants to help me find an audience and says, hey, this thing you've put together doesn't really super connect to an audience, and we've got to think about how well we can market this idea. So I have a choice to make, right, which is do I keep being the me that I've always been? Right? Do I keep going? You know what, I don't care about marketing. I don't care about whether it reaches an audience. I just care about the integrity of the message, right, Like I'm some kind of super artist person, right, who's And we talked about this on an episode we just recorded about being defensive. Like, one of the things I've learned doing client creative work is when you work for a client, you're not being paid as an artist in residence to just create whatever your vision is. You're being paid to do exactly what the client wants. Right. Michaelangelo got commissioned as well, and guess what, he didn't always like it. And it's the same and the same thing is true of serving an audience. Yeah, right, is you have to find a way to think about what a person needs to hear if you really want to help them, right, And whether that audience is a million people or your children. You can live life and say whatever you want to say and live however you want to live. That doesn't mean it's going to resonate with anybody or help them. If you're not being helpful, what else are you doing with your life? But if I'm not helping people and helping things get better, then I'm just completely useless. And this is the problem to me, like not to just go fully down the stroad. This is a problem to me. Of like politics, right, yeah, dude. Because now we live in a world where no one can have any conversations and no one can can engage with the other side because we're right, you're wrong. That's the end of the matter. And as long like, as long as you decide to be wrong and we're right, then we're never going to have any kind of discussion. It's like, it's not about the problem in politics. To me is really not about the rightness or wrongness, although there is rightness or wrong. It's about the way that we're packaging these messages. Yeah, like people you know, and I'm a conservative, so I'm gonna say this more to like the conservatives. Conservatives don't have to be a holes about being right, and I mean being on the right, but also being right. Like, if you're a pro life person, you don't have to be a pro choice hater, like you can navigate. The Bible says, let your conversation be graceful and seasoned with soul. I don't think that we are doing that very well as conservatives, especially those of us who call ourselves conservative Christians in America. We just take our stand on truth right. Well. The dynamic with that is the Bible says that Jesus came in grace and truth. We've talked about that on previous episodes. But if you care about the society and you care about helping people, you have to care about how you're giving the message. Right. It's it's you know, there's a there's a saying, there's a there's a thing called a horse pill, and horse pills are real. So like the amount of medicine they have to give a horse is a lot, so a horse pill is like the size of my hand, No joke, wow, right that a horse has to take. Of course, a horse is a lot bigger than a person. But you like the way a lot of so many people have really great, amazing, truthful things to say, and they have wonderful messages. But the problem is they're trying to make human beings swallow a horse pill. Right, So a person will reject the message not because of what the message content is. They reject the message because of how the message is structured and put together. So a person who would otherwise change their life grow be different. Because we don't deliver the message in like a loving way, they're gonna say no, one reject it because it feels unloving. So love is finding the balance between grace and truth. Right, and well, I think a key thing in here it takes humility. It takes humility to say, look, it's not about me delivering this the way that I think it should be done, or like falling on like some self righteous you know this is you know you need this, just take your medicine. It takes humility to say, like, what, like Jesus met people where they were at? How many people did he heal that were like screaming for him to be crucified weeks later? Yeah? And and well, Jesus and Jesus. The Bible says that Jesus spent his time with tax collectors and notorious sinners. So it's not like Jesus was this isolated pharisee who only hung out with people that agreed with him and shared his theology. He hung out with people who didn't believe he was the son of God, didn't think he was divine, didn't didn't you know, or maybe his friends or whatever. I mean, this this is how this guy rolled, so anyway, not to just go like fully down. That road we went partially. Well, but the reason, the reason why, the reason why I'm saying that is, uh, well, let me say this before I go onto my next thought, this is not binary, right, And one of the things I'm like learning right now in my life is if you're a binary thinker, you're immature. So if you're a binary thinker, you're not a mature thinker, because most of life is not binary. It's not either or. It's figuring out where you fall on some kind of spectrum in terms of creating a balance. What you're saying is you're on the spectrum. I'm on the spectrum. I stay on the spectrum at all times. You've got to take me off of it. It's quoted on this Podcastn't get me off the spectrum if there's no way I'm coming off of it. So, so the reason why I say that is because truth matters. What you feel like you are put on the earth to say and create and do matters. But also what also matters, it's not either or. What also matters is whether or not that message can be received by an audience. And if you're like an established artist or an established communicator and you already have an audience, you kind of can people are with you no matter what. That's not where I am in the journey, right right, right, I don't have a million people that follow me that just love whatever I have to say. And you're like, oh, give us more philosophy and get down deep? Can you tell us about what Aristotle said and laos Sue and all these different guys. Nobody really wants to hear that. I mean, I'm saying it, but people like it whenever I say it. But there's not an audience of people who can't wait for my. No, there's not a known need of what did Laos Su say? Yeah, please give us the next philosophical treatise that you've discovered brow in your head your Socrates, right, But in reality you're like, so createsy, Yeah exactly so. So the feedback that comes back on this on this book proposed deal is, hey, this is like a fine book, but this is probably not a good first book, and we really need to identify a real problem that we're solving, because this this book reads more like a a journal of someone who navigates their way through life with philosophy. And I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point it's supposed to be. It's not supposed to be like a book with here's the problems and here's the solutions. But the problem is right, the market doesn't want that book, non problem. They need problem. So one day I believe when there's enough influence or there's enough of an audience there, then I can say, hey, now this book that I put out is going to be a little bit radical and it's gonna be different than what you've seen before. Doing that as your first book is not the best move because everyone will just think you're a weirdo, and no one will really listened to what you have to say. Anyway, there's always gonna be the one person who's like, man, I found your book had changed my life. Well, yeah, I mean I've had I can't even tell you how many conversations I've had with people where they're like, don't you know how many times that JK. Rowling was rejected before she sold Harry Potter. Don't you know how many times Mark Victor Hanson, who wrote you know this whole story, Mark Victor Hanson, who wrote Chicken Noodlesuit for the Soul, The book is rejected by like one hundred publishers, and then he found one one that wanted it, and then it's like a best time New York Times bestselling book for a million years. It's like, yes, and tell me how many people aren't that person who no one ever bought their book, no one ever read what they had to say, and they never had any influence. There's kJ Lowryan who like wrote seventeen books, Like, we've never heard of that person who cares. Yeah, right, So just walk in that balance. So anyway, we sit on have a conversation and I'm like, great, you know I've had I had to work through it for like a week, and I was like, just give me some time to think about this, So sit down and have a conversation. I'm like, man, I so appreciate that you guys want me to be successful in a publishing career. Like my agent wants me to be more successful than I want to be, right, So I so appreciate that you guys want me to be successful. And let's talk about some other ideas of what I can write, because really I can write about anything I could I could figure. Out a way to solve a problem. So what we land on is and I've talked about it a lot, We've talked about on this podcast, but we've landed on is putting together the valve prosperity as a book, right, Okay, we're going to release cause it's just you know, it's a people are more interested in the prosperity Gospel and all those conversations than ever, and I think it could potentially be a really great book this for the season that Christianity and the church is in because people want to you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of people our age, you know especially, want. To be successful. Yeah, and they want to have a good life, but they don't really know if God wants that for them. Yeah, you know, and we've grown up in a culture that where there's this thing called the prosperity Gospel, which is a little bit like a boogeyman, you know. It's like, well you're getting really close to the prosperity gospel or you know, that's one of those. Prosperity It was so popular for our parents though, yeah, like like well name it and claim it stuff that was big time. So so the question that a lot of people have is well, what am I supposed to do? Like there's a there's like a little bit of a paralysis for people where like in their career, in their life, they want to provide a good life for their kids. They want to be as successful as they possibly can be. But then, really, what's happened is there's this weird thing called the prosperity gospel. It's a bunch of weird stuff. And then what's come up as kind of an alternative to that is basically just rejecting any kind of success and saying, well, God doesn't care about that. He only can about eternity, and poverty is actually a virtuous thing anyway, which is also unbiblical. Dude, there's the. Title of your book, poverty is not a virtue. Yeah, So so people are kind of forced to choose. They feel like they're forced to choose between two bad options. So anyway, that's a better What I'm sitting here saying is that's a way better problem to solve than just general Yeah, everyone needs to live a meaningful life, right, But what practically is going to affect people's lives more is this question, does God really want me to be successful in my life? And if he does, is there a way for that to happen. Well, that's a great time. Does God really want me to be successful? No, one's going to wonder what the book's about. Yeah, and so all that whatever happened, I'm like marking it now on this podcast that whatever happens after this with this proposal is because of good or bad and indifferent whatever is because I've sat and listened to feedback. But also my encouragement for everybody that's listening to this is you have to be the one that connects all these dots. Like for me, can it's not It's not this microcosm of just what my agent and some publishing minds who don't know me have to say, right, it's not just that. If it was just that and everybody else in my life was like, no, you really like you're one hundred percent on with your audience. You really know how to talk to people in a way they need to hear it, then I could go, oh, well, you know, maybe you don't really know. But he says that I have a life. I have a life, a life. That's been filled with avoiding learning certain skills that I need to learn to connect with an audience better. And then I also have people who I really trust and love in my life who've told me, hey, listen, what you say is really good, but you need to really think about where the audience is in that journey and taking them on that journey. That's only really if I really start to apply all that, that's only really going to make me better at being who I am, because I know, and this is what I told, This is what I told Rory, my agent was I said, I know I can preserve the integrity of a message and make it to where there's better on rams for people here what they need to I know I can do that. It's a lot of work. It's a lot more work, I would say, to write that book than it is to write this other book. But I will almost guarantee, I will almost guarantee that that's going to be a better book than the book that I wrote. Praise Lord, dude. This was Stories with Lessons. Stories with Lessons by Joshkraft. Thank you for listening to the dialogue. Make sure to like, share and subscribe, and also if you think someone else would enjoy this, please send it to them. If you want to get in touch or learn more about me what I think, speak and write, you can go to Joshuacraft dot com or you can also follow Nick and I on Instagram. Our handles are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.