- Living inside the investment. Now there’s a thought.
Shock-jock Howard Stern once asked Jerry Seinfeld if he ever dreams of a day when he can just go to a Chinese restaurant with his wife and not think about jokes – or how absurd chopsticks are.
In other words, Seinfeld – one of the world’s greatest comics – is always working, right? Everything he does all day long is about wondering if that thing he just noticed – a reaction, a utensil, a car crash, a personality flaw – could be repurposed as a joke or otherwise creatively twisted into a laugh.
Seinfeld didn’t hesitate:
“What fun is life if I’m not making jokes all the time? It’s a torture I love.”
Scott Melker, who included the Stern-Seinfeld dialogue in his financial newsletter, commented that what Seinfeld – and, really, practically anyone outstanding in their field – does with life is what “tortured” people do: they perceive how life fits their agenda.
Torture, Melker proposes, is just a comedian’s way to express “devotion” or “discipline.” But when you reach a certain level of expertise in a field, every thought heads that direction. Since his newsletter involves investing, Melker asks:
Do you think Paul Tudor Jones, Cathie Wood, Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, or Peter Thiel ever stop thinking about investing? I can’t speak for them – but I’d bet the answer is a strong no. It never turns off…Bill Ackman’s fund holds 30.3 million shares of Uber, worth $2.21 billion. Do you think he takes a ride without evaluating the driver, the app, the wait time? Of course not. He’s living inside the investment.
Living inside the investment. Now there’s a thought.
Consider what “investment” looks like in the Kingdom of God: much more than church and Sunday School attendance with an accompanying tithe. Jesus asks for…all. And “love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your might” has been the fundamental Judeo-Christian mantra since Deuteronomy was recorded.
Here are the ramifications of the Kingdom of God for our lives: whether you are investing or fishing or hunting or driving or eating or talking with your family…you are thinking about Jesus, like Jesus…seeking first and only His Kingdom and His righteousness.
Paul of Tarsus admonishes us to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Every thought…not just what is appropriate in a culture that likes to keep things…um, balanced and fervent and respectable but certainly not radical.
“Every thought captive” requires quite a reorientation of our brains. But that is what grace and repentance and a thousand micro-repentances, daily commitment to prayer and Bible study and obedience of those precepts can do for us. Change our thinking, our feeling, our doing, by His grace.
It becomes “a torture we’re comfortable with” – even something that defines us.
Devotion. Discipline. You never stop thinking about it. It never turns off. You don’t get to clock out. Your kingdom mind is always live. You live inside your soul’s investment.
And you’re all in.
Matt Friedeman
