Through The Dip

Everyone wants to be successful. Whether in business, relationships, or life, we want our work to pay off. Especially with regard to faith, we want to live for God and receive the great reward of heaven! But not many people make it, really not in any of these categories.  Far too often people start working, and get immediate results, but then... it gets hard. The experience the inevitable dip. Most people give up. But not those who find success. Not those who build great marriages. Not those who see heaven!  Let's talk about how to press on through the dip!

- What do we expect when we put out new effort?

- What is "the dip" and why does it interrupt our growth?

- How do successful people handle success better than most?

- Does Christ expect you to work "through the dip" in your faith?

- What are good reasons to quit something you have started?

Transcript

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Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Still More podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you deepen your faith, build stronger relationships, and do the most with your life in Christ. Thank you for joining. Let's get started. Okay, so I know I say this a lot, but I am so excited about today's topic. Firstly, because the application for me has been so clear, it's given me an opportunity to reevaluate everything I am expending energy on and really determining what is worth the work and what isn't. But even more than that, I know that this will help you. The concept of the dip, understanding what it is and how to work through it, will help you with everyday things that you're engaged in, but more importantly, you will find spiritual application from this. This principle will give you courage even when things aren't going your way, and you will know exactly why you are pushing through. Okay, so first let me walk you through where I came across this concept. It was late one night, I sat down on my bedside and I reached to the table to grab the remote, but for whatever reason it wasn't there. In its place was this little white book, a small hardcover book that wasn't much larger than my hand. I had no idea how it got there, where it was from, or what it was about. There was actually nothing even written on the cover. I pick up this book and I look at the spine, and they're just two words. The dip. And I'm kind of like, the dip of what? What is this about? No information. I noticed that it isn't super thick, so I turn to the last page and I see it's 74 pages long, and I thought, I don't know where this came from, but here it is. I think I'll go over and sit down in the reading chair and just read the first few pages. Well, that night, Summer had already laid down, done some reading, and gone to bed, and every light in the house was out except the one that was shining on that book, and I read all 74 pages right there that first night. Once I started to see the dip as a reality in nearly every part of my life, I was inquisitive as to how to know when to keep pushing and when to quit, and I found the ideas laid out in this book super helpful. It was written by a guy named Seth Godin, G-O-D-I-N. You're more than welcome to look that up. Actually, I think it would be a good read. Although I would say it's a business application book, it's the evaluation of the dip as part of the process in building a business or pushing on towards excellence in a field, which is great. But I think once you get the concept, you will find many other applications in addition to economics. To make this simple, I need you to imagine a line graph. You know, like from high school where you have the X axis that goes to the right, and it's down at the bottom, and then on the left side you have that y-axis that's going up. If you can imagine that, let me label both of those lines. At the bottom, I would put the word effort. We're talking about the work that you put in, the actual decisions and activity that you make towards something that matters to you. The y axis up the left side is success. It represents progress, improvement, gain, reward, all the good stuff. The reason you're putting in the effort moving to the right is so that you can grow in success. All right, so what would a line look like on something you endeavored to do? If you decided to do something that was important to you, that you decided mattered, and you put your entire energy behind it, what kind of a line would be drawn on that graph? Well, that's pretty easy to predict. You would start in the bottom left-hand corner where the x and y axis correspond with one another, and you would begin to draw a line diagonally upward. In other words, as you put in more effort, the success was growing right along with it. It would be immediate and it would be awesome. I could give you any number of examples, but if you decide to put effort into daily Bible reading, you instantly feel better, learn things, and find application. If you decide to bring a ton more kindness and selflessness to your marriage, and you really go out of your way to make effort, there are immediate positive outcomes and success. This happens in almost everything, but usually that line does not head up and to the right diagonally forever. After a period of time, maybe a few days or weeks, maybe even after a few months, something happens to that line. It begins to crest and then comes back down even as it's being drawn to the right. In other words, you are still putting in the effort. You're still working on your marriage, you're still reading the Bible or any number of other things. And while there was great success for a while, something tends to happen before you've gone too far. It seems like the success stops. Maybe you have a bad week, and it seems like everything you've been doing isn't amounting to anything, or you've been reading your Bible for a month and you went out and did something foolish, or it doesn't seem like people are appreciating the thing that you're trying to do here, and it almost looks like it's making matters worse. And that line actually begins to come back down some and begin to flatten out in a little bit of a dip. It's a dip in your progress and it's super frustrating. You could understand if you had stopped making effort, but you're still making effort. And yet for some reason, maybe something you can't describe, you go through some trial, some diminished return, some setback. And instead of the line just going straight off the paper, it is actually curved back down to some measure and it gets really discouraging. This happens in almost everything. It is a natural phenomenon. Ultimately, the dip is a phenomenon that allows us to differentiate between successful people and unsuccessful people. People who truly get the most out of their lives, and people who just get little, short, unlasting highs, and then the effort disappears. And that leads me to a question, but I already think you know the answer. What usually happens next? You try something new, you pour yourself into it, you keep the effort going, you feel like you're getting better, and yet it doesn't seem like in the moment it's paying off. It seems like all the energy has ran out. What do people usually do then? You know what? They quit. You just stop making effort. And so right there in that first dip, people stop right in the middle of it and say, Well, this didn't work, and they move on to something else. And if that's something that you do, just recognize there is nothing special about that. People do that all the time. Most people live their lives with a graph of influence and involvement and change that looks just like that. Start something, great returns, looking awesome, nobody else is excited anymore, looks like it's not going to amount to anything, so I just quit. I could give you endless examples. When we were kids and we had a lemonade stand, and the neighborhood found out about it, and we sold all this lemonade and it looked great. But the next weekend it was rainy or something, fewer people cared, and the sales cut in half. We experienced our first dip. What did we do as kids? Did we fight through for the next few weeks and make new flyers and keep the effort up and mix in some Arnold Palmers? No, we just said, Mom, I'm done. What's next? At least that's what I did. The message of the book is you must work through the dip. You must understand that those periods of testing do come, and that's what they are. They are periods of testing. If you are doing something you know is valuable, you know you are capable of doing, you just keep at it. And when you do, you press through that dip. I want you to imagine this line graph, it's come back down about halfway, but it begins to level off, and then at some point, through sheer effort and continual passion, it starts to turn upwards again, and then it goes all the way off the top right hand side of the page. Please understand, very few people do that. The first time adversity comes, they fall back on old habits, which means less effort, and they never get to see what happens when you persevere through it. But the people in life who are truly successful, people who have excellent businesses that everybody wants, let them tell you their story. It wasn't just straight up at a 45-degree angle from Jump Street. They had to learn about bills and off-season crowds and all kinds of setbacks, but they kept moving forward. The same is true with other examples like marriage. Maybe I make an effort with my wife and I get all of this positive reinforcement, but you know what? After a month or so, she kind of gets used to that and she's not quite so excited about it. Or maybe we both have a bad day and we get in an argument, and I'm tempted to just stop doing better. But this is the moment that separates the men from the boys. This is the moment where a truly long-term great marriage gets built, or we just restart new efforts every six months or so. A good example of this is the Excel Still More podcast. I started it in January of 2019, and for the first few months it was awesome. People were listening every week, more and more people, 500, then a thousand, then two thousand. I was so excited. I was even on the Apple New and Noteworthy page. But then around three or four months in, we hit summertime. A lot of my friends who were listening just to be nice, maybe they moved on to something else. People in the summer had differing schedules and they weren't listening to podcasts as much. And it fell. I hit a dip. It went down like 25%. And you know, I had heard when I started that like 90% of podcasts don't make it past three months. And I was kind of like, why in the world would they quit if it's something that they love? And yet there I was thinking, well, this is a failure. I guess I should just quit. But instead, I did a little research and I noticed that summers can be tough, and I just kept moving forward. Kept trying to get better at the podcasts and the sound and deal with more relevant topics, put them out every week, and wouldn't you know it, pushing through the dip, we recovered all of those people and twice as many afterwards within the next year or so. So I'm hopeful that you can visualize that chart and you can understand the value of perseverance. It certainly makes me think about our relationship with Jesus. Jesus said the way to heaven would be narrow and few would find it. And even during his ministry, there were people who followed him, they put in the effort, they received the reward, they were in the presence of Jesus. But when they became hungry or they didn't understand what he was saying, and they hit their first dip where they said, Hey, today was kind of tough. I thought every day was going to be paradise, a lot of them just left him. I'm thinking about even in the days of the church, Demas. Demas was this follower of Jesus on this upward path of enjoying the success and putting in the effort, and then it started to cost them their freedom. It started to cost some of them their lives. And in the middle of that dip of persecution, Demas left the faith because he loved this present world. He just stopped working. And yet those who stayed faithful unto death teach us something that's really out of this world. Sometimes the dip is so severe, you die in it. You say, Well, that's that's not going to work. Well, spiritually it actually does work. Even when they were persecuted, arrested, and murdered, they kept making the effort. And let me tell you, after they left this life, having persevered through the setbacks on the earth, they went into a place of glory that is off the charts. So listen, whatever effort you've put forth for spiritual gain, if it is something that you know pleases God, if it's improving your marriage, if it's improving your daily Bible study, if it's improving your willingness to spread the gospel, if it's changing your attitude or watching your language or attending services more, listen, it's going to feel great at first. Everybody experiences that. Some people live their lives chasing the immediate high and never really amounting to much. Because there is this leveling off and maybe even a bit of discouragement process where it's not exactly what you thought it would be, and that energy begins to wear off, and most people stop moving. But if you believe in it enough, if you trust in God enough, and you don't let distraction or discouragement stop you, you will reach a place that very few people experience. It is the other side of that dip. It is what happens when you get through it. You experience a strength, a doubling up of blessings, and you reach new heights. Please understand me. What I am saying to you sounds very simple, but very few people will do it. They do what is easy, they do what feels great, but when it gets hard and it doesn't feel great, they give up. And what they're missing is this is the way God built life. This is the way it works in businesses and relationships and lemonade stands and podcasts and Bible reading and exercise and all of it. You know about exercise, right? When you first start running and dieting and you speed up dramatically the first week and you lose all this weight, and then the second and third week you plateau and maybe even have some setbacks. How great does it feel in week three to weigh yourself and you gain two pounds? I remember on the biggest loser, they always lost a ton of weight in week one and sometimes even gained a little back on week two, but they were not allowed to quit. That's what they had done their whole lives. That's what almost everybody does. And that's why being the best at something or achieving excellence or becoming someone better is something that a lot of people wish they could do and don't. But what about you? Now look, I think you can apply this to all kinds of parts of your life. So I'll take a minute or two and give you a couple of things to think about from the book. You know, there are times when you should quit. There are times when you hit that dip after initial excitement and it drags on a while because you need to just quit and do something else. He talks about that and he gives two reasons for it. So I'll go ahead and share this with you. I'm talking about things of the world now, not spiritual things, and I'll emphasize that at the end. Seth says in this book, he says, you know, you just may not be very good at it. You had some initial run up, but now you're struggling and it's going on because it's not something you've been really gifted to do. I mean, maybe it's sales and you're not good at talking to people. It really isn't going to do you any good to press through because you don't have the skills or ability at that time to do it. Yeah, you do have to evaluate that. That's what a dip allows you to do. It makes you do self-evaluate. And yeah, if it's something that doesn't matter to God whether you do or do not do it, and you just aren't able, well quit and go find something that you can do. But there'll be a dip in that as well, so be ready. He also insinuates that sometimes it's just too late. Maybe when you were younger you could have done it. Someone wants to be a college athlete. They get injured as a freshman and they just don't want to do all the work and they don't feel like they're good enough, they're in the dip, and so they quit. Now they're 30 years old and say, you know what, I think I will go ahead and be a major league baseball player. Well, you probably aren't going to make it. Time is not on your side, and unfortunately, in this life, we can wait too long, quit too many times, and when we finally hear the right podcast or read the right book, it's too late. But again, even if your timing is perfect, there will be a dip, a moment of wait, of challenge for perseverance to shine through. But as we close, let me tell you what is awesome about things that you do in the name of Jesus. If they are things that God approves, if they are things that please Him, it's never the wrong time. As long as you are still breathing, no matter how many setbacks you've had, you can do it now. And it doesn't matter your ability level. He's done most of the hard work anyway. He just wants you to give it everything you have. That's great news. It means you can excel in the kingdom. But there will be struggles along the way, testings and trials, but stay focused on your purpose and your passion and press through the dip. Thank you so much for joining in today. If you enjoyed this program, consider sharing it with your family and your friends. As always, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for the email, order the three-month journal, or just catch up on old episodes. And also, if you are looking for financial advice or future planning, give John Cunningham a call today, 205 913 1720. And remember this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel still more.