SPI 819: The Future of Our Children—How Teens Win with Jon Acuff

SPI 819: The Future of Our Children—How Teens Win with Jon Acuff

Jon Acuff: I think one of the tricks is parenting is being interruptible. And there’s been times I’ve been good at it and bad and bad at it. I would say in seasons of workaholism, if they interrupted me, I often reacted, like, “‘m really busy.” Like, “I’m trying to,” you know, “I’ll get to that later.”

The joke I do sometimes is have you ever been mad at your kid for interrupting your meditation? You’re meditating to learn how to be more peaceful and they get up early. That’s the day they get up early and you’re like, “How dare you? I’m trying to learn how to be at one with myself!” And you’re like, oh, this is not working. So I think being interruptible is big for parenting too, that they know they can come in and interrupt you.

Pat Flynn: Recently, I had the amazing pleasure of getting invited to an author’s retreat, and it was hosted by Donald Miller and Mike Michalowicz. So Donald Miller you might remember from Story Brand. Mike Michalowicz from Profit First, if you’ve heard of that. And there were about 30 authors in the room, and collectively I think we had sold over 12 million books just all together, and I felt like a small fish in a pond, but I also felt very grateful because that’s how I know I can grow, when I feel like I’m the person in the room who knows the least.

I know I know a lot of things and I was able to present and share a lot of things that were helpful to the group but I learned so much and I came back inspired and I just couldn’t believe the timing as well because right before I arrived, this was in early August, I had just turned in my second draft for my next book which will be my first traditionally published book so I actually got a lot of personal advice from a lot of people and who have traditionally published there.

One of those people being Jon Acuff. And Jon Acuff is somebody who I’ve had on the show before quite a long time ago. And I really connected with him because he is a 80s, Back to The Future nerd just like me. And he’s had a number of successful books under his belt, including my favorite, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done.

He also has one called Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking, which is a very underrated book in my opinion. And then he has a new book, called How Teens Win. And if you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I have a teenager now. And one that will soon be a teenager. And, life is getting crazy right now.

My son, at the time of this recording, is at band camp, and they’re starting to do all these things that they’ve never done before, and think in ways they’ve never thought before, and of course, as a parent, my wife and I, we both want our kids to succeed, and so, I figured, okay, I’m here in Nashville, my buddy Jon’s gonna be there, I haven’t talked to him for a while, he has this new book coming out, called How Teens Win.

I think I want to interview him. So we found some time early on day two of this event to grab a space and chat. So you’re going to hear the audio of this live conversation that he and I were having. I recorded it with just a couple microphones that we had lapel mics that were on our shirts. So it’s not going to sound like it normally does in my studio, but I had such a great time talking with Jon.

If you happen to have teens or going to have teens soon, or perhaps know somebody who has teens and wants them to win, and by win, I don’t mean like be the gold medalist or to always do better than others. There is a lot to that definition of win, but just win in life to succeed, to be happy. That’s what I want.

I know that’s what you want. And so listen in, this is Jon Acuff.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he believes a good story is way more important than good video quality, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Jon Acuff, author of 10 books, and just an amazing human being.

Thank you for being here for on the podcast.

Jon Acuff: Thanks for doing it.

Pat Flynn: We are here on the Don Miller estate in Tennessee, which has just been this beautiful experience and a wonderful time with other authors. But I want to speak to you specifically today, because I know you have a book that I want to learn a lot more about because it has to do with teenagers.

And as you might know, I have a teenager coming into this world very soon. So tell me a little bit about this book, what inspired it? I know you have a couple of kids as well.

Jon Acuff: Yeah. So it started a few years ago. I wrote a book called Soundtracks about mindset, and it was my seventh book, but it was the first time that parents came out of the woodwork and said, Hey, do you have a teen version that had never happened?

I wrote a book called finish. Parents didn’t ask about that. A book called Do Over, no parents asked. But with mindset, they started to say, if I could have learned how to change my mindset at 13, 14, 15, it would have changed the whole arc of my life. And what I realized is. I often deal with people in their late 40s, executives say, that are being given more opportunity and they’re pulling back.

And they’re sometimes even self sabotaging. If you pull the thread, you find out often at 14 somebody in authority told them they’re not a natural leader. And they believe that and they listen to that soundtrack for 30 years. And so I realized, wow, teenagers right now are having a hard going. Nashville, for instance, where we are, it’s a four to six month wait for teen counseling.

So when a teen is finally brave enough to go like, Hey, I need some help. They go, great. We’ll see you in half a year. So I knew I needed to write some books that were aimed at that, that audience. But if I wrote them, it’d be like an adult trying to sound like a youth, like, hello, fellow youths. Like, you sure do scooter more like.

I was skate or die. Like don’t crease the J’s. Like it would just be terrible. But I did have two teenage daughters at the time. And so we sat down and came up with a teen version of Soundtracks, which inspired the new one, which is called How Teens Win. So I wrote a book about goals and so many parents I talked to will say, how do I get my kid motivated?

What does that look like? Can I teach a kid how to do goals that’ll serve them for the rest of their life. So that’s the second book in the teen series. And what’s been fun is a lot of schools have already picked up the first one. A lot of high schools. My goal is in the future, teens will be taught mindset in the same way they’re taught finances.

Now, like 30 years ago, we gave kids, teens know financial advice. We’d go, here’s a credit card. Try not to buy a jet ski. And then they would wreck their life. And now every freshman in America has a personal finance class. So I hope in the future, every freshman will have a mindset class. Every freshman will have a goals class, because I think they’re the kind of tools that there’s a lot of people in this room, a lot of the authors that would say, took me to my late twenties to learn how to do some of this stuff.

I wish somebody had pulled me aside and said, Hey, here’s the tools. So that’s where these type of books came from for me.

Pat Flynn: So I mean, this isn’t your specialty, psychology and teens and stuff like, how did you do the research that you put into this book?

Jon Acuff: Well, I mean, a big part of it was making sure it was written from a teenage perspective.

So a lot of it was it’s me going to my own teens and other teens and saying, here’s what I think, where am I wrong? And they would go, Oh, that might’ve been true for you 20 years ago, but here’s how we think about that. So a lot of it was actually being in the trenches with teenagers and saying, okay, here’s my perspective as a parent or as somebody who’s 48, what’s your perspective on this?

What am I missing? What do I, so having my own kids and other teenagers they were really the content creators. Where I would say, here’s an idea. I think, and they’d go, no, nobody struggles with that. Like, cause it’s very easy as a parent to go, I bet these are the five things they’re thinking about. And then when you actually listen and engage with them, they go, no, for those, we don’t care about this one though, all our energies around that.

Pat Flynn: Do you have an example of one that maybe we thought as adults that they would be interested in?

Jon Acuff: It’s a joke I sometimes do is I didn’t know Mean Girls was a documentary until I had teenagers. Like I used to think it was a movie. And so just the pressure of the lunchroom, and then you add COVID, like COVID added politics to teenagers in a way it’s never been.

Freshmen weren’t divided politically as aggressively until COVID, because then they were masked and unmasked. And it’s so, politics trickled down way earlier than it did for our generation. Where there, I guarantee in 8th grade, you weren’t like, you know, remember, like, Sam’s a Republican, be like, or remember, like, so it added a ton of controversy and a ton of pressure. So that was one example of like, wow, they’re on the political front lines more than my generation was because of how the pandemic became a political issue. So that would just be an example of like, wow, they’re dealing with that pressure in a way that I didn’t have to deal with.

Pat Flynn: And my family and I just saw Mean Girls. And it was the kids first time seeing it. And there were moments where they were like, Yep. Mm hmm.

Jon Acuff: Yeah. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: And that is a little scary because that movie definitely takes the dynamics that I remember as a high school student to a whole new level but apparently it is there.

Yeah. The burn book and all these other things.

Jon Acuff: One! Think about, here’s another example of it. Prom, for me, was not as pressure filled as it is for kids. Because of Instagram, it’s a performance culture. So, there’s less kids going to the prom together in our community because of the pressure, because you have to do a sign, because it has to be elaborate, because you have to do a video. ,

Pat Flynn: Like the proposal part.

Jon Acuff: The proposal part. So, there’s less boys asking because they go, well, I don’t, I don’t even know how I’d creatively do it. I don’t have the budget to even do the ask, nevermind afford the corsage. Like there’s an expectation. And so that’s an interesting wrinkle where like for us, it was somebody asked you in the hall and you decided to go. And now because we’re a performance culture, it’s, was the sign creative? Was there, you know, were there fireworks? Was there a video that made, and so there’s extra layers. And we see that as adults. So like the adult version of that is you have to propose to your bridesmaids now. There’s this whole situation like in modern West, you do a thing where you go, you give them a bag and there’s this big thing and it’s a big deal.

And there’s a video. So, so it’s just trickling down. And where you see it as parents is like with my parents, they never had to have a graduation from fifth grade sign in their yard. That wasn’t, they didn’t have to order it. They didn’t have to coordinate it. And so now we keep seeing kind of this performance culture trickle down.

And that’s what I see a lot of teenagers. So like talking with my teens about. What is that struggle like? Well, what was that pressure like? And, and they’ll say, well, that’s why we’re going as a group. We’re just going with 10 friends. Like we’re not doing the, at least in my high school, there weren’t a lot of people that went in groups of 10 that weren’t connected.

It was unheard of. And so that’s, what’s been interesting to me is seeing them navigate social media, seeing them navigate how that changes, how teens interact.

Pat Flynn: So how do teens win today?

Jon Acuff: Well, a big part of it is they have the conversations. And so I think as a parent, what we can do as parents is encourage a passion, but not suffocate it.

That’d just be one example of a goal. So for instance, recently I ran a half marathon with my youngest daughter. She’s 18 years old. That was her first half marathon. And people said to me, what was your time goal? What was your time goal? And I would say back, I had two goals. One that at the end of it, she didn’t hate running and she didn’t hate me.

And so if you’re a parent, there’s this temptation where your six year old shows an interest in art and you go, they’re an artist and every gift becomes art related, every birthday becomes art related, every Christmas becomes art related and it suffocates them. And so as a parent, the dance, I feel like one of the dances you do is you go, how do I encourage the passion, but how do I not suffocate it where it’s now their identity?

And I put this pressure. I talked to somebody, they were a college swimmer, and they said, college swim coaches are now recruiting kids who haven’t swum until they are sophomores or juniors because they’re not burned out. And they’re recognizing that if a kid starts at six, by the time they hit freshman year, they’re burned out of the sport.

And so they’re trying to find kids that have just gotten into the sport late because there’s, again, we start sports for kids when they’re in the womb. Like there’s flag football for like zygotes and you’re like, okay, I remember my oldest daughter when she was nine started swimming and she said, it’s too late.

And so kids now go, it’s too late. I should have started. Cause she saw four year olds at swim practice. So she did the math and said, I’m five years too late. This is going to be too late. And we had to encourage her and go, you’re not too late. And you and I would go, we meet people, I guarantee people come up to you and go, it’s too late to do a podcast.

Like podcasts are kind of like, I missed it. I missed that. I missed YouTube. I missed whatever. And, and you and I would both go, no, there’s, there’s new stuff starting. Like it’s a great time to start a podcast and we forget that kids are processing that same kind of feeling. And you go, it’s not too late at nine.

It’s not too late at six. So I think as a parent reminding them of the truth, it’s not too late, but also creating a space where you can encourage their goals, but not suffocate them.

Pat Flynn: How do you encourage that communication at that age? I know that when I was a kid, I was. Almost afraid to talk to my parents about certain things or that I’d let them down if I didn’t want to do something anymore.

How do you encourage that honest, open line of communication?

Jon Acuff: Well, I think one, it’s consistently. So as a parent, it’s your job to be consistently owning the conversation. There’s no moment where you go, I’ll just wait for my kids to talk to me about that. I would like, you’re the one that has to be the pursuer.

You’re pursuing it. It’s consistent. You have to be the brave one to accept the rejection. Like if they’re frustrated, if they’re grumpy, they had a bad day at school and they don’t know how to process it, you have to be brave enough to keep going back to it. And then you also have to understand it’s going to involve other people.

So like for me, my oldest daughter had a small group leader from sixth grade to 11th grade that I know she told that person things she hadn’t told me because she was processing them in a group of other girls. And as a parent, you have the illusion of control when they’re young, and the older they get, the more your hands open up and go, No, I can’t control if they get invited to the par I control if they have friends in college.

Like, I can’t I love those things, and I I yearn for those things, but I have to be pretty open handed with it. So, some of it is going, while they’re in mentor relationships, they’ve got good teachers, there’s other parents that we talk about, and then you just find situations where, You know, it’s easy to talk.

Like one of the things we did deliberately was we would do activities where it was hard to be on the phone. So I didn’t love kayaking, but I love that my kids, when we are on a kayak together and our neighborhood and this little river couldn’t be on their phones because the phone is in the car or hiking where we didn’t have a signal.

So like this summer we hiked, you know, a hundred miles on trails in North Carolina, where with my 20 year old daughter. And when you’re on a six mile hike and there’s nothing to do but look at the view, like stuff comes up and I’m able to say, Hey, so it’s finding moments like that where conversation has a chance to happen.

The mistakes I made as a dad or like a lot of dads would be like, Oh, I want to have a quality conversation right now. Like let’s go. And what I found is like, if I throw a Frisbee with my daughter for a hundred times. Time number 87 is where she’ll say, yeah, there’s a situation that is really frustrating to me.

I don’t know what to do. But like, if I go, well, time number seven is when it’ll happen or time number that a lot of it takes her trusting that I’m there, I’m going to put in the work for it. And it’s going to happen on her timeframe, not mine as a parent. Like anytime I try to have a heart to heart and it backfires because it feels manufactured and it feels prepared and yeah, yeah It feels like a tv dad where you’re like, hey, we’ve got 22 minutes to wrap this up.

Tell me about boys. What do you think about boys. And it’s like what like she doesn’t want that at all.

Pat Flynn: How does one navigate that with two kids? I’ve I once heard that it can be difficult to have those personal conversations when the other sibling is in the room with them. Do you do like one on ones in a way or date nights?

Jon Acuff: You allow each kid to be their own kid. As soon as you have more than one kid, you realize that came with their own personalities. They came with their own brains. They came with their own. And so a lot of it is you allow like my, I ran the half marathon with my youngest daughter. My oldest daughter hates running, hates it. And if I tried to push that, that would cause tension.

So I know, I get to run with my youngest daughter. We have some conversations after the run. We have some conversations on the way to the, you know, on the way to the run. So my oldest daughter loves throwing Frisbee. So we throw a lot of Frisbee together. So I think a lot of it is you find the things you can do with them.

Like my youngest daughter loves sushi. So we’ll go out to sushi. And so a lot of it is one on one, but we make a real habit of family dinner. Like we have dinner, I would say when they were in the house, cause they’ve the youngest just graduated. I would say six out of seven nights. Now there are seasons.

We talked about high school band. My, my oldest daughter was in high school band. They were like, when you were in the throes of high school band, there were times where she’d get home at nine o’clock, 10 o’clock after a long practice to that season. Yeah. So I would never go like we had the dinner every time, like, your life gets busy and you want it to get busy. You want them to have activities like that. So, but I think dinner was a big part of it. We played a ton of card games. We, one of our family rules is that you can learn a lot about a person through a card game. Like we’ve taught that as a dating principle to our daughters.

Cause like you learn, if somebody cheats, you learn, if they get angry over stuff, that doesn’t matter. You learn, if they can’t sit still for two seconds, you learn, if they’re dumb, like if you can’t do UNO, like that. Like you’re not ready for a lot of things.

Pat Flynn: And so, that’s a red card.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like, we do a lot of family games, but I think a lot of it is like, you’re just putting in the time.

Like, and then, like, one of our principles is choose rare. Like, I choose rare. So, like, the other day, like, Three weeks ago, my youngest daughter was like, can we get coffee today? I was like, totally. And she was like, can we get it at 9am? And it was a Monday and I’m a go, go, go guy. So like a Monday at 9am, like I’m trying to go, but I did what’s rare. Like, wow, she’s going to college in like six weeks. I’m going to do the coffee at 9. I can work the rest of my life. And then my oldest daughter, the next day it was like, let’s play pickleball at 8am. It was a Tuesday at 8am. And as somebody who likes to go, I was like, man, Tuesday at 8am I’m supposed to be going.

But I thought I have a very narrow window. And if a kid asks you to do something, you often to the best of your abilities will clear the schedule. And so if a teenager reaches out and goes, can we get coffee? You go, I’ll move everything. So I think one of the tricks is parenting is being interruptible.

And there’s been times I’ve been good at it and bad and bad at it. I would say in seasons of workaholism, if they interrupted me, I often reacted like, I’m really busy. Like I’m trying to, you know, I’ll get to that later. Like I, the joke I do sometimes is have you ever been mad at your kid for interrupting your meditation?

Like you’re meditating to learn how to be more peaceful and they get up early. That’s the day they get up early and you’re like, how dare you? I’m trying to learn how to be at one with myself. And you’re like, oh, this is not working. So I think being interruptible is big for parenting too, is like that they know they can come in and interrupt you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I have specific memories of me going to my dad, asking him to play ball or something. And he, In his TV program or something. Yeah. You know, I’m like, okay, well, you know, I didn’t think this at the time, but looking back, it’s like, okay, well, I guess that was more important then.

Jon Acuff: Well, as a kid, you do, they’re smart.

Like our kids are smart and they’re picking up all these cues. So I think even just a goal of being interruptible is an interesting goal because it’s not a word we use a lot, but I’m like, no, I want my wife, I’m not interruptible for a ton of people, but for the small little people that have my name, like I want to be interruptible.

Pat Flynn: So, 18 and 20. Yeah. So, you’ve had the conversation about career and, you know, college and, and such. What is it like for a teen today to think about their future? I know it’s a lot different than when you and I were kids where it was pretty much laid out for us.

Jon Acuff: So, this book Soundtracks about mindset. We say sounds are everywhere.

so a soundtrack would be, there’s money everywhere on the ground if you’re willing to pick it up. Like, so we are very deliberate about pointing out opportunities. So we’re really deliberate about going, like an example would be, at the high school, in front of the high school, there’s like 50 houses and the town expanded the road and gave them all the same mailbox.

And that was probably eight years ago and the mailboxes are all faded. So we would say something like, hey, Those faded mailboxes, like a high school kid, if they went door to door and offered to paint those mailboxes for 50 bucks a pop and they hit 50 doors, like 10 of them would say, yes, that’s 500 for like, that’s a great little business.

There’s money everywhere. So we’re trying to open their eyes to opportunity and say like, Hey, that was a, so a funny example of that would be my oldest daughter the other day. I went into a bookstore, local bookstore, and I, I said, Oh, I love your store. And because I love bookstores and I bought a book and I said, I’m an author, I live right over there.

And they said, all right, cool. And then when I got to the car, I told my daughter that story and she said, Oh, they should have posted you on Instagram. They should have said, what books do you have?

They miss the opportunity. So like teaching them how to see opportunity is a big part of it. But then also like giving them the idea that like, you’re going to chase a million different paths. Like, let’s figure it out. So my oldest daughter loves crafting, loves patterns. She’s got a mathematical mind. So we talked to her about like, let’s try accounting. Like that might fit your personality. And she was willing, like, we didn’t say you have to be an accountant.

We said of the things. Well you know how you love to make sweaters like that’s pattern recognition. Like so sometimes seeing the strengths they have and then helping them connect it to a possible career. Yeah coaching them. So like my youngest daughter is a people person like she loves people So we’ve said to her let’s not find a career where you’re alone in a cubicle and you’re separated. So a lot of it is as parents one of your jobs is to be a mirror and hold a mirror to that kid and go, Hey, here’s who we see you.

This is who you are. These are the things you love. So like when my young, my youngest daughter was a camp counselor for nine weeks this summer, and she loved working with those kids. So in that situation, we might go you, when we picked you up from camp, you were on. fire. You were so full. What was going on there?

Oh, wow. You were in a community, a small community, or maybe a small school would be a girl like, oh, wow. You got to teach kids like maybe working with kids. Oh, wow. It was, there was a lot of outdoor time. Maybe you need some outdoor time. So helping them see what lights them up because the, I think it was Roy Williams, this author who said it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.

And that’s why we need rooms like this. We need rooms like this so that somebody else can go, Pat, I see this about you. And like every time you talk about it, you light up and, and you might not know that’s a topic you need to sit on, but man, you need to sit on that. You told me these 10 topics, but this one, like, I think that’s mirroring back to them who they are so that they can then go.

So that’s the decision I want to make.

Pat Flynn: That’s so good. How do you, as a guide to your children, navigate that through a lot of the societal expectations and school expectations, counselor expectations, getting 4.0 and not feeling good enough and all that kind of stuff?

Jon Acuff: Yeah. I mean, I, again, I think it depends on the kid, like what motivates them in the same way that like, If you talk to 10 adults, you’d go, well, this one’s motivated by competition.

This one shrinks in competition. They don’t like that. So like my oldest daughter, she said, I wish we still did class rank. That would have really motivated me. They don’t do that at our school. She said that would have really motivated me. I think my youngest daughter wouldn’t have been motivated by that.

So, so I think as a parent, you’re constantly trying to go, okay, this is what encourages them. This is what motivates them. The pressure, like we’re deliberate about stuff and I like, we don’t keep a scale out. Like we don’t want weight to like, we’re trying to be deliberate about weight. If you said, okay, there’s five things.

It’s like, we talk about social media a lot. The challenge with parents of social media is they give social media, their kids, like they gave them a bike, like, Hey, here’s your bike. Good luck riding the bike. And there’s not check ins. There’s not conversation where like, Social media is an ongoing conversation.

So like, have you bumped into anything you weren’t expecting to see? Have you, so I think I would say there’s five or six different things we think about, like whether it’s like how they feel about themselves physically, like we’re deliberate about that social media money, like how we talk about money in our family, lessons we see, like we’re constantly trying to go, okay, why do you think that person did that?

Like, what could they have done differently? How would we as a family have done it differently? So we try to be really deliberate about that.

Pat Flynn: I like that. How does one deal with, and I know I’m going to be going through this very soon, with my son 14, my daughter 11, there’s hormonal changes and things and just they’re not who you thought they were and they might one day lash out and i’m hearing stories from Hal Elrod about his daughters It’s like that scares me, you know, because we can do as much as we can to prepare them but then things change

Jon Acuff: I would say we don’t buy into some of the kind of broken soundtracks i’d say of culture. Like people say to you, Oh, you’ve got about to have teenagers, do they hate you yet? Like, I don’t accept that that has to happen. No, it’s garbage. Like kids are different at different ages, but you don’t have to go like, no, now’s the season where they hate me. And I expect that yesterday is funny. Yesterday, somebody said to me, In this room, yeah, my kids think I’m really funny right now, but I know that’s going to end.

And I said, hold on a second, like, cause I’m 10 years ahead. And I said, that doesn’t have to be that way. As you spend time, you develop personal inside jokes with them. Like you have a shared language. And so my kids making them laugh now, it’s a different challenge than being silly when they were six.

But now like I can text them a GIF that we’ve texted before and it’s a callback and they’re 20 and they can get it. So I think part of it is going, I don’t accept that your teenagers have to hate you. I don’t accept that it has to be miserable. Is it challenging? It definitely is, but I think every phase of parenting has its own set of challenges.

So like, I think as a parent, you just get used to the space that you won’t know where it’s going emotionally all the time. So there’ll be transitions between laughing and crying where you didn’t see the transition coming and you’ll go, Oh, we were joking about a thing and now crying. And so, and the other thing as a parent, I think it’s good to remember you have access to the words, I’m sorry, or I was wrong.

I made a mistake. So I think as a parent and teen, and when they’re adolescents, you have more opportunities to go, Hey, I reacted in anger there, or I was afraid and I, I took that out on you in a way that wasn’t fair.

Pat Flynn: And owning up to that is so eyeopening for a child to see like, Oh, I guess I don’t have to be perfect.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, I don’t have to be perfect, or I don’t have to be like amazing at everything. Insane, anytime that they struggle with perfectionism, we would say like, we’re not saying you can’t get a B. And if we have, we apologize. Like, if there’s times that we felt, we created that pressure for you. No, no, no, no, no.

Like we are, cause they would put a lot of that pressure on themselves and we would have to kind of come in the back of the conversation and go, wait a second, who’s judging you right now? Cause it’s not us. It’s not us, we’re on the team. Yeah, and you remind them of that. Like, that was one of the things. I worked for Dave Ramsey for three years, and we had a team meeting every Wednesday, and what I learned from that was, he repeated the things he wanted our culture to be every Wednesday for an hour.

Every Wednesday. And a lot of leaders go, did a January kickoff. So now the team knows for the rest of the year. And that’s not true of adults. It’s definitely not true of kids. And so saying those things a lot, but yeah, I, that’s one of those things I push back on. Like it doesn’t have to, like, Teenage years don’t have to be terrible.

They don’t have to be miserable. Again, there’s just different challenges of friend groups and, and that’s where as a dad you go, Hey, I haven’t seen Macy in a long time. Like I haven’t talked to her in six months. We don’t talk anymore. And you go, but you guys were so close in sixth grade. Like, and you go, yeah, what happened?

And sometimes what happened is they just had, they’ve got put in different sections of school and that was that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So before we finish up here,

The book itself, tell me about your publishing career and where it is and where it’s going.

You’re so prolific and you’re writing about more and different things now. I’m curious to know where you’re going with all this.

Jon Acuff: Yeah, the, the teen books kind of caught me by surprise. They weren’t part of a big plan. I often feel like as an author, when I watch other people, I’m like, man, they had a 40 year plan that they just worked perfectly.

Yeah. And that’s not my case. Like I wasn’t expecting to do a teen version of soundtracks and that just kind of happened. And so we leaned into that. So I think the, we’ll probably do an additional book. I could see one of my kids doing their own book. What’s been fun about it is they read the audio books.

So the feedback we’ve received, as parents will say to us, I’ll never get my 15 year old boy to read a book. But what we did was we listened to it on the carpool to soccer practice. And we listened to a chapter and that started a conversation. And because it was in your teenager’s voice, not yours, they were able to listen to it in a different way.

And I was able to have, like, we had a really fun, you know, conversation. And that’s the thing about parenting. I think like to engage in goals and make the goals fun. I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine named Kevin, he said to his son, I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you run one mile a day, every day for a year.

And he did it and they local sporting goods store did a banner for him. It did a news story on him. And so I shared that idea on a podcast and I got a letter yesterday from another mom that said, I heard that on a podcast. My son just did the same thing and sent us, send me a picture of this kid crossing the finish line.

And again, it wasn’t, you have to do 10 miles a day, but it was. I think as parents and as adults, part of our job is to go, I see something in you you don’t see in yourself yet, and I’m going to help nurture that. I’m going to help call that out. I really believe as individuals, we can’t call ourselves beyond ourselves, but there’s so much there.

And so I think as adults, there’s a lot of adults I work with that. Like if they have 10 gears, they think they’re at gear eight already. And they’re often at gear three and the joy of going, Oh, you got, you got so much in you, you got like, and I guarantee if you went back through your life, you go, Oh, these four people, these five people saw something in me I didn’t see. And they called it out of me. So the books I write, that’s what I hope they continue to do. Whether they’re for adults or whether for teenagers is go, there’s something in you and it’s there. That’s And I want to encourage that and equip that. And here’s a couple tools that have worked for me.

Try ’em in your life.

Pat Flynn: Jon, thank you so much for this I am, and the service you’re doing for families out there and, and all of us. I appreciate it, Pat. Thanks for having me. Where can we go pick up the book and the books?

Jon Acuff: Books called How Teens Win. It’s available everywhere books are sold. The audio super fun.

It’s what a lot of parents have said they’ve, they’ve listened to it. JonAcuff.com.

Pat Flynn: Fellow Back to the Future fan right here.

Jon Acuff: Love it. Love it. Got all the Lego sets, all the, all the Back to the Future Lego sets. I told him the DeLorean moment was amazing and that was nine years ago.

So I’m still thinking about it. So I love that you create moments of delight for people.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Jon Acuff, check him out. All the links in the description or on the resource page. Appreciate you, man.

Jon Acuff: Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. It was just such an absolute pleasure to be able to conduct that in person.

There’s a different kind of energy when I’m in the literal same room with somebody who I’m interviewing, I might take note of that for the future. Wink, wink. You’ll see what happens. We will all see what happens. This will likely live on YouTube and just, I’m so grateful for Jon and his time and wanting to hook up with me earlier so that we can get that in before our second day at this Authors for Authors Nashville event.

Again, to everybody who hosted that event to Donald Miller, Mike Michalowicz and everybody who was there. Michael Hyatt, my buddy Chris Ducker, Amy Porterfield. I got to meet Jenna Kutcher and so many others. It was just, again, I felt so incredible to be in that room. So grateful, feel very blessed. And I’m happy to have connected with people like Jon to be able to record stuff like this to pass forward to you, so I hope you enjoyed it.

Definitely check out JonAcuff.com. This book is now out by the time this episode comes out. How Teens Win. Definitely check it out.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. All the best.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!