Your First Job (The Sequel)

Just over a year ago, I wrote an article on The Young Professional Trap called "Your First Job." The idea was simple: before we are professionals, parents, or anything else, our actual first job, the one we're born into and never clock out of, is to grow as human beings.

I still believe that, but it isn’t the full story.

For several reasons I stopped writing in the middle of last year, and maybe the greatest of those reasons was acknowledging that I was writing about the topics I wanted to, but I wasn’t covering them in the way that I believe matters most.

The real passion underneath all my writing was never just "be a better human" or "have a healthier relationship with work". Those were and are both true, but my greatest hope was to help you (and me) discover God’s original design for work, and in doing so, to grow in our relationship with him.

That's why I’m so excited to share a new version of that newsletter, with a new name, a familiar focus, but with an explicit connection to the Lord and Savior.

Welcome to Wholehearted Work!
A weekly newsletter exploring leadership, sanctification, ambition, excellence, suffering, meaning, and the spiritual formation taking place beneath our work.

Let’s jump in.

I’ve run Grit for twelve years. For those that don’t know me, The Grit Group is a digital marketing company I started at the end of 2014. If you'd asked me in year three (or even year eleven) what I was building, I'd have given you a confident answer about culture, about growth, about the kind of company I wanted us to become.

What I wouldn't have told you, because I didn't fully see it, is that I had a scoreboard running in the background the entire time. Not the one with revenue and expenses. The scorecard I’m referring to tracked:

I want to be honest about this part: my faith language was active that whole time. I prayed over decisions. I talked about calling. I genuinely believed I was building something for God's purposes. And I was, but I was still checking the scoreboard underneath all of it, more often than I'd like to admit.

Trust me, that’s not a confession I make easily. It took years of slow, often painful realization to see it. Carolyn (my better half) always saw it before me, but it usually took a hard season with a challenging client, or a year where Grit's growth stalled, to discover how much of my identity had quietly moved onto that scoreboard.

I don’t know about you, but when I reflect on things like this, it reminds me just how great (and painful) a length that Jesus goes to pursue us and draw us to himself. I used to think of Matthew 18: 12-14 as a nice verse for whoever that person is that is the “one far off”.

"What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way, your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish."
Matthew 18:12-14

Work has been an incredible vehicle for the Lord to remind me that I am the “one far off”, but like the parable of the Prodigal Son, oh how he rejoices when we return to him (over and over).

👉 Check out what Jordan Raynor calls “the work beneath your work”. Inspired by Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor, here are some morning devotionals that dig a little further into what I’m calling “the scoreboard” 👈

There's a concept from Stephen Covey I centered around in my original YPT article, and I keep coming back to it. The central concept from his famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is about the shift from a Character Ethic to a Personality Ethic.

You can feel the pull to personality ethic in my personal scoreboard I described above. I didn’t want it to be there, but it was.

Here’s where writing this from a faith-first perspective changes everything. I don't think the shift Covey calls out is just a cultural problem. I believe it's a heart problem, and Scripture has been naming it a lot longer than Covey has.

Paul writes in Colossians, "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men" (Col 3:23). That's a redirection of the scoreboard. It's God saying, stop playing for the room. I'm the audience. I'm also the one doing the work in you while you work.

Jesus says something just as direct in Mark: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36).

So what does this mean for Covey's framework??
If you read the book, I actually believe he gets at a big piece of it in the first two habits, which center heavily on your personal mission statement and core values.

But assuming you haven’t read the book, and are just reacting to this framework, here is where I think I missed in my first article.

The Character Ethic is absolutely the right diagnosis.

But here's what I didn’t say in my original article: character isn't something we decide our way into. We can manage behavior. We can perform discipline for a season. What we cannot do is reach into our own chest and change what we love.

That's a heart problem, and Scripture has more to say about the heart than almost anything else in its pages. Use of the word “heart” appears roughly 4x more often than "faith" itself. Why? Because "out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks" (Luke 6:45). Our actions aren't the source. They're the evidence.

Here's the aha that reframed everything for me: if our real first job is what God does inside us, then our first job is actually God's job.

That's not a clever turn of phrase, it's the central theme of Scripture. "I will give you a new heart... I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). The subject of every verb is God. Not us. The only thing we ever truly contributed to our own salvation was the sin that made it necessary, Jesus paid it all (Eph 2:8-9).

I love this quote from John Piper that get’s at our job vs God’s job. Piper said, “Our job is faithfulness, God’s job is fruitfulness”. (link)

I spent over a decade missing this. You can build character on willpower for a while, Grit's early culture genuinely reflected it. But willpower-built character is brittle; it cracks under pressure or just enough time. A heart actually changed by God doesn't hold because you're disciplined enough to maintain it. It holds because something underneath has actually been replaced.

But willpower-built character is brittle; it cracks under pressure or just enough time. A heart actually changed by God doesn't hold because you're disciplined enough to maintain it. It holds because something underneath has actually been replaced.

That's why I'm writing about Wholehearted Work, not just "better work." Wholehearted isn't a trait you cultivate, it's what happens when the heart God promised to give you starts running the show.

I don’t know about you, but my reaction to that is two-fold:

I can’t wait to keep exploring this with you, and to allow the Lord minister to both of us as we do the work he’s given us to do each week.

So, if your first job, the real one, is what God is doing inside you through your work, what's He currently working on?

Whatever it is, I'd gently encourage you not to rush past it for the sake of the next milestone. My pastor recently reminded me, God’s voice is quiet, so unless you slow down, lean in, and truly listen, you’ll miss it.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have gotten some value out of this first NEW version of my weekly newsletter.

As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to talk and discuss anything from this or other posts! And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from this - I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Hope and Gratitude,

Alex

Disclaimer: I want to be clear, Covey’s work is incredible! Millions of people would agree with me. My thoughts in this article are NOT in any way intended to diminish his work. Seven Habits had a profound impact on me and The Lord has used the book in incredible ways (more on Common Grace soon)!