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 this new version of that newsletter, with a new name, a familiar focus, but with an explicit connection to the Lord and Savior.

I ran Grit for twelve years. If you'd asked me in year three (or even year 11) 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 one that tracked whether I was respected. Whether the year's numbers said something good about me. Whether I could walk into a room of other founders and feel like I belonged there.

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 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).

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.

Here’s where writing this from a faith-first perspective changes everything. I don't think that shift is just a cultural problem. I think 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 not a productivity verse. 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??
I think he was right about almost everything, BUT the one thing he couldn't give us is the thing we need most.

The Character Ethic is the right diagnosis.

But here's what I couldn't say in the 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 four times 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 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.

This is the conviction underneath everything I'm building with The Poiema Project. Poiema is the Greek word Paul uses in Ephesians 2:10, "For we are his workmanship", a poem, something crafted by a maker's hand. The verse isn't about what we make. It's about what's being made of us.

So here's the reframe I'm living in these days, and the one I hope you'll sit with this week too:

That doesn't make the building unimportant. Grit matters. The P&L matters. Showing up and doing excellent, faithful work matters enormously! Paul doesn't say work halfheartedly because God's really after your soul. He says work heartily. Fully. With everything you've got.

But the why underneath the what changes everything. You stop white-knuckling outcomes you can't control, because the outcome was never the actual job. You start noticing what your work is forming in you, your patience, your honesty, your willingness to be wrong, your capacity to love people who frustrate you. James puts words to this directly: "Let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing" (James 1:4). The forming isn't a side effect of good work. It's how the Lord uses your work to mold you more into his image.

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