Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Life

In Doers We Trust?

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Blank stare. Tossed hair. And a longing to be elsewhere.

If you’re up for it, let’s play a game of “Guess Who?” It’s simple. Just try and guess who I’m looking at right now.

Hangry, irritable, and unable to focus.

Is a picture of someone forming in your mind? Here are a few more descriptors: Piles of dirty laundry, protein bar wrappers in the trash, and a cup of coffee that’s been warmed up one too many times.

If you guessed a prisoner, an executive, or a working parent, you’re close, but not quite there yet. If you guessed yourself, you’re closer, but that probably means one of two things—you’re either sleep deprived or a doer.

Recently, one of the largest online marketplaces for freelancers ran an ad campaign in New York subways plastering up headshots of doers and excerpts from their interviews. They called this campaign, “The Year of Do,” with the catchy tag line, “In Doers We Trust.”

Here’s the excerpt from the ad I’m looking at, “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Apparently doing has become a badge of honor. A status symbol. And the way to define ourselves.

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7 Lies The World Tells Us, 7 Biblical Truths That God Tells Us

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Did you know that there’s a YouVersion Bible Reading Plan to go along with my newest book?

It’s seven days long and a great way to dig deeper and reflect on the 7 biblical truths that are on the flip side of the 7 lies that the world is shouting at us.

I want to invite you to start this reading plan today, and perhaps you can invite a few friends to join you while you’re at it!

Click here to get started.

A New (or Ancient) Way of Addressing the Lies of our Culture

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The gig economy affects everyone and everything. It’s the new normal and it matters.

But as I’ve been sharing over the past few weeks, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. The seven lies of the gig economy all hold a critical role in the way that you see yourself, but they are not the way to see yourself because they all come up short.

They’re incomplete precisely because they’re half-truths. As a result, there are unintended consequences behind each and every one of them.

This is why you can’t let any of these lies become the primary lens through which you view yourself, and also why we’re so particularly vulnerable to these lies.

Living according to the lies of the gig economy is like living in chains.

It’s tiring.

It’s a grind and a hustle just to try and keep up. And it’s actually a fool’s game because you will never feel caught up.

Living according to the lies of the gig economy is like living in chains.
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The Unintended Consequences of the Gig Economy

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In our culture today, doing has become a badge of honor.

It’s become a status symbol and the way to define ourselves.

The same is true with the rest of the lies of the gig economy that I breakdown in my new book, You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love.

Doing has become a badge of honor. It’s become a status symbol and the way to define ourselves.
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Our sense of meaning and significance have become tied to our experiences, our relationships, our knowledge, our stuff, our children and our past. However, the thing with each of these lies is that they all have unintended consequences.

  • A life of doing leads to a life of worrying
  • A life of experiences leads to a life of comparison
  • A life seeking acceptance from others leads to a loss of self
  • A life focused on the pursuit of knowledge leads to a life of despair
  • A life amassing stuff leads to a life of imprisonment
  • A life that revolves around your children leads to a life of narcissism
  • And a life lived in the past leads to a life of regret and pain
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Cauliflower, Podcasting, and Amazon Prime

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(The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my newest book, You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love)

If there’s anything constant in life, it’s change.

Just consider how commonplace cauliflower, podcasting, and Amazon Prime have become—and how quickly it’s happened.

If there’s anything constant in life, it’s change.
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Growing up, no one ever talked about cauliflower, let alone wanted to eat the tasteless and smelly thing.

Yet recently, you’ve probably tried (or heard of) cauliflower rice, cauliflower pizza crust, cauliflower buffalo wings, or cauliflower tots. And if you haven’t, your friends have. Now just to give you a sense of its meteoric rise, in a short span of three years, Green Giant has gone from harvesting five to thirty acres of cauliflower each week. That’s 100,000 heads of cauliflower every single day! And they are just one of the many companies that have hopped on the cauliflower bandwagon.

A similar thing has happened with podcasting.

When I started listening to podcasts in 2008, it was a multistep process that required a computer. Today, however, with the ubiquity of smartphones, listening to podcasts has become so commonplace and normal that the question has shifted from “Have you heard of podcasts?” to “Which podcasts do you listen to?” In fact, in the last five years, close to half of all Americans and Canadians tuned into their first podcast episode.

And let’s not forget the explosive growth of Amazon Prime.

Now that more than half of all American households are subscribing members, isn’t it odd to meet someone who doesn’t have it? It’s definitely become the exception, rather than the norm.

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