John Walt

My Journey and invitation.

Below is a quick overview of the journey I have been on and why I have started sharing my notes on wisdom.

My Dad was my first mentor, as a young man, he talked to me constantly about the importance of wisdom as we rode in the car to job sites and while we worked together. When I was 18, I kept reading in Proverbs that wisdom is the most precious thing we can have. So I promised myself that for the rest of my life, I would search for wisdom, and when I saw it, I would stop what I was doing and go and get it. That led me to spend tons of time with some really incredible people, read lots of great books and pursue more of God.

Ten years ago, two things happened that dramatically changed my life and journey. The first was I fell in love with my wife, Heather, and she just happened to have a PhD in Performance Psychology. She opened a whole new world for me by showing me how you can renew your mind and introducing me to incredible research and books about shaping your thought patterns. The second thing that happened was I met a mentor who became my second father. He jumped into the trenches and walked with me through the biggest transformation of my life.

I met Scott when he was in the process of retiring from being CEO and Chairman of the board of Superfeet. He had asked God what he was supposed to do next and God told him to mentor young business men. Then I showed up and Scott began to invite me into what it truly means to be a disciple of Jesus. He started talking to me about the importance of dying to self and letting go of everything that keeps us from God.

Several years later, stuff was hitting the fan in my life and I called him to ask him what to do, I was at the end of my rope. Scott simply replied, well, it seems like a great time to die. Suddenly everything he had been talking to me about for the last couple of years just clicked. I went home and started to methodically surrender all of my dreams and deepest desires to God. I literally let go of them. They were what was driving my life and what I normally held onto when things got tough. This was the hardest thing I had ever done because the dreams I was chasing had driven my life so far and now I was letting go of them.

Then, a strange thing started to happen. God began to build a new life for me full of things I had never known I wanted. Literally, everything about my life started to look different. That wasn’t the last time I had to die but it was the last time I put up a fight. Once I realized I don’t actually know who I am created to be and what I truly want, then embracing dying became so much easier. I go through the dying process regularly, God is continually showing me something I need to let go of. I am blessed that this journey has transformed me, how I work, what I do and how I live.

This process has taken years and I will be on it for the rest of my life. Looking back I have spent thousands of hours with Scott and other incredible mentors. I am a structural and first-principle thinker, so I love to organize concepts and principles to understand how they relate to each other. Simplifying and synthesizing abstract things is part of who I am. Last year I began organizing my notes and what I have learned on this journey to help me pass it along to my young kids. Then, some close friends encouraged me to share these notes with others through a weekly newsletter.

“Transformation is inevitable, the question is, what are we being transformed into.” - Scott Dohner

In order to become who we are created to be, we all must go through transformation, but our modern world has forgotten this simple truth. Most of us don’t even know what it means or how to go on the journey. I believe that a complete transformation journey requires several things to happen simultaneously.

Dying to the false self - Letting go of false identities, beliefs, desires and fears.
Renewing your mind - Reshaping our thought patterns to help us instead of hurting and hindering us.
Growing spiritually - Developing a real relationship with God where he speaks to you and guides your life.
Building your life on wisdom - Aligning how we live with how God’s creation is designed to function.

Instead of being led into the transformation we are created for, our culture subtly traps us in cycles of self-gratification. The most dangerous lie that is unique to our modern world is that: “You deserve to have what you want when you want it.” We are probably the first culture in human history with enough wealth to believe this across socio-economic brackets and throughout every stage of life. This lie is dangerous because it convinces us that we shouldn’t let go of what we think we want. It tells us to trust our feelings above all else. It is reaffirmed constantly around us through the ethos of our culture, the content we engage with, and the industries we rely on.

When we are hungry, we are told we should eat, and we have thousands of options waiting for us. When we are horny, we are told we should have our needs met. When we are lonely we have social media to make us feel connected. When we are scared, anxious or stressed, we can distract ourselves with mountains of entertainment. If we feel sad, we should take a pill, eat a gummy, or have another drink. What if our true self was on the other side of feeling hungry, horny, lonely, scared, anxious and sad? And what if where God wanted to meet us was in the desert, just past the place of comfort we have become so accustomed to? What if believing we should have what we want is keeping us from the path to life?

There is never enough of anything that almost works. - Larry Mills.

The only path to fulfillment in life is to let go of who we think we are, what we think is true, and what we believe we want in order to allow God to show us who he created us to be.

My greatest passion has become helping people go on the transformation journey God has for them. None of us know who we are or what we really want. I see so many people in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s who are stuck and confused. They are looking for the journey that every person needs to go on, but they don’t know what it is or how to find it.

Scott showed me what this journey was and guided me through it. He had been through it himself years before, and it had changed everything about his life. When I sat down with him I was able to look at a man I wanted to be like and trust him when he invited me to let go of the desires and identities I had built my life on.

There is a lot of Christian teaching about growing spiritually but much less about how to die to self, renew your mind and build your life on wisdom. Renewing your mind is a serious process of identifying your patterns of thinking and intentionally reshaping them. The Bible talks a lot about this, but it takes on a new and deeper meaning in light of what psychology research tells us about our minds. Understanding wisdom and building your life on it creates a deeply rooted foundation for a family that ripples out and impacts communities.

It is impossible to become who we really are created to be without going through the dying process of letting go of who we think we are. Every wisdom writing throughout history that I have seen seems to know this and practice it in some way. Now, we have more connection and knowledge than ever before by many orders of magnitude, but we have somehow lost the simplest truths about who we are and how we are created to live.

The function of discipleship in the Biblical context was to facilitate a transformation journey. Disciple is not just a name for people who believe in Jesus, it was and is an intense transformation journey.

If you are curious about this journey, I would like to invite you to read my weekly notes. I have covered a lot in this note without going in depth. There is so much to unpack here, and I will address it from a spiritual perspective, as well as, delve into the social, historical and psychological perspectives on transformation journeys, their role in our lives, societal impact and spiritual significance.

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- John Walt