Intentional Living and the Freedom to Fail – Larry O’Nan on Purpose, Resilience, and Stewardship

Brad Minus: Welcome back to another episode of Life Changing Challengers. Hey everybody. I have Larry Onan with us today. 

Larry O'Nan: It's Onan. It looks Irish, but it's really French. 

Brad Minus: Really? 

Larry O'Nan: Well, there was a time of the Inquisition in the guillotine in France.

The Huga knots and I was a part of the Huga Knot tribe and we escaped to Ireland. Ah, so if you go back onto the history, we went into Ireland and then they went, they changed the spelling of the name to blend into the culture. 

We got to the United States as well.

But there's controversy over the apostrophe, but that's the. Family story. 

Brad Minus: All right, Larry, I know that you're probably a little bit older than me, but I know that you weren't actually a part of the Huen knots, so, let's, let's, 

Larry O'Nan: That's way back in dark, literally. 

Brad Minus: So can you tell us a little bit about your childhood and like Yeah. You know, maybe what was the compliment of your family? You know, where did you grow up and what was it like to be Larry as a kid? 

Larry O'Nan: Well, I'm gonna date myself, Brad, but I was born in 1944, right toward the end of World War ii. I was, born and was raised in a western Colorado town, grand Junction, Colorado, which is the largest city between Denver and Salt Lake City.

My father was bi-vocational. He was a pastor of a startup church as well. He had a local business in that town. Now, at that time, that little town had 15, maybe 20,000 people. That was a big town back then, but that was where I was born and raised. Spent my childhood there. Had a brother, came along five years later and, was surprised he came 'cause nobody ever knew.

I didn't at least know my mom was pregnant until they bought him home. But, we got along really well because it was just, that was life back in the late forties, I guess. But, in my life experience took me to college. And I actually got involved in theater significantly in high school. Beautiful.

And decided that I was gonna either be in Hollywood or New York. Yeah. And, I was at the University of Colorado with a theater major when. I started to realize that the guys and gals that were in theater were acting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For some reason it never occurred to me that they were taken on a persona and everybody was pretty much fake, including myself.

And that was a crisis of my life actually, because for the first time I realized I didn't wanna be acting all the time. I took on acting 'cause it was fun for a few hours a day. Suddenly I saw people actually taking on personas that really weren't themselves at all because of emptiness and loneliness and confusion and heartbreak or whatever it was.

But in that particular point of crisis, I decided that I didn't want to get into theater, I ended up, graduating with a degree to teach theater arts and debate and speech and English. The University of Colorado thought they were producing a teacher, but I never taught a day after I graduated from college.

But, that was in a nutshell, that's me, a preacher's kid, a little town, the biggest and, a passion for the theater that took me in a radically different direction through a crisis of my own and junior and college. 

Brad Minus: Nice. I have a degree in theater myself and, I have been active. I've, done a lot of acting, directing, and, some stylizing, you know, sets and lighting and stuff like that.

Design work is basically what it's, well, I 

Larry O'Nan: I gravitated toward the production side more than the acting side. I just enjoyed seeing. Script in a book become a reality and all the work that you put together, I really wasn't too excited about acting because you work for weeks and weeks and weeks, perform five times and it's over.

I love the idea of creating something from nothing or a concept on paper, right? And that if you looked at my life, I've done that over and over and over again. That was really what challenged me. Many of my life experiences were built on the fact of taking something from nothing and creating something outta it.

So yes, I used all my training, but I never, I never pursued theater. 

Brad Minus: I tried it. It didn't work. I ended up, moving on from it. I was an actor. I loved acting and singing and the whole bit, and I love directing. That was part where I got into it.

Did some semi-professional stuff in DC and, Virginia. Unfortunately it didn't work out like I wanted to, but, you still get the bug once in a while, 

Larry O'Nan: I still buy season tickets and go to shows. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. 

Larry O'Nan: Now I'm taking grandkids. 

Brad Minus: You go. And I pick up a show every once in a while, somebody will sit there and call, Hey Brad, you know, we got this perfect part and I lost my actor.

Can you come in and fill in. I'll say, yeah, sure. And, I'll get the bug and then I have it fulfilled for a while and then to move on again. So you went to college, then you got this theater arts degree. Got into some teaching.

So what did you end up doing when you got outta college? 

Larry O'Nan: Well, the, life changed and the critical. Change of my life came as a junior when I just started realizing life was more than being on the stage. And this acting thing where people were just doing it all the time.

I was connected to a group of, engineers, believe it or not, they had nothing to do with acting. I don't think they'd ever been in a theater. And I met them in a her circumstantial, unique way. And, their life was so genuine that that just really impressed me. They weren't. Hard to get along with. They weren't what I thought engineers were.

They were just real guys that really had a love both for each other. They had a love for, the culture and a spiritual commitment in there too. And that really attracted me because I was raised in a present preacher's kid and I had learned how to perform that role really well. But these guys weren't performing.

They were very genuine in their heart. And that was an experience there that took me a few months to kinda work through. The result was, I said, you know, I wanna do something that's meaningful for life, not meaningful, just for a few hours. And I got out of theater, I graduated and I went with one of the largest international ministries to the college students worldwide.

It's still one of the largest ones, campus for Christ Crew International is what it's called. And I spent 20 years with that ministry. I worked at the University of Pennsylvania for a while. I was in the northeast, Philadelphia was my home for at least a couple of years, so a Colorado kid.

Got to see the rest of the United States that he never knew existed. I knew as far as Lincoln, Nebraska, and after that, I didn't know if it was a drop off to the abyss or if it really was world out there, but that took me into quite a journey. In that journey, what I thought I was gonna do there, I probably in 20 years had five or six different, radically different kind of jobs.

You know, I thought I was gonna do X and pretty soon that gravitated to something else. My experience there was using my background in theater arts, not the acting side, but the directing side. And for five or six years I put music groups together that would perform. Internationally and nationally, we had five groups in the United States and two overseas, and we would recruit the students, get them trained and equipped, and then we'd send them on tour for nine months.

And so I was over all of those groups and figuring out what kind of a new group we create for some reason. And I thought I would probably spend the rest of my life creating production groups. Then I had a radical change there where suddenly in a group of 80,000 people, they announced a new person was gonna be in charge of music.

And I knew I'd lost my job that night while I was doing this big show. And, for about 90 days it was crisis. What does Larry do with the rest of his life? Because yeah, I was, I came up against it. It wasn't my decision. It wasn't even the guy's decision that was directly over me. It was just a.

Organizational realignment. And then I was asked to go in and see the vice president of the organization, and he had a problem. That problem was 29 boxes of pledge cards that was filled out at one of those evenings where we had 80,000 people and there had been an international funding pledge made, and all the clo, the cards, the commitments were collected.

Just boxed up. And this guy had 29 boxes of pledge cards in a bathtub in his office. He was a, it was a converted hotel, and he literally had a bathtub in his office, but he had stacked all these boxes thinking, what am I gonna do with these? 

So I came into learning about fund development. By asking if I could figure out how to follow up 29 boxes of pledge cards. Almost two and a half million dollars worth of, commitments. And I went from knowing absolutely nothing, but it really was, I took something 29 boxes, took them to another office and said, what in the world do we do to even attempt to follow up a failure?

Because this was 90 days after the pledges had been made and they were still in boxes. We started, one other guy and I together began to figure out how do we even go about following up anything? And that took me into a career of 40 years of doing fund development, leadership consulting, coaching, mentoring worldwide.

But when I started, I knew nothing about the subject other than here's boxes and here's pledge cards. But I think that was the same context of a, it was a crisis because. The organization had no clue what to do, and they were asking me to fail because they didn't know what to even tell me to do other than try something and see if it works.

And I started trying things and see if it would work and tried again and saw if it would work. I learned something very valuable to my experience. I had one guy that was working with me and he kept telling me, Larry, you've always got the freedom to fail. Nobody really cares if you fail. It's not bad to fail.

If you fail. All you do is pick yourself up, test off the idea, tweak it a bit, and try again. So if you don't learn to have the freedom to fail, you'll never take, you'll never take test things out. You'll never try things that you cannot do. And over the last, for the first 12, 12 years of my experience there.

Almost every month or every few weeks, we had a new freedom to fail because we didn't know what to do, but we started figuring out pieces of the puzzle and lo and behold, we were successful Many, many times there were successes that we would not write home about, but it were still the idea behind it. And I think this is where people sometimes are get stuck.

They are frozen because they're afraid of the consequences. And sometimes you've gotta step out and just believe God if you would like to think of it that way. But believe God for how he's gonna lead you to do something. And the freedom to fail comes as a result of you stepping out to do that.

But on many, many occasions, that was probably, even to this day, when I get up against it and I don't know what to do with the situation I keep, I go back to the fact I got the freedom to fail. I'll try it. If it doesn't work, we'll tweak it and we'll adjust it. And you know, I've got experiences throughout life, which were challenges that were overwhelming, but the freedom to fail kept me saying, okay, there's gotta be a way out of this one too.

There's gotta be a solution and it's probably right in front of me, but I will not see it unless I keep moving toward it. 

Brad Minus: That is some amazing advice right there, is the having the freedom to fail. I coached at a. Theater retreat in New York City and there was a coach out there and he always said, dare to fail.

And then he had another one where basically when you talk about being on stage, he was like, dare to be stupid. You know, allow yourself to be stupid out there so you could learn something. But the dare to fail, kind of that, that was more kind of make that, because you're right is like you dare you, you, there's things that we won't do if we just are always gonna succeed.

If we're always going after the success and we will, we are going to the success. It's just giving yourself the permission to say, Hey, listen, as if I'm going there and I don't hit my mark. No big deal. Brush myself off, get my lessons learned. Try again. Try again. Yeah, so that's, that is some, a really, really good advice.

And that's something that people need to know about that, you know, I. Once you try something, it doesn't mean it's the end if you, you know, if you don't hit it the first time. And that's in our, in our current society, you know, with the entitlement that that's out, it's like, that's what happens. People are like, oh, I wanna try gymnastics.

And the kids go out and they do a somersault and they do a cartwheel, and then all of a sudden they tell 'em to do a flip and they can't. And they're like, oh no, I don't wanna do this anymore. And that just seems to be where we are. We're missing some of that drive. We don't have that anymore.

Larry O'Nan: In that drive world. Another thing I really learned a lot about was setting goals that were not necessarily goals that had to be achieved, but there were goals to be dreamed of in that experience. I shared, you know, I was in front of 80,000 people when I found my job had changed. Right. Well, eight months before then, the goal was to get 20,000 people there.

The leader of the organization said, I want to be aiming toward a hundred thousand. We thought the guy had had actually come close to losing his mind because at 20,000 goal to move it to a hundred thousand, it just seemed totally ridiculous. Well, it would became a movement across the United States to get thousands of kids to Dallas, Texas.

When it was all over, we had 82,000 kids registered plus their sponsors. And the question came, do you feel badly that you failed? They said, well, you set a goal of a hundred thousand. You had 82,000 students and you had sponsors.

That's a failure. You didn't get to a hundred thousand. He said if we had not set our goal at a hundred thousand, we'd have been happy with 40. The goal was a visionary goal. It was not something I had to reach. You know, I can say, I'm going to eat three times today, but maybe I'll eat two.

Did I fail by not eating three? 

Brad Minus: You go. 

Larry O'Nan: And I think many times people feel like, well, I can't make it so I won't try it, and if I can't try it, then it's over. And it was a failure. And I think I learned over and over again that the visionary idea of planning towards something does not mean they're gonna fail if you don't hit it.

But if you don't have something concrete in your mind that you want to see as a success, then you're probably gonna do much, much less because you don't have any way of monitoring a, idea of the, you want to see become reality. So 82,000 people in sponsors was not a failure. Even though we were 15,000 people under a hundred thousand.

And I think many times people shortchange themselves by setting too low of goals. And so life becomes just kind of a boring experience in life because they don't really, they don't know where they're going. 

Brad Minus: So I totally get that. My favorite, one of the favorite sayings I have is, as far as goals go, you shoot for the stars.

And if you don't hit them, you catch the moon on the way back down. 

Larry O'Nan: That's exactly right. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. So, and then, and I always thought about that because it's, it is the same thing. So, you know, I'm an endurance coach. I help people get through marathons and, get fit through endurance sports, like, iron Man triathlon and, ultra marathons and OSCs and stuff like that.

So, we always go for that. We're like, Hey, you wanna. What we call bq, which is a Boston qualify, you know? And we always wanna shoot for that five to 10 minutes underneath it, so to make sure that you can get to the race. And I'm like, all right, we're shooting for that. But if you hit just BQ on the way.

That's fine. You'll get the letter, maybe you won't get the race, maybe you won't actually get to run the race, but you get that letter that says you qualified. Yeah. And then the next year we'll hit our five year. Well then it's so much easier to take the five minutes off than it's to, to get down there in the first place.

I mean, it's the same thing like, you shoot for this, but you end up getting a personal record on the way back. And I think that's, something that just needs to be kind of cemented in our brains. It's an old philosophy that needs to be brought back.

'cause I think people just quit way too easy nowadays. 

Larry O'Nan: I think that we have a tendency to think that I'll stop before I even get close to dreaming that I could do it. And I think that brings around frustrations. You know, purpose in life is achieving life. And, I wrote a book called Intentional Living and Giving.

The idea behind that is being intentional every day and living and giving everything that you've been given to somebody else. And that doesn't mean I know everything I've gotta give today, but every day I can give something. Every day I can achieve an outcome that was worthy of me being here in the first place.

And I think in my culture of observation, especially of younger people. They don't have a goal to begin with. They don't even know there is a opportunity out there to, to find something to achieve toward. And I, I feel badly for 'em because life is not to be lived in a hovel or in darkness. It's it, scripture says God is light and there's no darkness at all.

Well, let's live in the light. Don't live in the shade and achieve what you can achieve in a a day's worth of time. Living giving is. You know, and in all the living and giving happens in the middle of crisis, I think many times we hope that we can live life and never have an accident because we're concerned about accident and driving our car.

We're cautious when we drive, but we always get where we want to be unless you get restless and you start to become preoccupied, and then you're opening yourself up, chaos. And you don't have to live in chaos. You don't have to live with an expectation that every day I'm gonna crash. You've gotta be conscious enough that you're, you're driving for somebody else while you're driving for yourself.

And I think so many times we, we are living in a different world where we think, well, I can't make that happen. I don't know this. I'm watching young people change jobs five to six times a year. Because they don't find something that gives them fulfillment in life and I think that's sad too because some of these things are long-term runs.

I mean, the marathon runner has got to pace himself and you, you've lived with that experience. These guys don't do this just because they get up and run really fast and really hard. They know how to pace themselves for the entire run. A few years ago, I was living in, I was in Hawaii and we were there for the, the Big Ironman competition.

And I became friends of one of the guys that was running that, and he'd been planning for three years to, to do that particular run and discipline was, and then, you know, then he, I said, well, what does it take? He said, well, the first thing is to swim. And he described that to me and I thought, well, that if I jumped in the water, that would be enough for me.

Then it was the bike ride, 96 miles on bike and then 24 miles running. And it was an all day deal before they could ever stop the process. But they knew where they were at because they were pacing themselves for the long haul. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament talks about running the race and preparing for the race and, being ready to run.

And then he comments in one of the letters. So one of his, mentors, I've run the race and I've achieved the prize, you know, because it's, and that was a 30 year life run, right? And I think many times we're, if we don't see success in two weeks, we start getting itchy and thinking, well, this is not what I'm supposed to do.

Life is a commitment to living and it will throw you a lot of curves if you're really serious about growth. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. That's obviously another thing is that life itself is a marathon. It's not a sprint. That's right. Unfortunately we lose a lot.

We've lost a lot of FARs. We called it paying our dues when I started working in the line of work that I do. To actually make money. I'm in it. I spent years doing data work and fumbling through numbers and codes before I was actually able to learn to own a process to where that I could feed that into a team and then take that team and have them create.

Something out of nothing, 

Larry O'Nan: yeah. 

Brad Minus: I knew that there was this times that, hey, you gotta pay your dues. You gotta, you gotta learn the business, learn the craft. And you can't just go in there and, and the first week and say, oh, I don't like it, so I'm not gonna stay.

Oh, this isn't my passion. Well, you don't know. It's your passion. Can you imagine, we've got people that, you know, lawyers, right? And they walk out of law school and they become an associate. And inside of a big firm, and they're there for hours and hours before and a couple of years before they finally get in front of a judge, you know, they first gotta pass the bar and then they're an intern and then they become, you know, like, not a paralegal, but like a.

A lawyer's second chair or third chair even, and they're doing the research and learning the business. I mean, can you imagine if we had all these lawyers coming into law school and they walked in their first week and they were just given books and things to read and things to do, that were very manual and saying, oh, this is not what I thought lawyering was gonna be.

Screw it, you know, that's a hundred thousand dollars down. Can you imagine if that was the case, 

Larry O'Nan: and 

Brad Minus: people don't wanna, well, we have so many people 

Larry O'Nan: I think living today that are frustrated because it's not going fast enough. We're an instant society and we're mad at McDonald's if it takes 'em an extra minute to get us a french fries and a Big Mac, or whatever it is.

And yet life is designed to be lived and you learn by doing. You learn by experience and you learn by negative experiences. I've learned far more about, you know, I mentioned, you know, 20 years of working in one organization, I was moved to five different kinds of jobs. If I had not been moved, I would never been set up for the next one.

That really was my success. And it sometimes takes, living. Close to the dirt level before you can appreciate that that's what you walk on. And then you'll always appreciate it because it taught you something. And I just think many people are living almost without a view of what their purpose is and are frustrated because they cannot figure it out with what the first job they have.

And I just feel badly for people that are living in that kind of constant whirlwind. Always trying to, get it quick and get it fast and get it easy. Life is not that way. Sometimes it'll be health, sometimes it's a spiritual, encounter. Sometimes it's a financial situation. It could be a family breakup or a confusion there, but all of those experiences that we live through can actually contribute to our growth later on.

Brad Minus: No, no, no, please. I wanna make a story. 

Larry O'Nan: In 1967, I was working at the University of Pennsylvania and part of my responsibility was networking with other universities and colleges. There's 57 at that time, 57 colleges or schools of higher education in the greater Philadelphia area.

I was working at the University of Pennsylvania and spending a little bit of time at Drexel University I thought, well, I'm gonna spread my wings and find out what's over in New Jersey. Princeton was over there and there was a few more schools that I had names about, but I thought, well, I'll just find a church in New Jersey and I'll start seeing if they have any college students.

That was my goal. So I drove from downtown Philadelphia to New Jersey every weekend. To associate with different college students that I would ever meet in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. And one Sunday evening, I was gonna go to a concert that, it was at this church. It was a, you know, a traditional church with a large choir and an orchestra and all this.

But I knew I'd be running late because of other commitments. But I got there and had to sit in the very back of the sanctuary up in the balcony, and I discovered when I sat down there that I could not see the choir and I could not see the orchestra.

For the first time in my life, everything had been clear in my eyes and, but I was sitting there realizing that I thought, I'm going blind, because what I knew was clear was no longer clear. Now after the show was over, I went down front and I could see everybody pretty clear there, but I was really was a, excuse me, it was a, a crisis because I'm thinking I'm going blind.

What's going on with me? Well, it was about five months later that I was in California again, and I learned of a doctor in a little town near San Diego that was helping fit young adults with contact lenses. So I went to see him and he looked at my eyes for a while and he says, you've got a rare eye disease.

And he said, you've got a thing called keratoconus. And he says, your cornea is the ker. The conus is your, your cornea is shaped like a cone and it's gonna grow that way. You cannot stop the cone development. And, he said, but we can correct this to a great extent with the right kind of contact lenses.

And this is 1967, and he said, you will be getting a cornea transplant within the next 10 to 15 years. So as a result of that, I started wearing contacts and he told me, he says, I'd like to get you connected to a specialist eventually. Because he said it could really be a help to you to know who you're gonna have, do your cornea transplant.

Well, I wore the contacts. Life went on. I actually had a good eyesight, Brad, a week ago. I had a cornea transplant for the first time, 57 years later. Now, today, I'm looking through somebody else's cornea. A cornea transplant is one of the rare things they can do.

So I received a 38 year old's cornea that had died of a heart attack the week before and last Monday, a week ago. They put the new cornea in my eye and I can see you as good as I could see beforehand, and I'm still blurry at this juncture. It will take a year for this process of healing to take place.

Right. The only thing right now that holds my cornea in place is, is 16 very, very, very tiny stitches. Wow. And they're in my eye For a year, I will have a bonding between my donor's contact and my eye, and with the right kind of attention and intentionality of taking care of that lens, I'm stewarding somebody else's lens that's no longer living.

Now, that's seven days ago. The day after my cornea transplant, I could see better than I'm seen in 10 or 15 years out of that eye's. Great. Now, the crisis started 50 se 19 67, 57 years later, and I've had to deal with carefully taking care of it over the years, but not in any pain or not any discomfort.

But the point of it is it's 57 year journey just on a cornea. Now for the first time, I've got somebody else's cornea that I'm stewarding because the cornea is still alive. Now the, you know, the Bible says that we're fearfully and wonderfully made. That's a David hymn or a David saw, and he talks about being fearfully and wonderfully made.

What I discovered the morning after my cornea transplant, that in the next seven days after I received the cornea, my cells would overtake the donor cells. Within seven days, all of my eye would be covered with my own personal cells and all of his cells would be eliminated. Now, that's being fearfully and wonderfully made, but it takes me now as a steward to take care of my eye correctly.

Brad Minus: Right. 

Larry O'Nan: What may seem like a negative in 57 created an environment where I had to be diligently taking care of my eyes. In doing so, I got 57 years of life out of that cornea that was supposed to be replaced within 10 years.

Now I could have, just thrown my hands and chosen to do something else and got a cornea transplant 50 years ago, but at that time, they didn't have enough knowledge to even know for sure how to do cornea transplants. It was brand new into the, market of, transplanted material from the bodies, but because of discipline and, choosing to take care of it and not becoming too rash, and wanting to go too quickly.

I was able to take care of something that I had no control over. I could not wish it away. It wasn't gonna disappear because I had good thoughts. Okay. I had to choose to live with that reality. And I've lived, 57 years according to transplant, that the youth thought should have taken place at least 50 years ago.

Brad Minus: Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. It's funny that you mentioned that. 'cause I got LASIK in, 2003. And it was the exact same situation. I got on the table, looked at the clock. I couldn't see it, laid down. They did both eyes.

Took less than 20 minutes. Then I sat up at the edge of the table. I looked at the clock. I could see it clear as day. Amazing. So I have a little bit of similarity there and I understand that so you said that yours was shaped like a cone?

Mine shaped like my corneas are shaped like footballs. Okay. Yeah, I have a stigmatism. 

Larry O'Nan: Is in the realm of stigmatisms, 

Brad Minus: right. You guys started to get more and more of a cone.

Larry O'Nan: Now, where it was a bump, now it became almost Mount Everest. And right. Seven months ago, I could no longer put a cornea or put a contact over the cone because that, now, for the first time in my life, I was experiencing the, the cortic, the, the conus, the now the, the, the cornea is bumping right up against the contact and so Exactly.

I put wearing contact, the contact in my left eye. And, but I think that's a, you know, a, a, a crisis of some side that will hit us. Well, I could do anything about not having credit Cardus. They say it comes from a maybe genetics. They don't even know for certain what causes it. One in 2000 people have keratoconus out there even today.

So it's really, something that's pretty rare, but it can be managed. Crisises can be managed if you choose to intentionally manage 'em. 

Brad Minus: That's. Yes. Absolutely. And I think that's something that needs to go out as well, is that, you go into a time in your life when you go through either a crisis or, a long illness or you know, something's going on in your life that.

There is a way, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But Brad, that also 

Larry O'Nan: takes a commitment to look for that light. 

Brad Minus: It, that's where I wanted to go. You took it right outta my mouth, Larry.

I was all about it. It's like you can't, you can't expect it to come to you. You need to go get it. Just like you said that you were very diligent about taking care of your eyes and doing exactly what you were supposed to do, and that was the route you needed to take in order to extend that life before you had to get that corneal transplant.

You know, that was the route you needed to take my, I've got people that I, that I coach, that they wanna lose weight and there's so many different routes. You know, my people, the people my route, the brought of a doing, you know, like road races or trail races or something, that's the route they wanna take.

Instead of going to the gym and learning to diet and blah, blah, blah, blah. They decide, okay, I'm gonna take this route instead. And sometimes it works and sometimes if it doesn't and it doesn't, you go forward. But anyway, you have, you have, you were just about to talk, you were talking about it before.

Is the, is the book that you wrote. That is, is it's coming out or is it out 

Larry O'Nan: It came out last June. Brad, the book is a result of life experiences in many respects. I was, doing the fund development back in, probably 73, 74, and I'd had a lot of success in doing what I call fundraising.

Now fundraising is exchanges. You do this and I do this. Other words, if I give money to wounded warriors and they give me a blanket that's fundraising. Nothing wrong with it. It's not a sinful thing to do, but there's always exchanges in fundraising. You do this for me and I'll do this for you.

So t-shirts, blankets, trinkets, even runners, get 'em on. Necklaces, all kinds of stuff. I really didn't like fundraising because there was a dark side of it, and that was manipulation. And I see it in the political stuff that I get. I got an email this morning, Larry, we can't believe that you fail this.

We have not seen your membership renewal this year. And they, it's time for me to renew, but the language was disappointment in me because I'd not done it earlier. There's some manipulation going on there because I don't want anybody to feel badly for me and they're counting on me to feel badly for myself and send them some money.

Right now, there's nothing wrong with that, but there's the dark side to fundraising, I was trying to get people to do stuff that they didn't want to do, give us money. That was really the goal was to get money. Then I was in a meeting because I'd had quite a bit of success in these early days of trying and failing and experiencing that.

I'd gone to a meeting where I didn't really belong in the meeting. I was 31, 32 years of age, and the leadership were there and they were considering doing a campaign that would raise a billion dollars. And I was invited because the consultants were gonna outline how we could go about doing this.

And I knew in looking around the room, Larry, you could disappear. Nobody would even know you left the room, but you liked everybody and they all liked you. It was congenial friendliness, but it really was, Larry really probably doesn't belong here. Well, the consultants outlined something that we had to do and there was quite a bit of argument about it, because the organization was not wanting to start another department or another program.

The only people that had raised that kind of money at that particular time was Harvard and Stanford with their endowments. And so, you know, you were competing against endowment money, not money that you could actually spend.

There's very different routine in today's, period of time, you're learning what, however, it has. Hidden away in the bushes, and that's their endowment, which is bigger than most states. But at that time, I was, sitting there and they said, well, in the argument, let's assign this to Larry and maybe he can figure out what we should do with this particular challenge.

And I wrote down on a yellow pad what the task was, figure out what lifestyle stewardship is for the ministry. And then underneath it, I wrote my old phrase, Larry, you got the freedom to fail. And because I have a high degree of responsibility in my wheelhouse, about five, six weeks later, I thought I had done nothing about this responsibility.

And ironically, nobody had even asked me how I was coming on the responsibility. So there was no accountability. But I thought, we've gotta figure this out. This may be something that we really do need. So I brought my team leaders together and I said, we've gotta figure out what this really means. Our consultants were so insistent that we do this right and if we don't do it right, we could be a failure at it.

So over a period of about six or eight months, there was a team of us working on it and we came up with biblical principles of lifestyle stewardship. It was just what does scripture have to say about a person? That's a steward. A steward is not a person that gives money.

A steward is managing somebody else's affairs. Hmm. That's all that it is. It's, and it's an accounting term in many respects, because accountants, a lot of times would manage the money for somebody else, or a stewardship responsibility if you get on United or Delta or whatever airline today, you have stewardess.

They are there on behalf of the owner of that airplane to make sure that we don't mess up the airplane. They may be nice and they give us cokes and they give us snacks or whatever it takes. They do a routine, but they're really an evil eye watching every move we make because they're working on behalf of the owner of that high cost product that's up in the air.

They are stewards. For United or Delta, they are not just there to make us happy. Now, part of making us happy keeps us also from doing crazy things in the airplane. But the reality is a steward is working on behalf of somebody else to take care of somebody else's affairs. And if you get that picture in your mind, you're gonna start realizing, okay, I was put here on Earth.

To manage somebody else's affairs. I don't own anything. I have a car that the state of California says I own my SUV, but in reality, it's not mine. I live in a house, I've got to pay taxes on it. I'm stewarding my house. I'm actually stewarding a donor's cornea. It's not my cornea. He, I didn't create what he gave me a week ago, somebody else did that.

I'm the stewarded. So if you start to understand a biblical view of stewardship or a lifestyle of managing somebody else's affairs, you become purpose driven on how you live your life. And instead of living my life for myself and only me counts and. Everything is centered around my success and my peace and my joy and everything else.

I'm here to manage somebody else's affairs. So every morning I wake up saying, what am I to do today to manage the affairs they've entrusted with me today? It's a spiritual experience, but it's a practical experience. So I, I don't own a thing, but I steward everything. I'm not broke, but I have no money.

Because it's somebody else's money. My mindset is around intentionally living life and giving what was given to me to help advance the cause of other people's needs that they've got. And that does not mean I'm giving a lot of money away. I'm managing the affairs that I've got so that other people are blessed and they can manage their affairs well.

The book, intentional Living and Giving, that came out in June of last year. And you can get that book, Brad. It's available on, you know, Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You go to any place you wanna find books, you can find it. If people are desperate to get a autograph copy, then they need to go to larry oand.com and I'll sign 'em a copy.

But I would prefer you to get the copy the fastest way you can get it. And that's by Amazon, not through Larry o. But the book is designed around those core principles. Nine chapters deal with the biblical principles, old Testament into New Testament. So it's the, it's a scriptural context. And then the latter nine chapters is, now that you understand that you are what I call an authorized wealth distributor.

When you understand who you are, then there's nine chapters on practicality of how you live that life, day to day and function. Within the realm and the world that we live in. So there's nine chapters of understanding the principle, and then once you've got it, how do you apply that to your life? Live intentional, living and giving intentional is important because if we don't decide we're gonna do something, we won't do it. Yeah. Then the living is every single day. Then you're a steward, so you are managing somebody else's fair. How do you give what you've already got away using your time, your talent, your treasure, your skills?

There's things you don't want me to do for you, Brad, and there's things I can do well for you. And I know myself well enough that I'm gonna tell you, no, you don't want me to do X so I can, as a steward, you don't want me to do it 'cause I'm not good at certain things. Other things I'm really good at. So yes, I can step into life and help somebody else out, and it's my job to decide how I best manage the stewardship of time and do the things that would help other people out.

And many of the, the stories in the book come from life experiences with many of them being tied around a crisis of, of confusion at that particular time. Yeah. I remember people, you know, they think, okay, Larry's fine. He's 81 years of age. 

Well, my wife died 10 years ago of a glioblastoma brain tumor. Now, it was an experience that I didn't wanna live through. I would not advise anybody to live through watching a person die of a terminal disease. It took her 18 months to do so after surgery. You know, I looked at that and I said, okay, I can see that we had 44 years of wonderful life together.

Great kids, great everything. We were best of friends, but the season was over. For us to do that together, my season now is to take that crisis and leverage that to new things while I'm here and while I'm healthy, I've still got responsibility. It did not change my stewardship responsibility in life.

Just because she changed addresses on me. And so I think sometimes we think, well, I can't live through that, or I get stuck in this and I can't move. You can get up every day and decide you're making a choice to get up and do things intentionally. So I believe there's a very strong biblical, faith commitment to it.

There's a very practical side to it. There's a way of understanding how you leverage life that way. So yeah, I'm looking at, I wanna help people that are down and out and feeling frustrated and don't know where they're going. Be thriving in purpose. That's what the whole book is about. And achieving goals and helping people live a life, that's what the book is all about.

So, yeah, it's a fun thing, but it's really my life in on pages. I guess that's what you'd call it. 

Brad Minus: That is amazing, and that's exactly what our audience here is looking for. You know, looking for information on how to make their life the potential. That it's supposed to be. Right? Right. It's finding, you know, finding their potential and then getting little bits of information here and there on how to get there.

Right. And you have already given us, intentional stewardship. All of those little nuggets can all help us move into the direction that we wanna go in and get to the potential of our lives. 

Larry O'Nan: Well, one of the editors of the book years ago when I was in the middle of. Putting the thing together.

He said, this is not really a book, it's a guide, it's a map and the map is telling you how to utilize the map for nine chapters, what the principles are behind the map. One of the things my wife could never do in her entire life is she could not read a map and for some reason she was not wired in the fourth grade to read maps like they teach you how to do in the fourth grade.

So she lived by guideposts and by signs. She knew where the McDonald was, and you turn left in McDonald's and you turn right at Starbucks. And that was the way my, my, my, in 44 years, I watched a person that did not know where they were on this planet. She functioned really well, but mapping was not one of those things.

And I think many people, if they don't have the map in their hand, they do not know how to get someplace. I tell people I live in Southern California. I say, if you're gonna go to Dallas, Texas, you go one way. But if you go to Seattle, Washington, you're gonna go another. And if you're, you're not going to get to Seattle by driving to Dallas.

And they're both freeways, they're good roads going both directions. But you've got to choose your destination before you choose the map that you're gonna follow. And I think if people just have that as a mindset, if they say, I need to have a guidebook. Or a guide map to get me to where I can live a victorious, thriving life.

You better get ahold of intentional living and giving and didn't just follow the principles. They're pretty well outlined. We've used them worldwide. Many people's seen transformation occur over these principles for 30 to 40 years. 

Brad Minus: Oh man. And I am like really excited, to read it myself.

We're going to go ahead and put that link, to the book in the show notes. We're also gonna put your website right there in the show notes. That, actually is larry oand.com. That's easiest way to reach 

Larry O'Nan: Yeah, just larry oand.com. I'll eventually see it.

Brad Minus: Yep. And then he is got a contact page in there too. So he gives you, you know, obviously don't wait to reach to him. Are you on any of the social medias? 

Larry O'Nan: You can find, intentional Living and giving a Larry Nan on Facebook. LinkedIn. I'm out there as well. 

Common things at 81 years of age. I'm not into everything that comes out there. My 23-year-old grandson, he can jump into any of 'em. But he says to me, Grandpa, I don't use Facebook. 

Brad Minus: Oh yeah. No, no, no. Facebook is for us now. Yeah. Yeah. It's for if you've gotten 50 now, you, now you're Facebook.

You know what I mean? 

Larry O'Nan: And that's only been a decade that that's really became the thing out there. 

Brad Minus: So then, yeah, now it's like now Instagram and TikTok, you know, and God. Oh, and don't be on Pinterest.

Yeah. Oh no, that's for old ladies. But isn't it amazing? 'cause the majority of the people out here can't use a map.

Larry O'Nan: I can't look 

Brad Minus: They have to use the GPS on their phone. Well, 

Larry O'Nan: I don't know how many times over the years, she'd say, I've gotta go to x, y, Z restaurant tomorrow to meet somebody. Get in the car and we're gonna drive there now, and I'm gonna write down all the signs of where I turn, and I would literally drive her to that Starbucks or X, y, Z restaurant.

And she would sit in the car and write her notes so she'd know where to turn at her signs. Now in GPS today, you say, I need to go to X, Y, Z address and then start talking to you and tell you where you're gonna turn. I was the GPS 25 years ago, 

but it was the old mechanical way. Again, right? Like that's a good illustration is that you may be stuck on a liability or something you do not know, do, do not do. Well, anybody can conquer something. It's what happens to us is that's a weakness to her. My weakness is numbers. You don't want me to help you with accounting and numbers.

I can do those things, but you know, at the end of the day when I'm doing numbers, I'm exhausted. When I'm doing something in my strength, I'm energized and I can keep right on going. You can do a weakness to accomplish your strength and just know that in the process of the weakness, you're gonna wipe yourself out and be tired, but you can do it.

There's a lot of things you can do. You just don't like to do it, 

Brad Minus: exactly. 

Larry O'Nan: And so we need to find out what is our strength and run with it with great joy and anticipation. I'm not a runner, but I'm a swimmer. I don't like to the idea of running what you've trained people to do, but years ago I've decided I do like to swim.

So except for this season when I can't get my head in the water for probably six months, I swim three days a week and do a mile three days a week at 5:00 AM It's because I'm choosing to do something that's healthy, but I found something that is my sweet spot, but it's not everybody else's. Find what makes you work and go for it, but get some, get some ground rules.

Get the principles down. You're not gonna win this game of intentional living unless you understand what you're doing with it. 

Brad Minus: Truer words could not have been said. Larry, you know what I have to say? Thank you so much for joining us and what I, I just want you ended on such a perfect note.

So for all of you listening, everything's in the show notes. We're gonna make sure that Larry's website, the social media places where he has his platforms that he is on, those are gonna be in there. The direct link to the book on Amazon is going to be there.

You're gonna have everything that you need to, to contact him if, and like he just told you, he's more than willing to talk if you are. Watching on YouTube, if you can go ahead and hit that, subscribe that like button, and then you can hit that notification bell so you always know when a next episode is dropping.

If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, if you can leave a review. We definitely appreciate it. But Larry. Thank you. Thank you so much. You've given such a, a wealth of knowledge, and, and a way to live through intention and through grace, and I think that is, by far the best thing that we could possibly do in our lives today.

Larry O'Nan: Thank you very much for the invitation. 

Brad Minus: Thank you all for listening. I appreciate it and we will see you in the next one.