TD Jakes - It'll Work If You Work It - Part 2
The people who brought you here may not be the people who can take you there. Doesn't mean you'd leave 'em, doesn't mean you hate 'em, doesn't mean you don't appreciate 'em, doesn't mean you don't honor them, doesn't mean you don't go to lunch and eat some dry chicken with them every now and then, but it does mean that you understand that in order to get there, you have to take up new relationship. Elisha met Elijah, and he knew, wow, this is it. This is it means I can kiss my mama goodbye. On behalf of the President of the Mama's Boys club, you don't kiss your mama goodbye. You might wave at the old man, you know, say, hey daddy, I'll be back home in a little bit. You don't say goodbye to mama and daddy and walk away from them and their hopes and their dreams and their field and their work and the body of their life's work. He left it all, burnt their plow. Wasn't even his plow, burnt his plow, ate the ox. He said, I'm gone. He closes every door on being stuck in the state of sowing and not reaping.
Have you closed the door on being who you were so that you can open the door on being who you are? Have you closed your escape route, your way back home? I told you Sunday, the Red Sea closed not just to drown Pharaoh, but to stop the children of Israel from going back when they miss the leeks and onions. There was no way for them to go back and get it, because the passageway was closed. You got to close the door on certain relationships, you got to delete certain phone numbers, you got to block certain people from inboxing you.
If you are going to be free to go into the future, you have got to let the Red Sea close and let Pharaoh and his chariots drown in the Red Sea so that you can go from being a slave to who you were, to a son of who you are becoming. And that ain't easy, that's hard work, that's hard work to do that. I tell you, it'll work if you work it. We want to talk about different people, how they worked it. I said, talk to us a little bit. I mean, you could have been just like a regular barber, rent a booth in somebody's shop, cut some hair, make some money, feed the kids, going about your business, what happened to you that made you work it to the point that now you have people working for you and you start winning these awards, doing these television shows, what got you thinking out of the box? What does barbering have to do with television shows?
Frederick Johnson: Bishop, thank you for having me tonight. How ya'll doin? Bishop, my journey as a barber started at an early age. I'm originally from Mississippi, so me being a neighborhood barber, cutting hair at school, it kinda, like, easy to build my relationship because I started cutting my friends, and then my friends kept on referring me to other people in Mississippi. So, it was kinda, like, easy in Mississippi to be a barber, but when I moved to Texas, I didn't have my game plan together like I did in Mississippi, because I didn't handle clients hair here. So, when I first moved to Texas, that was the early 2000s, I didn't have my plan together, so when I first got to Texas, I failed as a barber. I quit cutting hair. I started doin' commercial industrial air conditioning. And that didn't last too long, because that wasn't my passion, that wasn't my dream to come to Texas to be an air condition guy.
And so, what happened was when I moved to Texas, I mean after I got fired from the air conditioning job, I said, man, I gotta go back to what I know, and that was cutting hair. And still I didn't have a plan, but I knew I was going to get back into something that I loved doing, and I knew I could do it really well. So, I started working in a barber shop out here in Arlington, Texas, and when I got to the shop, everybody knew I can cut, but I saw the guys getting kinda, like, jealous of me, because I'm a new guy, people starting to sit in my chair because they saw that I can work or whatever, but it still was kinda slow. So, I heard about a hair battle in Arlington, Texas. That was, like, 2006. I went to that barber battle, and I never been to a barber battle before, so I didn't know what they expected to battle. I went there with flip flops on, some cut out jeans, and a barber jacket, but I knew I can cut hair, 'cause even though I didn't have a clientele, I still thought that I was, like, the best barber in the world. And that's just me being from a little small city.
I went to that barber battle, and I won. I mean, $1000 off doing one haircut, it blew my mind, because I never dreamed of something like that, and what happened was I went back to the barber shop with that trophy. Not only now I'm saying that I'm the best, but I got a trophy to say that I'm the best at cutting hair. And that sparked the fire in me. Something that I like to say, I didn't know I had a passion for even competing. So, I went from state to state, city to city, winning barber battles. Winning all those battles, going over from East Coast to the West Coast, I started getting invited to hair battles, and I was invited to, like, one of the biggest battles there was on TV, it was "Cedric's Barber Battle," Cedric the Entertainer, he had a show, a battle on TV. I went there, man, I stole the show, I think I stole the show just because I put on a show and he wasn't expecting. I come in cutting hair with chainsaws and everything.
I knew that I had to grab their attention, I knew I had to grab the attention of everybody, I knew everybody that they invited was good, good barbers, so I said, man, I gotta put on a show. This is gonna be on TV. Went there, won the "Cedric's Barber Battle". Like, that was, like, the biggest battle that I ever won. And so, now I won "Cedric's Barber Battle," now I'm invited to the biggest barber battle in Atlanta, Georgia. Went down there, I had all the young guys, so, I mean, I'm looking good for my age or whatever, but everybody I compete against, normally, they like half my age, they the young guys. I'm representing for the 40 and up club, almost 50 club. But one of the Bronner brothers and still the current champion from Dallas, Texas, holding the title in Atlanta, Georgia right now. And so, by winning, Bronner brothers in Atlanta, Georgia I bumped into a product company called Lustrous Product, and now I'm a global ambassador for them for the US and international team.
TD Jakes: When we say it'll work if you work it, this is what it means to work it, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 3:30 a.m., 4 a.m. in the morning. This is what it means to work it. Do the barber chairs, do the events, do the competition, and cut the hair. It's not for the lazy people. Entrepreneurship is not for the lazy people. Parenting is not for lazy people. Marriage is not for lazy people. Pastoring is not for lazy people. You might not see it, all you see is Sunday morning, Wednesday night, but every day of my calendar is full of something. If you work hard, God will bless you, God will bless you, God will bless you.
I know we live in an age of self care, and self care is wonderful after you do something. We got people getting self care who have not done any work. You know, you have to do some work. God put Adam in the garden, he was open about work. He said to till the ground, to work the soil, to take what I gave you and turn it into something else. The Bible says when God dispersed talents, he expected them to turn it into something more than what he gave them. For what God gave you, did you just keep what he gave you or did you turn it into something? What else could it be? Who else would a father... said he takes his antique barber chairs and finds them, they look like nothing when he gets them. He makes them over and puts him on the market again. He's working his social media, he's working his Facebook, he's going the extra mile with his customers, steaming their face, doing stuff that other people don't do.
If you do what others have not done, you will go where others have not been. You have to put the work in or you don't get there. Let's talk to Marcus for a minute. You were supposed to be a musician dude. You were supposed to be a musician. You grew up, you're a PK, you came out of North Carolina, you weren't born in North Carolina, you grew up in the church, I hired you as a musician. We're flying back and forth on the plane, we're talkin' about business, what happened?
Marcus Dawson: Well, I think, bishop, the thing that was so interesting to me and I count as as a massive blessing is the exposure. I think that's what happened. You know, being able to to sit with you in rooms, and you have to know, during the time you and I were traveling, it was very popular for the pastors to go in one room, and they would send the musicians in another room. It was common, but you always summoned for me to be with you, sitting next to you in the room so I was able to overhear the conversations that, you know, either the prominent leaders, I mean, from kings to presidents and business leaders were sharing, and I would take those nuggets home.
I remember early on in my career, I was starting to do television music, and I was writing jingles for a lot of different companies, and I felt myself getting burned out because I could only do one jingle at a time. One of the things that I did was I contacted guys who had equal or greater skillset, contracted with them so that I could take on more contracts to do more jingles. And so, in that attempt, I was able to multiply my efforts where I could only do one piece at a time, now I'm doing 35 pieces of music a week.
You know, and I booked my first publishing company with over 35 songwriters, and we had about 350 compositions in my portfolio at that time. But that was only because of the exposure that I watched with you, and I don't know if you remember this, but you gave me a really hard lesson one time. You said, you know what, you're too good to yourself. You know, you celebrate too soon. You know, your generation, you know, you guys'll go party, you said, but Benjamin, the Bible says that Benjamin would raven as a wolf, and end of day, he would devour the prey, but in the evening, he would divide the spoils. And when you broke that down to me, what you saying is while he's young and while he's healthy, he's out hunting. You need to go kill something, you need to go bring the deal in, and that stuck with me in a way that I've been able to kind of use that throughout my whole musical career.
TD Jakes: How much did you have to go out of meetings we were in and run back and Google stuff, trying to figure out what they were talking about?
Marcus Dawson: The funny thing, when you first started introducing me to some of the people that we ended up doing business with, there was no Google. Okay, so I was running to the public library to get a book to understand business and sitting up at night, and really forcing myself to get it. You know, I didn't want to be able to just throw out terms for the sake of being able to do it because somebody may call you on that. So, you really wanna learn information so you can apply it. You know, and it did cost everything. You know, I remember some of the guys will be hangin' out and they're goin' to the mall and shopping, and I just didn't have time to do it.
Bishop, I just didn't have time to do it, nor did I want to do it because I was focused. And I knew where I wanted to end up. You know, years ago I kinda read this book about Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones's story. It's so unique, it's like he was a phenomenal musician, but the music was really a conduit to a greater conversation that he wanted to have later. And so, I felt like that was part of my career. Music got me into the room, it allowed me to meet you, but now that I'm in the room, I have to reinvent myself, I have to learn the rules all over again so that I'm relevant in this new room, this new space that I'm in.
TD Jakes: The big word to me is focused. How committed were you to discovering who you really were?
Marcus Dawson: Wow. I'm trying not to get emotional.
TD Jakes: That's okay.
Marcus Dawson: Because I realize, in order to do what I needed to do, there was some generational things that had to be broken. So, it would cost me everything, and I would ask myself knowing that it would cost me everything, was I willing to pay the price? And I couldn't not say yes. Yes was the only answer that was an option for me. And so, I knew it would cost me everything. Some days I didn't know how much it would cost, but I just know it'd be worth it.
TD Jakes: Pastor talked to me a little bit. I mean, you're a pastor, you're an evangelist, you're a missionary, you're an educator, you're a teacher, you're a student, you're a father, you're a husband, you a guy, you a dude, you a fella, you a person, how do you manage that?
Patrick E Winfield II: First of all, bishop, thank you so much for having us. Sometimes I ask myself the same question. I know typically, typically when people see all of those particular roles, they think that you have balance. And I learned something just watching Jesus Christ, that there are times in which there are people that he disappointed. That over here, while he was healing one, another one was asking for him to come and heal them. And while he was having time with the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus's daughter was dying. When Lazarus was sick, they asked for Jesus to come, and Jesus was having his me time, and he said, he said, wait a minute, I need I need my me time. I'll get there. He's only sleeping. So, by the time he gets to Bethany, they're angry with him because he was having his me time. And they didn't know that having his me time was a part of the purpose.
So, there are times in which you're not going to balance everything, but you gotta be focused on the very thing that God is calling for you to do right now. So, one of the things that I've learned how to do, and my wife has certainly helped me to do it, is to always be present in the moment. Be present in the moment, always be present in the moment. So, when I'm with my kids, I'm the best father I can be. When I'm with my wife, I'm the best husband I can be. When I'm with the church, I'm the best pastor I can be. When I'm with my parents, I'm the best son that I can be. When I'm in the classroom and studying for exam or writing papers, I'm the best student that I can be. And when I'm studying for a sermon, I require about eight hours per sermon, that's not necessarily because I need eight hours, it's because, deep down on the inside of me, there's so many different things about the text that I want to be prepared for that I require of myself more to get that done. And so, I'm the best that I can be when I'm in that particular moment.
TD Jakes: So much I wanna say about that. First of all, if you're a preacher, you should always have more than you need.
Patrick E Winfield II: Indeed.
TD Jakes: You may not use all of it, but you ought to have all of it. And that understanding of studying eight hours to preach one is a real, real thing, because that gives you confidence. You have thoroughly digested and ingested the material. The other thing you said that really stood out to me and gave me goose pimples, to be present in the moment, that is a big thing. To be present in the moment, and that's enough reason to burn the ox and burn the plow, so that you're not divided. Bye, mama. See ya later, daddy. I gotta be present right here.
This requires my full attention to be present in the moment, and I had to learn that, because sometimes I'm always in tomorrow. I'm always in tomorrow, and I found out that the enemy was stealing my today because I was always in tomorrow. I would be sitting in Tuesday thinkin' about Thursday. And I actually wasn't there Tuesday, and then Tuesday was gone and I missed it. And my wife would say, "Did you hear so-and-so," I'd say, "When did that happen"? So, I'm a planner, I'm a strategic planner, I think ahead, that sort of thing, but I had to go back and be conscious about correcting defects in my structure, because everybody has defects in their structure, so I could be present in the moment so that the enemy who comes to kill, steal, and destroy would not steal and destroy my present while I'm focusing on my future. Am I talkin' to anybody tonight? Am I talking to anybody tonight? This is some good stuff. This is some good stuff. I'm coming back to you in a minute. Alison, jump in this conversation right quick.
Alison Draper Lolley: I'd love to. So, thanks for having me and hello, everybody. Marcus, my story's similar in terms of exposure, but yet so different. I was raised in a work ethic environment. It was modeled for me, but I also was a third generation female in our family line, and no woman before me had had a career.
TD Jakes: Wow.
Alison Draper Lolley: My mother and her siblings and on both sides of my family were stay at home mothers, and that was a full time job for them, and they did a fabulous job with it. I have three girls, and I see that as a full time job still, but the work ethic was modeled early, and I was allowed to sit in the rooms as a child. My father was a banker, and every weekend he'd go work on Saturday. He'd work all week long, and on Saturday, he'd go to work, and he'd say, "Do you want to go with me"? And I went to work with him on Saturdays and had free reign of that bank, but I always paid attention to it, right? My grandmother was a Sunday school teacher. And she taught Sunday school every single Sunday for 50 years, and if we wanted to go take a family trip and it conflicted with that Sunday school class, we didn't take the trip at that time. She couldn't go with us.
So, it was modeled, and I wanted to work. I love to work, and I wanted to work early, and so one of my first exposures was dad let me go get a job at 15. And, you know, my mother had a fit about it. And I went to go work at a little retail store, and I was the gift wrapper. And I'll never forget, Miss Maddy was my employer, she was an older woman, and she said, "Now, I'm going to exactly how to do this. This is how you measure the paper, this is how you measure the stirring, this is how you wrap the box". I paid attention to what you had to do to be successful. I listened and I heard it, and I was so interested in doing it well and right. I can over-rotate to perfection, and on occasion, that I followed the instructions and I was rewarded for that. So, I watched how to do it, I applied what I learned, and I reaped the benefit, right?
So, you know, the newspaper business for 30 years is extremely structured, very predictable, on occasion, you know, when we had numerous titles to publish, we could have 20 deadlines in a day. And multiple divisions had to come in and get all their work in at one time, and that structured environment and that rigor and performance really was addictive for me. So, you know, it was real comfortable to stay there. It's real natural, I was successful, and it wasn't until my father passed away in 2018. He came to be at our house on hospice care, and I moved him from Louisiana, got him all situated on hospice, and went straight back to work. That work ethic, boom, and the hospice nurse called me and said, "He does better when you're home". And I looked at my boss and said, "I'm leaving". Everything's covered here, because I'd hired good people that could fill in, right?
And I went home, and I realized after all those years I was in my comfort zone, and I really wasn't taking any chances. I wasn't living in my authentic self, and I made the decision shortly after he passed away that I was going to leave that job and I was going to go move into purpose work and take a chance. And I gave them six months' notice, I replaced myself, I put them through a budget, I did everything I needed to do to exit, and I said, I'm gonna spend a year in focused silence and work on family business, transition, everything we need to do there, and wait for the right thing to come. And in January of 2020 I read a Dallas Morning News article that you were launching the foundation. And I picked up the phone and called Beverly Robinson, and said, "I would like to speak to bishop". And that afternoon, you and Hatti Hill called me and asked to speak to me before Beverly delivered that message.
TD Jakes: The funny thing about that is... yeah, clap your hands. The funny thing about that is when she was working for Dallas Morning News, I was checking her out. See, because smartness cannot be hidden, and you never know who's watching you. You never know who's watching you. So, even though you might be doing something that you're no longer going to do, do it with excellence, because somebody's always watching you, they're always watching you. The first thing they teach CEOs is to always be interviewing everybody. I interview, we can be sitting up eating ice cream cones, "So, how long you been working here? What do you do? What do you think about so and so"? Always interviewing, because, because building a team, at least in my style of leadership, is the most important thing. Building a team around you to reach your dream is the most important thing for you to have is a great team.
The reason Elijah is depressed is because he is alone. He is alone, he's tryin' to do it all by himself, and it drove him to suicide. He wanted to die. He was anointed, he was gifted, he called fire down from heaven, but inside he wasn't emotionally healthy because he was alone. And when you build a team, I'm not talkin' about Jojo and Nook-Nook and your cousins and them, I'm talkin' about building a team that's an asset, that brings something to the table, and preferably something different from you. We're gonna take a few questions that may be coming in from the audience, but let me tell you something, somethin' that's different from you, because if you surround yourself with people who are good at what you're good at, they will compete with you. If you surround yourself with people that are good at what you're good at, they will compete with you. If you surround yourself with people who are good at what you are not good at, they will complete you.