Episode 1579: Interview with John Knowlton on His Book Thinking for Success: 52 Stories that Upgrade Your Thinking to Boost Productivity, Problem Solving, and Relationships

===

Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining us on episode 1,579 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

John Knowlton: I'm John Knowlton. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to change your default settings is key, and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this The Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

If you look at the gospel of Mark, the first thing that Jesus says is the time is fulfilled. Repent and believe in its good news. And the word repent there in Greek is meta noo, meta change. How you think Change your thinking

Scott Maderer: and believe this [00:01:00] good news. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself. Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

In today's podcast episode, I interview John Knowlton. I asked John about his upcoming book. Thinking for success. I also asked John about how we need to develop better habits of thinking to really grow, and John also shares how we can find pivotal moments to shift our thinking and how that happened for him.

I have a great book that's been out for a while now called Inspired Living. Assemble the Puzzle of your Calling by [00:02:00] mastering your Time, your Talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about that book over@inspiredlivingbook.com. It'll take you to a page where there's information and you can sign up to get some mailings about it, as well as purchase a copy there.

I'd love to see you get a copy and share with me how it impacted your world. John and his wife Julie have realized an abundant life, and they believe that all of our outcomes are rooted in our thinking. John's career has been bi-vocational, fully engaged in building businesses and serving part-time as a pastor and teacher.

As a jail chaplain, he saw people whose thinking led them down the wrong path. And as an entrepreneur, he discovered the power of thinking about others first and seeking to create great value. John partnered to build a wealth management business that managed more than $1 billion of client assets, and he retired at the age of 50.

After a year long COVID [00:03:00] sabbatical, he served CEOs and business owners as a C 12 chair facilitating day long business retreats. John's focus is helping people think better so they can fulfill the purpose for which they were made. His book Thanking for Success. 52 Stories that Upgrade Your Thinking to Boost Productivity.

Problem Solving and Relationships will be released by Morgan James in January of 2026. Welcome to the show, John. Hey, thank you, Scott. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. I shared a little bit in the intro, but I laughingly always say that intros are like Instagram photos of our life.

They just show the parts so that we get in frame for the nice post picture. Di if you don't mind, go back. Take us back in time a little bit and share a little bit about your journey and your background and what's brought you to the point where you're focusing on thinking and productivity and problem solving and these sorts of big ideas.

Yeah.

John Knowlton: [00:04:00] Thank you so much, Scott. I thought you were gonna ask me like, to tell my most embarrassing moment or something as you've introed that question.

Scott Maderer: Yeah. If you want to fortunately I don't get that embarrassed, so I know I'm a knucklehead, so when you own it, it's not that

hard.

I, that's how I am too. People are like, do you have any regrets? I'm like. Regrets. No. Things that I wish I wouldn't have done when I was younger. Oh, I've got a long list of those, but they're not really regrets. I can't say I regret 'em. Sure.

John Knowlton: Yeah.

Scott Maderer: They were fun at the time.

John Knowlton: Let me show a couple warts here.

So I've been divorced, my divorce followed my. My first wife asking me to leave full-time ministry because she thought it was bad for our marriage. And then she left me six months later anyways. And so that wasn't the whole deal.

Scott Maderer: And you left the ministry before

John Knowlton: she left? Yeah. Yeah. So I stepped away from the full-time ministry.

She left. [00:05:00] But I needed a job, Scott, and so I'm applying for all kinds of, this is in the nineties, so this is kinda ancient history, but I'm applying for all kinds of jobs that I should have been. A slam dunk for Catholic Family Services, YMCA camp all these kind of jobs like that. I could get an interview, but I couldn't get a second interview.

I couldn't get an offer. And so my mom sent me a VHS videotape. Some people will remember those.

Scott Maderer: And for the younger crowd, these were these big box things. But anyway, yeah, you can look it up. Google it. They'll, there's pictures.

John Knowlton: This one happened to be a re. Recruiting video from Edward Jones, which is a personal finance company.

And so I watched it and got interested. I applied and they also chose not to hire me, but the process got me interested in doing financial services and advising people with MO for [00:06:00] their money a as a career. I had been an investor since age 11. I was born in 1969. In 1980, the prime rate hit 21.5%.

And my dad marched me down to the local savings and loan, which is a kind of bank that doesn't exist anymore. And I bought a CD that was paying 15.9%. If you do the math on that, it doubled in five years. A certificate of deposit doubled in five years. So anyways, I'd been exposed to that kinda investment strategy, and then I owned stocks and I owned some precious metals in high school and all that.

So anyways, here I am in nearly 30 years old looking for a job. So I found. That I was interested in this career of being in financial planning and wealth management. And I took one resume to a career fair where I knew there was gonna be somebody from the company that I [00:07:00] was interested in after Edward Jones and they hired me.

And so that kind of started this process of building. Wealth management business gathering some partners, doing some deals where I was buying people out and I realized, gosh, you can get clients one at a time, or you can buy out somebody who's retiring and get in chunks. And I kinda liked the chunks.

And so over the course of the career, I needed to develop skill as a practitioner, giving good advice and all that. But then I learned. If I'm going to be building a business, I need to gather skills as a manager and leader. And I started to hire people and build out teams in this and realized, gosh, some of the people who work for me keep making the same mistakes over and over, and I could correct them.

Tell them what to do. But I found that [00:08:00] when I just told them what to do and I solved the problem, they didn't develop the muscle of solving problems. And so then I realized stories are the most effective way to change our thinking because. I don't know. When we were all growing up out in the primordial fields and caves and stuff, we would just tell stories around campfires and that was the way that information was conveyed.

And so we have this thing in our brain where if we start to tell a story, it opens what is called a story loop. If I tell you that a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar, you wanna know what happens. And I would find stories and tell them in the staff meeting, and then end each story with a moral of the story or a conclusion, and then that would become, that story became our shorthand for how to think differently.

And over time I realized I would [00:09:00] start to forget the story. I didn't capture them, so I started to write them down and eventually realized I had 40 of them. And then. Realized, my gosh, if I had 52, I could have one a year or one a week for a year for a staff meeting use and whatnot. So there, that process of just working with and leading people has gotten me interested into into understanding and then a commitment to think better every day.

Scott Maderer: So when you think about thinking that and education, the technical term for that is metacognition, which is just a fancy way of thinking about thinking. You mentioned discovering that stories work. Was there a breakthrough moment or an experience that you had that kind of opened your eyes to that?

Or is it something that you read it somewhere or what opened your eyes to the power of stories?

John Knowlton: I think the best teacher that I'm aware of is Jesus Nazareth, and he used a lot of stories to [00:10:00] tell people to break through their current paradigms or thinking models.

And Leonard Sweet described his teaching style is abductive. It's not inductive or deductive, but it grabs you and pulls you into a new a new reality.

Scott Maderer: So when you think about that you mentioned that you had been in ministry and you just mentioned learning from the parables of Jesus and seeing that example.

Talk a little bit about your faith journey and how that's intersected with the life journey. From ministry to wealth management, at first glance, that seems pretty big leap to folks. So connect the dots. How did those connect in your experience?

John Knowlton: I've never really left ministry.

I left the full-time ministry and realized, oh, you know what? I can still minister and make more money in business. Business supports my ministry habit now [00:11:00] and the the way I like to think about it is. Ministry is helping people with something important, their spiritual lives or emotional life and financial planning is helping people with something important, their money and how they relate to it.

And so to me it was, it's not as jarring a as some people might think at first glance. Go ahead and reframe the question though.

Scott Maderer: So let me frame it another way when I am talking my, my brand has inspired stewardship, and we'll talk about stewardship more later, but one of the frames I run into is in Christian circles that makes me want to talk about stewardship, which is not only money, but includes money is, I see these sorts of approaches that people have about money, where a lot of Christians were hold four views in their head all at one time that don't.

I don't understand how you can hold all four of 'em [00:12:00] in your head. One is, oh, that person doesn't have money, so they haven't been blessed by God, so they must have done something wrong. And at the same time, they'll see somebody else and say that person doesn't have money. Oh, see how holy they are?

And how, they're very spiritual because money's not important to 'em. They're not materialistic and. Slash they'll see somebody who has resources and has money and is bla blessed with resources and they'll look at them and they'll go, huh, that person has been blessed by God.

They must be doing really well. And then they'll see somebody else that has a lot of resources and they'll go, oh, that must be an evil person who takes advantage of everybody. And in my head, I'm looking at those things going. All four of these can't be right. You gotta pick a few, but, and yet that's really prominent in the Christian circles that there's a lot of discussion around how money either keeps us from being.

Spiritually minded or interferes with our walk and again, I don't think that's invalid. [00:13:00] And then, but there's also these views around how it's a proof of blessing and these sorts of things. And I don't think that's invalid either. But yet it kind of contradicts. So that's what I mean by for your journey, you've gone from ministry to wealth management and I think for a lot of Christians they would see those as contradictory, how do you reconcile 'em? And you just mentioned you don't see 'em as contradictory, but expand on that if you would like.

John Knowlton: Sure. I don't necessarily think that having resources or not having them is a sign of blessing or withholding of blessing. It's a matter of do you provide value or not?

And this is a biblical principle, Luke 6 38. Jesus says, give and it shall be given to you. And so the value creation cycle starts with giving. It starts with a gift. And if it's important to you to be engaged in the world I really encourage everybody to seek to [00:14:00] provide value in every interaction they have.

And you can do this a lot of different ways, but finding needs that people have and then supplying those needs, whether it's you do it or you make a connection or you make an introduction, or you suggest a resource, or have you thought about this? All of those are ways of adding value and the more we add value and the more.

Valuable. The problems are that we solve, the more we're engaging that value creation cycle that Jesus talked about, give and it shall be given to you. And so people who have more resources tend to solve better problems or provide more value, and that's simply the way God designed the economy to work.

People curse those who the, he who withholds grain, but a blessing is on the head of him who provides it. That's in the proverbs.

So yeah, the [00:15:00] blessing comes from what Providing meeting a need, providing something valuable.

Scott Maderer: Yeah. It's the difference between hoarding a resource and having a resource, yeah. If I have it, I'm, I. It's in my possession, but I can give it away. I can multiply it, I can do other things with it. If I'm hoarding it well, it's in my possession and I don't want anyone else to ever touch it. It's mine and only mine.

John Knowlton: Sure, yeah. Like the Dead Sea. It's it's so salty because it has no outlet.

It only receives, it never lets anything out.

Scott Maderer: Everything comes in and nothing goes out.

John Knowlton: Yeah.

Scott Maderer: What are some of the pivotal moments for you as you were going through these transitions and beginning to reframe how you looked at your own success and how you define success for others?

John Knowlton: Yeah. I can't point to a moment, but I have come to recognize that all of our [00:16:00] outcomes. A result of our choices and behaviors, which are all rooted in our thinking. And if you look at the gospel of Mark, the first thing that Jesus says is the time is fulfilled. Repent and believe in this good news.

And the word repent there in Greek is Noo meta change. Noo how you think. Change your thinking and believe this good news. Then you could say, what good news and what are we thinking about? How you think about yourself and how you think about God. And what we also come to see is that Jesus pur, one of his purpose statements was to provide life that's abundant, overflowing, expansive.

And so there's something that needs to happen in our thinking. Therefore our behaviors and therefore our outcomes, that results in us aligning our lives with the way God wants things to work. And then [00:17:00] resources of heaven, the resources of heaven come to flow into our lives. And the thinking is critical.

Jesus said it, and I've noticed it in my own life and in the people around me.

Scott Maderer: I know this is probably gonna be a bit like asking you to name one which one is your favorite child, but if you go back through your book thank you for success, 52 stories that upgrade your thinking to boost productivity, problem solving, and relationships.

Do you have one of the stories that you consider your favorite or the one you most like sharing?

John Knowlton: Scott, I'll tell you the one that everyone seems to smile when we talk about it, and it's called Creativity in a Box, and the story is about the filming of Raiders of the Lost Arc. And Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones, of course.

And there's a scene where he's in an alley in North Africa and there's a guy with a simar who's doing all [00:18:00] these wild gyrations and it's this intensely choreographed scene. And the guy's coming at Harrison Ford or Indiana Jones, and he's swinging the saber around and he's doing all this wild stuff.

And just when. Harrison Ford's about to be chopped down. He just pulls out his pistol and shoots the guy and he dies. And everyone who's seen the movie remembers that scene, but that's not how the scene was written.

In fact, Ford was supposed to do a very similar choreographed response and they had this whole fight scene where they're gonna dance all around the alley and all this kinda stuff.

But on the day of filming the Harrison Ford woke up with the flu. So he wasn't able to record and he said, no, guys, I can't work today. And the production budget was already spent. They'd hired the extras, they blocked off the streets. They had the cameras and lights and everything. And so [00:19:00] Ford said I could stand there for a couple minutes if you need me in the shot.

And so that's what they did. The budget. Was a constraint. It was a box, if you will, that they couldn't reschedule. They didn't have the money to schedule it on another day, and so that. Box forced them to decide on some other way to solve their problem, which was this very memorable scene.

Probably no one would remember the choreographed scene that they'd written, but everybody remembers Indiana Jones pulling out his pistol and shooting the guy. And so the point of this story is that we can see constraints, financial constraints, budget, time constraints. Resource constraints, whatever.

We can see them as a big problem and an excuse for not accomplishing things, or we [00:20:00] can see them as a constraint that forces us to be even more creative than we would've been without the constraint. And so I, Scott, I actually wanna make that stor story in its entirety available to the listeners.

And so they're welcome to go to the website that we can talk about in a minute. And I'll send them that story along with a 92nd video explaining how to use it in your very next staff meeting or team meeting.

Scott Maderer: Awesome. And yeah, we'll share the links at the end where folks can find that as well.

You talk a lot about thinking, and I think most people would agree that thinking is something that's important, but again, I don't think we're necessarily all trained or understand how to look at our thinking, how to understand our thinking, and then how to develop better ways of thinking.

How do you. How do you help people? [00:21:00] Or what's the frame that you use to help people begin to learn better? Better ways of thinking, better habits of thought.

John Knowlton: Yeah. You used a great term before metacognition. Meta. Meta in one of its definitions in Greek is above. And we can, we, among all the creatures of the world, as far as we know, we are the only ones who can think about what we think about.

And so I like to teach people to ha to change their defaults or upgrade their default thinking, their default settings. And what I mean by that is when we recognize, when we're thinking about what we're thinking about and we recognize it's a limiting thought or a constraining thought I can't do that 'cause I don't have enough money.

Or I can't accomplish this thing, I can't meet the goal because of whatever it is. When we have that [00:22:00] kind of a thought and we become aware of it, I just, I encourage everybody to have a quick alternative that they can go to. So for me, it happens to be Psalm 23 when I notice I'm engaged in bad thinking or that's limited.

The Lord is my shepherd. I'm not my shepherd. He makes me lie down and right. And so that's mine. Other, it doesn't have to be a psalm, it doesn't have to be any scripture. It could be anything positive. But I just encourage people to, to train themselves, to pay attention to what they're thinking about and have a ready default change their default setting.

Scott Maderer: With, folks tend to have two kind of the scripts that they play in their head. Oftentimes they're things that have come from even childhood or long they really started a long time ago. But we still have that kind of script that [00:23:00] runs in our head is the default.

Is that sort of something that you use to help reset when one of those scripts starts to take over? Is that a good example of that?

John Knowlton: Yeah. When I'm in a coaching situation, I'll often ask people when I hear something that's not likely to lead them to their success or to their goal.

I'll ask them, tell me why you said that. And just ask some open-ended questions like that to unpack it and then often. Together we can find something to replace that with. Oh, what would be a better thing to say? What might be more helpful to you? One of my four kids had trouble falling asleep.

He had, was dealing with some anxiety as a little guy and so we would before [00:24:00] bed. Help him rehearse what is it that is true? What would, what is helpful? So when he would get scared he already knew what was a good thing to think about. And what was a positive thing that he could train his mind on instead of whatever he was anxious or scared about?

The Apostle Paul taught. In Philippians four, eight. If there's anything true, anything worthy of praise, anything excellent think on these things. And this is a, an ancient technique to have something ready at hand that we can replace bad thinking with. Good.

Scott Maderer: Are there any. Kind of key phrases or expressions that you hear people use that kind of, as some of those indicators that maybe this is a thought that people would examine and try to come up [00:25:00] with that new default, so to speak? I could never do that. That's a big one. I would never, I could never, or.

John Knowlton: Only this other kind of person can do that. Or my kind of people don't do that. So those are just some examples that they're categorical. They tend to be really categorical.

Scott Maderer: I

John Knowlton: would never, people like me don't, et cetera. And anytime you hear that from yourself or somebody else, that is a learned limitation.

And it's. It's not what God has in mind for you.

Scott Maderer: What you think about some of the frames of thought that we talk about is like scarcity versus abundance mindsets. What do you see as ways that folks can begin to reframe from that kind of closed in scarcity mindset [00:26:00] to one that's more growth oriented or abundant oriented?

John Knowlton: Yeah. So two, two tags I'll take on this. The first one is. Is to really think about what you think is true about the world and about God. In other words is God a, a God who is limiting and constraining or has he created a universe that's so big we can't even figure it out? Is it still expanding and there's new things being made all the time.

So that might be helpful for some people just to think about, gosh what is true about what we know of God and the universe. The second is to think about ourselves and we have a lot more control over ourselves. Of course. It's the only thing we have control over and to think, [00:27:00] what could I do?

What's my next best action? And so for sometimes I know it's a little bit abstract or arcane to be thinking about thinking metacognition. So let's take, let's boil it down to action. What was, what is the next best thing I could do right now? And you know what, Scott? These these phones that we pay a thousand dollars for are scientifically designed distraction machines.

And they will keep us entertained or addicted to a dopamine hit or whatever me mechanism they use to keep us from, we keep us thinking about what other people are doing instead of what we can do. And so those are my two answers. Broad. Think about God and what he's made. Very micro, what is [00:28:00] my next best move?

Scott Maderer: So I've got a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, but before I go there and ask those, is there anything else about the book that you've written or the work that you do that you would like to share with the listener? I.

John Knowlton: I'll just say this the book 52 store is 52 stories that are there to help us learn to think better without being prescriptive or without being a bunch of theories.

I. The reason I included them and wrote 'em down is they seem to help. I'm not interested in any theories. I only care about what works and it works to help to tell stories and to talk about 'em with people. I see behavior change and outcomes change when people will engage together in stories that provoke their thinking, and so I just encourage you to.[00:29:00]

To give it a try, try engaging with stories that might challenge your current thinking and open up new new ways of being. Give it a shot.

Scott Maderer: Awesome. So my brand is inspired stewardship and I tend to run things through that lens of stewardship, and yet I've discovered over the years that's a word that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So for you, what does the word stewardship mean to you?

John Knowlton: The first thing that comes to mind, 'cause I haven't written a book about stewardship, Scott I'll have to look at yours, but the first thing that comes to mind is. Psalm 24, the Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. In other words, I don't own anything.

Yeah, my name's on some titles and some deeds and things like that, but the everything in creation is owned by [00:30:00] God and I am a steward of whatever I get to say whatever I have, say over, and therefore I have a responsibility to the owner. Whether that's the owner of my business the owner of my family, the owner of my work, and my interactions with every everybody else.

And so there is a responsibility that I have to God to take care of it in the way that he would. He gave Adam a responsibility. In the garden to tend it and to keep it, to cultivate it and add value to it to make it even better. And so to me, stewardship is begins with that recognition that what people see as mine is just what I have current custody over and I have a responsibility to the owner.[00:31:00]

Scott Maderer: So this is my favorite question, John, that I like to ask everybody. Imagine for a moment that I could invent this magic machine and with this machine, I was able to take you from where you are today and transport you to the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years. And through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life, see all of the connections, all of the ripples, all of the impacts you've left behind.

What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

John Knowlton: My wife and I, Julie. Julie, and I have four children, and the oldest is my stepdaughter. And then the second is ours together. And then the number three and four we had, we fostered and then adopted and. So for each of our kids, they have different aptitudes and skills and abilities and all of that.[00:32:00]

And I've realized that we needed to have a sort of different expectations for each kid.

The reality is, because we all have different capacities. We can't set a standard and say All my kids need to go to college or start a business, or whatever the case might be. So that's a long way of getting to my answer, Scott, which is my. Hope and goal would be that I've equipped my kids with the values and the spiritual resources and the material resources that they need in order to become what God has planned for them.

And that they would be able to pass that on to their following [00:33:00] generations. If we had a family line of people who. Didn't meet my standard, but lived into what God created them to be. Wow. That would be so awesome.

Scott Maderer: So what's on the roadmap? What's coming next as you continue on your journey? I.

John Knowlton: We've got this book coming out and you, we can talk about that.

But the next project I have in mind, this book isn't even released yet, but you can pre-order it and I'm already thinking about the next one. And so Scott, there's a million conferences, books, podcasts, and websites about leadership, but I've come to realize that everyone. Is also a follower

Scott Maderer: and

John Knowlton: I can't find any books or conferences on followership.

And so I'm working on this concept called Leaders who Follow and how do I be a great follower and help [00:34:00] you if you're my leader, help you achieve your vision, to extend it, et cetera. So I'm doing a pretty deep study right now on what does it take to be a great follower.

Scott Maderer: Yeah that's gonna be an interesting new project as well.

You can find out more about John Dalton over@abundantthoughtrevolution.com. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. I'll also link to where you can pre-order or order the book as well. I'll have all of that over in the show notes. John, what else would you like to share with the listener?

John Knowlton: The thing that I'd like to leave your listeners with is.

Is an idea that is critical. It drives me every day, and it's this three word phrase. Think better every day. Think better every day. I believe that if we can find a way to think better, to, to have [00:35:00] more accurate assessment of the world and our role in it, we'll add more value to people. We'll get closer to the.

The purpose for which God made us, and we will find more success. That doesn't necessarily mean money, but if you add a lot of value, you're probably gonna get some more money. It doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get prettier or handsomer. I'm probably not gonna get any taller, but there's an incredible sense of satisfaction that comes when we are living in our sweet spot for which we were designed.

And it all starts with our thinking. Think better every day.

Scott Maderer: Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to [00:36:00] live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode. Please. Please do us a favor. Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes.

Rate all one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review, and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed. Until next time, invest your time. Your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.