Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids.

They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end,

featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout.

You can explore all of that at creation to revelation.com.

I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started.

Okay, so I need to tell you right up front that I have an equal amount of excitement

in sharing the relevance and personal benefit of today's topic

versus fear, a sense of trepidation, I guess, because the only way for me to convey this

concept of work smarter, not harder, and how it can help you is to share a few things from my life.

And I'm genuinely afraid that it might come off as some, hey, everybody, look at me, this is the way

I did it, and it's working, and you should do that too. And I don't want that to happen.

Because I am so far from perfect, it isn't even

funny. I mean, even today's topic was motivated by my personal laziness early on. But bear with me

as I share a few things, and then when we get to the back half of this episode, we will put the

focus squarely on you and your life and how you might be able to work more wisely,

more efficiently, and maybe less hard, with less of a grind, with a lot less stress.

And ultimately, that's why I'm going forward with this. My excitement over how this might help you today overrides some of those other things.

Okay, let me start in the beginning for just a moment.

Even as a teenager, my objective was how can I get the most result out of the least amount of hard,

sustained work? I'm not saying it was noble, but I am saying it was worth the effort. For instance,

I started college kind of young. We were homeschooled and I was a teenager, and I figured out very early on that if you memorized everything in the chapter that was bolded, and you had even a functioning knowledge of the stuff that was italicized, you pretty much did not have to read anything else.

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