Well Done

Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. — Matthew 25:21

For a long stretch of my life, getting things done was what I was known for. At the periodic galas, I was usually not the wealthiest person in the room, or the most powerful, or the best connected. But when something needed to be built, I could usually find a way to build it, and often faster than anyone expected. Then came a season that taught me what I could not have learned any other way. I will come back to that at the end.

A couple of months ago, a man who once served on one of my executive teams invited me to lunch. He has done very well for himself since, and he wanted to talk about what to do with what he had been given. Somewhere between ordering and the check, without being asked, he said I was the best CEO he had ever worked for. He has worked for a few. I thanked him and did not think much more about it.

This morning it occurred to me that in decades of building companies — through startups, turnarounds, booms, busts and a few fights I did not choose — I have never written down what I would actually tell someone who wants to get more done. So here it is. None of it is complicated. All of it costs something.

The short version: real effectiveness is not a choice between the practical life and the spiritual one. It takes both.

1. Be an Incurable Optimist

Every large undertaking starts with someone who believes it can be done before there is any evidence that it can. That kind of optimism looks naive, but it rests on a paradox: you have to be willing to fail while remaining confident that, in the end, you won't.

"Failure is not an option" is a fine slogan, but living it sometimes requires redefining failure. A missed deadline is not failure. A lost deal is not failure. Even a company that doesn't make it is not failure. True failure is giving up hope. If you have lost it, go get it back. Hope that has been through trouble is the kind that holds (Romans 5:3–5).

2. Stay Diligent

Every age has its bread and circuses, and ours are delivered to your pocket around the clock. The person who gets things done can stay culturally aware — know the score, catch the highlights — without surrendering the whole evening to it. Hours are the raw material of everything you will ever build, and they do not come back.

An old proverb states the payoff plainly: Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings (Proverbs 22:29). You were made to be fruitful. There is no point pretending otherwise.

3. Use the Tools of the Day

When I was a kid, before Excel there was VisiCalc. Before Google there was Dow Jones News Retrieval. Before the web there were dial-up bulletin boards. Each gave an edge to whoever learned it first.

Today the tools are AI and "vibe coding" — describing software in plain language and building it alongside the machine — and learning both early is about as close to an unfair advantage as the market offers right now. But timing matters. Too early, and you pay to educate a market someone else will harvest. Too late, and you compete on price for scraps. The skill is to stay close enough to the frontier to recognize when a tool has crossed from novelty to necessity.

4. Match Talent to Task

If I have one managerial skill worth passing on, it is helping people find the gift they did not know they had. Nearly everyone has something that comes easily to them and hard to others. They often discount it precisely because it is easy. It can stay hidden for years under a job description written for someone else.

Find it, name it, and shape the role around it, and you will watch an ordinary performer become exceptional almost overnight. Most of the best people I have worked with were not hired as stars. They became stars once their work matched their wiring. As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another (1 Peter 4:10).

5. Hold On to Humility

The great hazard for anyone who is gifted and blessed is to forget where the gifts and blessings came from. Success has a way of rewriting the story so that you are its author. Learn who the real Author is early enough for it to matter. If you don't, you will be invited to learn it the hard way. I say that as someone who received the invitation.

God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble* (James 4:6).

6. Grow Up Spiritually

Here is the season I promised to come back to.

In time I met headwinds. Some were the ordinary kind every builder meets. Some were not ordinary at all — opposition organized and determined enough that I can only call it evil. I stepped back. For a long while I lived more like a hermit than an executive. The desire to be useful never left, but something had to die first, and that something was me. Dying to self was the price of re-entry. What came out the other side was not a smaller version of the old drive. It was the same native ability, now joined to a power that is not mine.

We get 70 or 80 years, if we are given a normal span (Psalm 90:10). Their purpose is not, finally, to get more done. It is to find the One who made us and learn what He wants. Everything above is useful. None of it is enough.

Consider Daniel. He was the chief administrator of the most powerful empire of his day, serving kings who executed people for failing them, and he outlasted a change of dynasty. The record says an excellent spirit was in him (Daniel 6:3), and the same chapter shows where it came from: three times a day he went to his window and prayed, as he always had (Daniel 6:10). When rivals engineered a law to stop him, he kept the appointment anyway. The busiest man in Babylon never treated prayer as a distraction from the work. It was the work underneath the work.

That is the fusion I mean: native ability, sharpened by discipline, joined to power from on High. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6). Skill alone burns bright and burns out. Skill surrendered lasts.

I have spent a great deal of time in recent years asking the questions underneath all of this. Over the past 8 months I distilled what I found at TheTimeOfTheReturn.com. It was not a planned project. It was simply the by-product of looking into things honestly and writing down what turned up, for anyone else asking the same questions.

Lord, Send Me: First Steps

If you are ready to put this to work, start here this week.

1. Ask first. Before you plan anything, ask for fresh unction and the right words for your own calling and circumstances. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally (James 1:5). Your gift and your season are not anyone else's.

2. Audit one week. For 7 days, write down where your hours actually go, in 30-minute blocks. Most people find 10 or more hours a week they would never have chosen to spend that way. That is your new capital.

3. Learn one tool this month. Pick one: Claude for research and writing, or Replit for building small software by describing what you want. Give it one real problem from your own work, not a demo. The learning curve is shorter than you think, and the gap it opens is wider.

4. Name one gift. Think of one person on your team or in your family whose gift is going unused. Tell them specifically what you see. Then ask what work would let them use it.

5. Keep an appointment. Set a fixed time each day, however short, to step away from the work and pray before you plan. Daniel's window is a picture, not a quota. The point is that the appointment is kept on the days when the work is loudest.

6. If you got a great deal done and lost the plot along the way: you are not the first, and you are not too far gone. Start with Luke 15. If you want company on the road home, prodigalmirror.org was built for you.

Well Done

Jesus told a story about a man who entrusted his servants with talents of silver before a long journey (Matthew 25:14–30). Two put theirs to work and doubled it. One buried his out of fear. When the master returned, he did not ask any of them how busy they had been. He asked what they had done with what they were given. To the two who had done something, he said: Well done, good and faithful servant.

That is the only performance review that finally matters.

If you are reading this because you want to get more done, good. Take the first 5 and go. But if you are reading it because you already got a great deal done and are wondering whether it counted — or whether you have wandered too far to come back — the sixth is for you. The father in the other story was watching the road, and when he saw his son yet a great way off, he ran (Luke 15:20).

It is not too late to hear "well done."

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Sources and tiers

SPINE: Scripture as cited (KJV). Proverbs 22:29, Psalm 90:10, Daniel 6 and Zechariah 4:6 are cited as wisdom and as type and shadow, not as ordinance.

CONVICTION (the author's own): that lasting excellence is native skill fused with power from on High; that AI and plain-language software building are the tools of this season.

Companion pieces: When You Bet the Ranch on the Wrong Horse; The Final Exam. For an honest look at the evidence of design: thetimeofthereturn.com/kitchen-table-proofs. For the prodigal who wants to come home: prodigalmirror.org.

Drafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI system made by Anthropic — Ody the Wellkeeper & Claude, MMXXVI.