I have a confession that's uncomfortable to write.

For most of the last two decades, I've been building a business the way I wanted to build it. I had the plan, the platform, the passion — and a quiet but stubborn conviction that I knew what I was doing. When my bishop raised concerns, I heard him but didn't really listen. When Tamera — my wife — pushed back with caution, I filed it under "she doesn't understand the vision."

​I was too busy being driven to be corrected.


In my journal, I wrote things that sounded like wisdom but were just ambition wearing spiritual clothes:

That's not wrong on its face. But the energy behind it was — and I knew it. The race I wanted to escape had become a race I was running even harder, just in a different lane. And somewhere in that hustle, I stopped asking God if He wanted me to run at all.

Elder David A. Bednar called me out without knowing it.

In his April 2018 General Conference address "Meek and Lowly of Heart," Elder Bednar made a distinction I've been sitting with for weeks now.

He said that meekness is not weakness. It's not passivity. It's not a doormat laid flat by life's blows.

Meekness, he taught, is righteous responsiveness, willing submissiveness, and strong self-restraint.

He used Jesus in Gethsemane as the model: the Savior possessed the power to call down twelve legions of angels. He could have walked away from the cross. Instead, He chose the Father's will over His own — not because He had no choice, but because He had every choice and made the right one.

That hit differently than I expected.

I had always pictured meekness as something for men who were soft or struggling. I now see it for what it is: the posture of a man secure enough in God to stop proving himself to everyone else. A man strong enough to be corrected. A man honest enough to admit the bishop was right.​

My bishop is a good man. A careful man. When he raised concerns about the direction of my business and the drive behind it, I nodded and thought, he just doesn't see what I see.

But here's what I wrote in my journal in March 2025 — and this one stings:

I framed their caution as abandonment. As isolation. I turned their concern into a reason to double down.

That's not meekness. That's not even honesty. That's a man whose pride has gotten so comfortable it started defending itself with scripture.

Elder Bednar described this pattern — the spiritually proud person who can hear instruction but can't receive it, who processes correction through the filter of self-justification. I was doing exactly that. And I called it faith.​

I wrote in April 2025:

And also:​

There's nothing wrong with wanting to build income or get out of debt. But there's a version of entrepreneurship that stops being about service and starts being about escape — from the job you hate, from the financial pressure that won't quit, from the feeling that you've fallen behind.

That's where I was living.

Business is fundamentally an act of service. You trade something of greater worth — your knowledge, your time, your creativity — for something of equal or lesser value. The moment your primary motivation shifts from what can I give to what can I get, you've stopped being an entrepreneur and started being a consumer of other people's attention.

My bishop saw it. My wife saw it. And God, in His patient way, kept sending me to the mirror until I saw it too.

Elder Bednar made a point that I keep returning to: meekness is active. It requires more discipline than aggression does. A proud man can charge forward without thinking. A meek man has to choose, again and again, to hold his power in check and yield to a wisdom greater than his own.

​I wrote in January 2025:

That sentence — I do not quit providing — used to feel like strength to me. Now I see it was also a defense mechanism. A way of saying: "I'll yield, but only so far. My drive stays."

True meekness would sound more like: I trust the Lord enough to stop white-knuckling my own plan.
That's the version I'm still working toward.

In March 2025, I wrote something that felt like a crack in the armor:

Not someday. Today.

That's not a man who has it together. That's a man who has finally gotten tired enough of the fight to set down the weapon he was using against himself.

​The weapon was pride. The disguise it wore was hustle.

My bishop was right. I've been building something with mixed motives — some genuine, some greedy. Some rooted in service, some rooted in the itch to prove I'm not behind.

Meekness doesn't mean I stop building. Elder Bednar was clear: the Savior was not passive. He was perfectly responsive to the Father's will, even when that will was difficult.

What I'm purging is the part of my ambition that's really just fear with a business plan attached. The part that scrolls competitors' income claims and feels inadequate. The part that dismisses the counsel of good men because they can't see my spreadsheet.

Business is service. And service, real service, requires meekness — the willingness to be corrected, to be redirected, to trade what I want for what God sees is actually needed.

I'm not there yet. But I'm closer than I was before I started writing this.

Elder David A. Bednar, "Meek and Lowly of Heart," General Conference, April 2018.

What about you? Is there an area of your life where you've been running your own plan a little too hard — and something (or someone) has been trying to tell you so? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

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