The Red Letter Disciple Episode 30

030: Tanner Olson on Poetry’s Place in the World, How Being a Writer is Only 10% Writing, and His Best Advice for Those Who Want to Be Entrepreneurs

Tanner Olson is an author, speaker, and poet. Tanner discusses his writing rhythms, how he’s grown his platform and influence over the years, and his unique way of blending humor and creativity into a story and announcing the hope and love of Jesus.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by Red Letter Living. At its core, Red Letter Living creates resources to challenge all people to be greater disciples of Jesus.

Pastors and church leaders, enjoy a FREE resource called Growing Your Church Challenge: 10 Ideas to Grow Your Church that Cost Little to No Money. Enter the code “PodcastPastor” at checkout to receive this totally FREE! This offer is good up until Easter 2023 (4/9/2023). These ten ideas are going to be extremely practical, and not vague ideas like “preach better” and “be kinder.” I trust you already do that. So, go, grab this FREE resource and let’s grow our churches for the glory of God.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Written to Speak by Tanner Olson

Tanner Olson Instagram 

Walk a Little Slower Podcast by Tanner Olson

Written to Speak Blog by Tanner Olson

Key insights from the episode:

Art takes surrendering.
Tanner spends 10% of his time writing; the other 90% is “all the other stuff.”
Poetry has a place in the church.
Poetry is not a sermon; it is not a song. It is somewhere in between. – Tanner Olson
Poetry is for everybody, but not everybody knows that poetry is for them. – Tanner Olson
Create and write for the people who follow you, not for the ones who don’t. – Tanner Olson
It’s better to have a very small audience with faithful followers than to have 100,000 followers who don’t know you exist. – Tanner Olson

Tanner’s Challenge: Rest and read poetry!

Tanner Olson

Are you following Jesus? 

Many want to be greater followers of Jesus but don’t know how. So we extensively studied everything Jesus commanded of us and located five key targets to which Jesus invited His followers. The five targets are Being, Forgiving, Serving, Giving, and Going.

In partnership with LifeWay Research, we created a Red Letter Challenge Assessment that will measure you according to these five targets. And the best news of all: it’s free! You will get results back immediately and be presented with the following steps to help you become an even greater follower of Jesus.

You can take the FREE Red Letter Challenge Assessment here.

Some not-so-key insights: 

Tanner knew his spot in heaven was secured when he worked at Chick-fil-A.

Watch the entire season for free: 

We’ll upload every episode of The Red Letter Disciple on our Youtube Channel. If you aren’t subscribed already, you can do so here!

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