B00CHVIVMY EBOK (12 page)

They research books and write.

They go to writing conferences to hone their craft and write.

Speakers? They do just the opposite.

They book as many speaking engagements as possible and speak.

They work up as many speeches as possible and speak.

They attend speaking conferences to hone their craft and speak.

When I broke it down that simply, it was pretty easy to say yes to some things and no to others.

Most of the time we try to stand in the middle of the passion seesaw and balance perfectly. We’re afraid to pick the wrong thing, so we just hover there instead of jumping on one side.

The absurdity is that when I picked writing, it didn’t mean I never got to speak. I spoke more times last year than I ever have. I’ll speak dozens of times this year and love doing that. I didn’t have to decide never to do one of my passions. I just had to decide that there was going to be a winner—the awesome above all awesome. There was going to be a first place if the two passions, writing and speaking, ever went head to head.

And of course they overlap. Most of our passions do. Right now, it’s very unlikely your passions are “be a marine biologist, become a Bedouin shepherd, or be a stock trader on Wall Street.” Editing your list won’t usually prevent you from ever doing your other passions. More often than not, your focus on one passion helps you get even better at another one.

When I focused on being a writer, I got better at writing speeches and presentations. I didn’t get rid of the passion to speak. Speaking actually became easier. It just wasn’t my final destination on the road to awesome. I wanted to be a writer.

Mountain climber

A one-legged mountain climber once taught me something really interesting.

He’d lost his leg in a climbing accident but still lived on the mountain. In between taking photos for magazines he can be found clinging to cliffs and whatnot.

At an event, I talked to him about the only mountain-climbing story I had. It was a short one that basically went like this:

“Have you seen the cover of the recent
National Geographic
? That guy standing on the cliff? How crazy is that?”

That was all I had. Just like that, I was out of mountain-climbing material.

Fortunately, he had plenty.

“That’s Alex Honnold. I’m friends with him. He’s amazing.”

Alex Honnold is one of the top solo climbers in the world. Solo climbing means he climbs without ropes and without anyone else. The only thing he brings on the mountain is a small bag of chalk and his iPod (probably with the
Quitter
audio book on repeat). He then scales a thousand feet up a cliff, carefully putting his calloused fingers in inch-wide fissures so that he doesn’t plummet to his death.

This climber/photographer friend told me that Alex was starting to get a lot of national media attention. One afternoon a team of photographers tied themselves to different parts of the mountain so that they could capture Alex as he ascended. Alex went so fast, the photographers couldn’t keep up. Every few hundred feet he was forced to find three inches of ledge and pause there while the photographers repositioned their ropes and gear.

“How is Alex handling all of this newfound fame?” I asked. “Being on the cover of
National Geographic
is no joke.”

The photographer thought for a few seconds and then said, “Well, I think Alex’s point of view is, ‘I am going to climb mountains, because that’s what I do; I’m a mountain climber. So if you want to come along and take photos of me and pay me money to do it, that’s cool. I was going to do this anyway.’ ”

Alex was going to climb mountains. That’s what he does. That’s who he is. His road to awesome is just like yours except it’s vertical. And if you ever see a video of him, you’ll know instantly that he’s doing the right thing. On the ground he’s kind of awkward. He seems uncomfortable and completely out of his element. On the mountain he transforms.

He was going to do it anyway.

How about you? What were you going to do anyway?

We all have something like that. We all have a passion or two like Alex. For me, it’s creating ideas. I love that I get paid to write books and consult with companies. Both are a lot of fun. But regardless of the money, I was going to do those things anyway.

Because I’m a writer. That’s what writers do. They share ideas.

Who do you need to be when you enter the land of Mastering?

My friend Thad Cockrell gave me the answer. He’s a musician.

A few months ago he started a new project called
Leagues
. After a successful solo career, he decided to strike out on a new adventure with a brand-new band.

Before they started recording the album, he called the guitar player and the drummer and the keyboard player and the audio engineer and anyone who was even remotely going to be involved with the project, and he told them who he needed them to be.

Their secret selves.

Call by call, he’d say, “I need you to be your secret self on this album. I need you to be the person you’ve always known you could be deep down inside but were afraid to be. The person you’ve always dreamed of being. I need that person on this album. I need you to be your secret self.”

That’s what I need you to be as we enter the land of Mastering.

It’s time to be your secret self.

6: Mastering
 

6

Mastering

You ready for a bar fight?

I don’t think I’m supposed to use the phrase “bar fight” as a Christian, but in this case, my hands are really tied. Can you think of another phrase that means “stool getting broken over someone’s back”? I can’t. Maybe “potluck fight” or “church picnic brawl,” but neither of those captures the fury of an old-fashioned bar fight. And awesome is always up for one of those.

A dream you don’t have to fight for isn’t a dream—it’s a nap. And while naps are delightful and enjoyed best on Sunday afternoon, they do very little to move you closer to awesome. A nap changes your afternoon. Awesome changes your world. Which is why I had a bar fight with Dave Ramsey.

When I wanted to name my last book
Quitter
, he pushed back. He felt that it was a bit too negative and wouldn’t make a great title. We went round and round via a few emails until finally we decided to have a meeting.

I was a nervous wreck. I think at some point I won’t be intimidated by Dave Ramsey anymore—probably around 2032 that will happen. But he’s sold millions of books, has a personality that fills arenas, and spends every week giving five million people advice via his radio show. He’s an entrepreneur who, after clawing his way back from bankruptcy, has spent the last twenty years building a successful business, fighting and scrapping the entire time.

The weekend before the meeting, I practiced the mini speech I was going to give him. On Saturday afternoon, I set up an office in my home so I could rehearse how I would sit and what I would do with my arms. Do I lean on my left while pointing with my right for emphasis, which is my power arm? Do I cross my arms to establish my seriousness, or is that bad body language?

I had everything ready for our meeting at 4:30 p.m. that Monday. At 9:35 a.m., my phone rang. It was my team leader, who said, “Hey, Dave is in my office and wants to talk about the title of your book.” Ohhhh, time change. Well played, Dave Ramsey. Well played indeed.

So I marched up to the office, sweaty and a little throw-uppy. I sat down and told him why the title had to be
Quitter
. I told him I’d quit six of the eight jobs I’ve had in my life. I told him that, of the other two, I was fired from one and asked to leave the other. I laid out the grossness of my previous employment history as proof that I was indeed a quitter. I was anxious about what he’d say when he heard my background, but I had to fight for the title I believed in. It mattered to me, and I didn’t know how much until I got into a fight about it.

His pushback helped me define my dream. It called out new passion and new energy for the title and the book. I’d presented a dozen other weak titles to the team, but I didn’t care about them. It wasn’t until I was pushed into the corner and forced to fight that my dream about the book really started to crystallize.

That’s how the road to awesome works.

You’re gonna get your hands dirty in a bar fight. You’re gonna step into the fray of a meeting and throw some elbows. Awesome is not a casual affair. There’s always some degree of scuffle. Some degree of opposition. And as long as you’re pursuing your true awesome, you won’t shrink from a fight.

Welcome to the land of Mastering. It’s time to throw some elbows.

I spent some time in rehab

In 2008, I decided I wanted to be a public speaker. After writing, it was the second thing I wanted to learn how to master.

I had hope, passion, and great gobs of desire to be a public speaker.

The only problem was that no one else cared.

Nobody would book me to come speak. And that was a good decision on their part. I was horrible.

But I was caught in a vicious cycle not unlike the one college graduates discover when they hit the real world looking for a job. This cycle is not uncommon when you enter the land of Mastering: You don’t have any experience. The only way to get experience is to get a job. But every job for which you apply insists you still need experience. And around again you go.

Then I found a loophole in the system. It was in the last place most people would look—rehab.

A church near us had a residential rehab program. They had twelve people living in the facility at any given time. They were always looking for speakers because no one aims at the rehab crowd.

When you aspire to be a public speaker, you aim for huge crowds with huge stages and huge paychecks. Speaking to twelve people, who are in the throes of one of the worst seasons of their lives, for free, is not exactly a moment you aspire to. So why did I do it?

It was awesome.

One of my dreams is to share hope with people. Talk about a group who needed some encouragement. Sometimes we get so caught up in waiting for the perfect context—the one we’ve always had in our heads—in order to begin being awesome. It’s a horrible mistake. Awesome starts the moment you do what you love. If you truly love doing it, the environment in which you do it shouldn’t matter (remember the Apple customer service rep?).

They won’t let you phone it in.

People in rehab are learning how to communicate honestly. They won’t let you come in and sleepwalk through a speech. I had to dig deep and speak from my heart. That was an invaluable experience.

Nobody else was doing it.

Do you know how many other public speakers asked the rehab center if they could speak there the same month I did? Zero. For someone who was horrible at public speaking, that was the level of competition I was ready to handle.

I only got to do it a couple times, but I loved it. And a few years after I spoke there, someone approached me after an event. He said, “I heard you the first time you spoke. I was in rehab, and that meant a lot to me.”

Want to be more awesome at whatever it is you’ve chosen to master? Find your version of rehab—somewhere you can practice being awesome.

GET EXPERIENCE

If you’re not trying to be a public speaker, what does “rehab” look like for you? The three best things you can do to get some experience are:

Volunteer.

Take a part-time
job.

Be
led.

None of those options are particularly sexy, but they are incredibly effective.

Volunteer.

Sometimes my friends will tell me, “I’m starting a nonprofit!” I’ll ask them what that means, and they’ll say, “I registered a Twitter account and bought a URL, and I might do a kickstarter campaign.”

“Have you been to the country your nonprofit will focus on?”

“Yes, I spent four days there once.”

“Have you ever worked with an organization that is already on the ground there?”

“No. Why?”

And that’s when I beg them to volunteer first.

I hope you start a million nonprofits. I hope you start a million businesses. I hope you start many different things. But don’t be so eager to rush through the land of Mastering that you refuse to volunteer.

We think a six-month period of volunteering will delay us from our dream.

We are wrong.

Volunteering does not slow you down. It speeds you up. It gives you a crash-course education that will be invaluable once you launch whatever it is you want to launch. It teaches you lessons you’d rather learn when your future isn’t at stake.

Am I recommending you quit your day job today and volunteer for six months? No. I’m suggesting that, in the land of Mastering, you make a conscious, deliberate effort to find a volunteer sign-up sheet. It doesn’t have to be a soup kitchen. Throw out your old definition of “volunteer.” The new definition of volunteer is “any activity that lets you trade time for expertise.”

That can be almost anything. My friend Jeff Goins wanted to be an awesome blogger. So instead of just focusing on his blog, he created a very intentional list of blogs he would guest post for. For more than a year, he wrote guest posts for free for other blogs.

Did he get better at blogging?

You bet.

Did his volunteering lead to great relationships in the blogging community?

Absolutely.

Did his own blog, his awesome, grow as a result of his volunteering?

Significantly.

Would yours too?

There’s no doubt.

Take a part-time job.

One morning, while waiting for a taxi in a hotel lobby, I talked with a driver who had come to pick up someone else. He was a nice guy and proceeded to tell me a few stories about his life in Florida. Out of work, he had taken the driving job as a stopgap. His house was upside down, his prospects were nonexistent, and he described Florida much like Vin Diesel’s character in
The Chronicles of Riddick
would have described the prison planet he escaped from.

After a few minutes, my ride came and I jumped in the back of the car. I figured he’d have a story much like the first driver. After all, they were in the exact same profession, in the exact same geography, in the exact same economy. Instead, when I asked him how he was doing, this is what he said:

“Things are great! So much opportunity down here. We moved from up north, and we absolutely love Florida! I started this driving business, and it’s really starting to grow.”

I was confused by these two completely different experiences, so I told him, “I just talked to another driver, and he told me the exact opposite story. What’s different about you? Same city, same profession, same economy. Where’s the disconnect?”

He laughed a little and then told me his story.

One day he hired a driver to pick up his family at the airport. He wanted his kids to have the fun experience of having someone waiting for you at baggage claim with your name on a sign. He was looking forward to the whole experience, but it turned out to be pretty lackluster. The driver wasn’t kind, the service was average, and the cost was high.

After thinking about it for a while, he reached a conclusion that a lot of new business owners reach: “I bet I could do that better.”

He could provide better service at a better price and probably build a much better business.

And here’s where his story gets awesome.

He could have very easily said to his wife, “I’ve never been a driver. I’ve never worked for a driving service. I know nothing about that business. I’m going to do some light research, online mostly, and then throw our life savings, all our stability, our kids’ futures, and anything not bolted down in our home at this new dream of mine. Then, six months later, when things don’t grow as fast as I planned, I’m going to act shocked that you’re uncomfortable with this dream.”

Instead, he ignored the average path and got a job at the same car company from which his family got that lackluster ride. Instead of just getting theory training, he got on-the-job training. He spent four months learning the ins and outs of that business. He worked as hard as he could for his new employer, and in turn, he got to learn what it means to run a driving service company.

Then, and only then, did he decide to start his company.

If you’ve got a dream that involves a business of any kind, don’t be too proud, impatient, or foolish to think you don’t need a part-time job. Why learn your mistakes when the stakes are the absolute highest? Why attach your entire future to an experiment? Why not get a paid-for education in your dream?

If you want to start a coffeehouse but have never worked at one in your entire life, you need to work at Starbucks first. Maybe you will come to hate coffee. Maybe you’ll get sick of retail hours. Maybe opening a store at 4:30 a.m. every morning will be a nightmare by month two.

I’d rather you find that out in your part-time job than your full-time dream.

Be led.

Sometimes people get in my ear. Not literally, but metaphorically. And under the guise of advice, they’ll say some interesting things.Here is something I’ve heard a few times: “Wow, I’m surprised you joined Dave Ramsey’s team. You could be doing all of this blog and book stuff on your own by now. Why didn’t you just start your own thing?”

Sometimes when people say that they mean it as a compliment of sorts. They mean I’ve written a book and have a blog and a Twitter account, and maybe it’s really time to strike out on my own. Sometimes they mean it as a dig, that I have somehow taken the easy route or safe route or cowardly route by joining someone else’s team instead of going solo.

I’ve been thinking about those comments for a year now, and I think they represent an interesting shift in our culture. On one end of the spectrum is the entrepreneur, who feels called to go it alone. There are so many tools and opportunities right now for sailing your own ship. This is an amazing time to be an entrepreneur and, for many people, that is the perfect decision.

Sometimes, however, along the way a sense of impatience and even entitlement gets tangled with our sense of entrepreneurship. We’re so desperate to be “the man” or “the woman” right away. We’re so eager to chart our own course that we don’t think we need to be led. We say, “I can grow my own platform easily with social media . . . I can get my own following . . . I’ve been called to do this, and nobody in the history of mankind has ever done it like this! Who could possibly give me advice? Being an apprentice would be failure. This is my time!”

With that line of thinking, we’ve climbed an entitlement ladder and lost a few things.

We’ve lost the value of wise counsel.

We’ve lost the honor of sitting under someone else’s leadership.

We’ve lost the joy of building something slowly that impacts multiple generations instead of just our own lives.

Why did I decide to work for Dave Ramsey?

Because I want to be led. I want to learn from a master. I want to admit time and time again, “I don’t know the best way to do this. Will you teach me?”

I have a new thought now when people tell me, “Wow, I’m surprised you joined Dave Ramsey’s team.” Now in my head, I think,
You’re right. He spent two decades growing a business from zero employees to more than 300 and building a radio empire that’s on 500 radio stations across the country. I’ve written a blog and a couple books. We’re pretty much on the same level at this point. I’m done learning and should probably step out on my own already. What could that guy possibly teach me?