B00CHVIVMY EBOK (2 page)

2. Hope is boss.

Do you know how many people in my college graduating class of 1998 launched projects to build wells in Africa? Do you know how many asked what percentage of their hoodie purchase was going to Haiti? Do you know how many wore TOMS shoes? The answer in each case is zero. Changing the world was something you cared about eventually, not right away, and brilliant books reflected that. In
Halftime
, Bob Buford told Boomers that after spending the first half of their lives focused on success, it was time to spend the second half focused on significance and changing the world. If you told a 22-year-old today that before he can change the world he has to work for twenty years, he’d giggle at you. Generation Y, and Generation X as they are inspired by the shift in culture, want meaning now, not eventually. Hope is boss.

3. Anyone can play.

In 2000, I paid a designer $2,000 to build me a website. He charged by the page and learned how to develop it by reading a book. A book! Isn’t that adorable? We thought the dawn of the Internet removed all the gatekeepers. It didn’t. It just introduced new gatekeepers. Like developers and designers and social media experts. Those days are waning, though. Moms are making millions on blogs. Teenagers are starting businesses on Facebook. People are building empires on Pinterest. Specialists still exist, but technology is finally available to the entire population. Anyone can play.

I’m not a futurist. I’m a presentist, which isn’t even a real word but sounds less lame than “right nowist.” Those three forces I just described aren’t on the horizon. They are the horizon—for you and me and anyone who is willing to escape average.

As a result, you can be more awesome, more often, a whole lot faster today.

The Internet revolution isn’t over. It’s barely started. And one of the biggest things it’s done is radically shorten the path to reaching your dreams.

While the fives stages of awesome have held true for decades, reaching awesome used to be primarily a post-midlife accomplishment. You had to gain experience plus earn money or pedigree or degrees from institutions where they wear ascots and play, not just eat, squash. The path to awesome was decades long and there was little you could do to shorten it. Everyone had to put in his or her time.

The Internet, and especially social media, has changed that. You just have to find your starting point and stay on the right path.

In 2008, I started a blog in my kitchen. I didn’t have a fancy design. I didn’t have any photos. I didn’t have any sort of tech-savvy skills that made me a perfect candidate for social media. I used the free template that Blogspot offered, and I didn’t even start with an original idea. There was another blog called
Stuff White People Like
. It was a satire of Caucasia. I thought it would be funny to create a Christian version of that site. So I did, with the expectation that I’d get bored of it in a week or two and move on. After all, the other fifty horrible URLs I had registered at GoDaddy.com didn’t sustain a whole lot of momentum. “WordNinja.com” went nowhere.

I told 100 friends about the site and started writing goofy paragraphs. On the
eighth day of its existence, 4,000 people from around the world showed up to read it. Turns out the 100 friends had passed the URL to 100 friends who had passed the URL to 100 friends who eventually told people in Singapore to read it.

Can you even begin to fathom how I would have shared my ideas with 4,000 people in eight days for free thirty years ago? What would I have done, a door-to-door marketing campaign? Me just knocking on people’s front doors and saying, “Hi, I have some ideas about how it’s weird that some people front hug you and other people side hug you. It’s kind of this ‘I like you enough to give you one arm of appreciation but let’s not get all crazy and embrace with both arms.’ Can I please come sit in your living room and read you some of my other ideas? When we’re done, do you mind calling your friends on your rotary phone, which is bolted to your kitchen wall, to let them know I am available for home readings of my ideas? Also, do you know anyone in other countries, like Singapore for instance? Do you mind giving them a ring too? Thanks!”

That would have never worked. And if that were my only path to awesome, I’d still be on the average path. A few years ago, you and I had only a few chances to find our path to an awesome life. Ultimately, you just hoped you picked the right track when you were young and got a big break along the way.

It’s not that we all chose average. No one aims for that in the beginning. Nobody says, “I’m going to be average for sixty-five years and then die!” But not long ago, the path to awesome was so long and arduous that most of us chose not to start. That, or we tried, and failed, to find a shortcut.

I looked at life that way, too, until 2008.

That’s the year I discovered the path to awesome had changed. Namely, it was something that could be traveled much more quickly, before eyelid wrinkles started to appear. I started by taking small steps—steps that I eventually learned social media could greatly accelerate.

After my blog started to grow a little, I thought it might make for an interesting book. Having spent a decade on the average path, I tried a very average way to get it published. I asked a friend who worked at a big church if he knew anyone at any of the major publishers. He had a friend who had a friend at one of the largest publishers on the planet. He told her about my book idea and asked if she would pass the idea to the publisher. She did, and this is her verbatim response:

I actually mentioned this to the publisher this morning on a call I had with them, and to be honest, they feel pretty full up right now. Their recommendation would be to continue to see how the blog readership goes and perhaps explore connecting with a smaller, boutique publishing house that could give him the attention he wants and deserves if this is indeed his calling.

Not what you want to hear, but that is what they suggested at this time.

That’s fancy talk for “no.”

That’s where the average path got me, and it makes sense. Who did I think I was to write a book? I’d never written a book before. I’d never spoken publically before. I’d never done anything in my entire life that would make me attractive to a publisher.

If I stayed on the average path, the steps I’d take to get a book published were pretty clear. I’d spend my 30s slowly building a name for myself. I’d start going to writers’ conferences. I’d buy a big thick book with publishers’ addresses in it and mail off my manuscript a thousand times. I’d join a writers’ circle and maybe figure out a way to self-publish a few of my ideas and call them scholarly articles. In my 40s, I’d keep plugging away at my manuscript, count my rejection letters, grow a frustrated writer’s beard, and hope that in my 50s I had paid enough dues to get a book published. In my 60s, I’d then get to sit my grandkids on my knee, set aside my corncob pipe, and tell them an epic forty-year yarn called, “How Grandpa Finally Got His Book Published.” It would teach them perseverance, theoretically.

Ugh.

That’s the average path. Depressing, right?

Fortunately for you and me, we’re growing up in the middle of a revolution. (I use that word sparingly. Whenever another author tells me, “This isn’t a book; this is a revolution!” I know it’s just a book.)

Social media gave me a chance to build a platform. For free. The only costs were time and hustle. Social media gave me access to an audience. It gave me a public arena to hone my writing skills with instant, international feedback.

Social media offered me an opportunity to become a legitimate author much sooner than 50 years old. I accepted the challenge and jumped in with both feet.

A few months later, my agent and I submitted my book proposal back to publishers. Only this time I included information about my blog audience. Number of readers, number of comments, number of fans in numbers of countries. That completely changed the conversation.

I was no longer invisible. I was no longer a nobody with an idea. I was a writer with proven skills as evidenced by a quantifiable readership. As a result, two publishers bid for the book. Guess who won? Guess who published my first book?

The same publisher who initially rejected it via my friend.

My story isn’t that unique or that impressive. Pebble Tech-nology, the company that created a customizable wristwatch that few had ever heard of, raised $10.2 million from more than 68,000 supporters on www.kickstarter.com.
3
They raised their first million in twenty-eight hours. Can you imagine how long it would have taken to find 68,000 donors without the tools of the Internet?

Clearly there are now ways to accelerate your life down the path to awesome, even if you never use social media. (If you decide to use social media, though, I put my top ten tips on page 239.) Once you know how the map works, you can shorten the time you spend in each destination. You can game the map. You don’t have to wait until you are 50 to harvest. You don’t have to wait until you are 40 to be an expert. And you don’t have to be 20 to start a new adventure.

We all used to be awesome

Awesome is a lot simpler than you think, because you used to know awesome quite well.

Everyone did at one point. Especially when we were kids.

I was reminded of this one night as I was walking down the hall at home. My daughters were brushing their teeth, an event that usually boils over to an international crisis. This time, though, they weren’t fighting for sink space—they were talking literature.

I heard L.E., my 9-year-old, say to her little sister, McRae, “Did you know that the guy who wrote
The Twits
also wrote
James and the Giant Peach
?”

I heard McRae respond, “I know! I love that guy. He’s got a great imagination, like me.”

Like me.

What a powerful declaration.

Roald Dahl has been called the greatest storyteller of our generation. He also wrote
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. He’s sold millions and millions of books. And in McRae’s little 6-year-old mind, his imagination is on par with hers. He’s her peer.

You used to believe like that too. You used to turn sticks into swords or dirty flip-flops into glass slippers. You climbed trees and made forts and thought being a doctor wasn’t out of reach. Nothing was out of reach.

Then, somewhere along the way, you lost it.

Maybe someone who mattered to you told you that your version of awesome didn’t matter. When my friend Liz was in the eighth grade, she loved to dance. It was all she ever did. One day, her mom pulled her aside and said, “You know you’re not going to be a Rockette, right? You know that’s not in the cards for you, right?”

Do you think Liz danced a whole lot after that? Of course not. She gave up her dream of awesome that day.

As a parent, I understand the temptation to tell your kid something like that. You don’t want Simon Cowell to be the first person who introduces your daughter to the idea that she can’t sing. But there’s an inherent problem with this approach to life. When a parent, a boss, a teacher, a spouse, or a friend tells you what you
can’t
be, they’re predicting a future they don’t control. They don’t know what 25 or 35 or 55 looks like for you.

What if, when he didn’t make the varsity basketball team his sophomore year of high school, Michael Jordan’s dad had pulled him aside and, putting his arm around a young Michael, said, “You know you’re not going to play in the NBA, right? You know that’s not in the cards for you, don’t you?”

Maybe your mom never told you that your dream was too big, but chances are you’ve been telling yourself that for years—maybe decades. The way your brain developed certainly hasn’t helped the cause.

When you were young, your right hemisphere or “right brain” was in full force. It was the guy in charge, and it was the part of your brain that embraced curiosity and adventure and was constantly unafraid to ask
Why?
and
Why not?
Your brain was this way when you were a child because you were learning at a rapid clip. You were learning language and the laws of physics and the elements of balance. You had to be unguarded so you could absorb everything—even some pain here and there—so you would know how to thrive in this land called life-outside-the-womb.

But as you grew older, the other hemisphere, the “left brain” began to gain a voice. It began to say things like, “That’s impossible,” or, “They will laugh at you,” or, “Don’t be foolish.” Your left brain plays an important role in your thinking because it is the voice that teaches you to not touch the hot stove or jump off the top stair like you are a superhero. Unfortunately, it can also make a very logical and compelling argument that what it says is final. As we grew up, most of us came to believe the left brain’s assertions, and as a result we lost the sense that awesome was around the corner. Instead, we started to believe that awesome was not in the cards for us or that it was illogical or simply “childish.”

The good news is we can recover those childlike notions of grandeur. But it takes more than simply acting like a child again. You know some things as an adult that you couldn’t have known as a child. And you possess some skills that no child can develop. While I encourage you to think like my daughter does about the famous author—because your perception does truly fuel your reality—the best news is that now you can apply that thinking like an adult. The road to awesome is still accessible. Now, as an adult, you have the tools to head down it immediately.

We’ve been told our whole lives that our 20s are when we begin down our career paths. And our 60s are the end of the road. But that timeline is no longer the only valid one. In fact, that timeline is no longer typical.

Age is no longer the primary factor that determines where you are on the map. Life is now less about how old you are and more about when you decide to live.

If you’re 45 and looking for a career shift after realizing you don’t love what you do, you’re back in your 20s. It’s time to start.