B00CHVIVMY EBOK

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Published by Lampo Press, The Lampo Group, Inc.

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The opinions and conclusions expressed in this book are those of the author. All references to websites, blogs, authors, publications, brand names, and/or products are placed there by the author. No recommendation or endorsement by The Lampo Group, Inc., is intended, nor should any be implied. Some of the names of people mentioned have been changed to protect their
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Editors: Brent Cole and Darcie Clemen


Cover design: Luke LeFevre and Melissa McKenney

Interior design: Thinkpen Design, Inc., www.thinkpendesign.com

ISBN: 978-1-937077-59-4

CIP Data application in process

“Dad, why is L.E.’s name mentioned three times in the dedication to
Quitter
and my name is mentioned only once?”
—McRae, my then 5-year-old daughter

“Great question. You can write the dedication to the next book.”
—Me

“Good. I’ll say, ‘To Jenny, McRae, and L.E.’ ”
—McRae

1: You Are Here

1

You Are Here

If you ever fly Korean Air,
keep your eyes closed as you make your way to coach. You may have to feel your way there, but trust me, that momentary inconvenience is worth it. You do not want to see the first-class seats.

The challenge is that you enter from the front of the plane. If your eyes are open, you’re immediately thrust into an aeronautical wonderland. First class isn’t full of seats; it’s full of tiny pods of luxury. They have their own little sleeping cocoons in which to lounge away the sixteen-hour flight. And if you see these pleasure domes as you walk to your seat, you’re going to get sad.

So that you fully comprehend what’s happening as you pass through the seating classes, Korean Air color-codes the seats. The pleasure domes in first class are woven in a periwinkle blue fabric that seems to tickle you lightly and whisper, “Don’t you wish this flight were longer?” The next class of seats is light blue, like the color of an apron you’d buy at Williams-Sonoma after being wooed into the store by the smell of boysenberry muffins. The business class is dark blue, serious but still seriously comfortable. Finally, at the end of the color wheel—and back of the plane—you get to coach class, your seat, which is brown, the color of disappointment.

The other thing it’d be good for you to know—should you ever find yourself flying to Asia—is that Vietnam is not close to South Korea. I thought they were like Connecticut and Rhode Island. That maybe I could look out the window from the airport in Seoul and see Vietnam across the water. I was wrong.

After flying sixteen hours from Atlanta to South Korea, we had to fly another six hours from Seoul to Hanoi. We then boarded an overnight train to travel deeper into the country. I don’t know if there were periwinkle first-class seats available on that train, but I do know we didn’t get them. The shared bathroom was just a metal hole in the floor that dropped straight onto the tracks. I thought it was kind of fun. My wife felt differently.

After a solid night of rumbling through moonlit mountains, we arrived in Sapa. From there we drove another seven hours on dirt roads overlooking cliffs. Imagine the most dangerous road you’ve ever been on, remove all the guardrails, and then add water buffalo.

Finally, after hours of breathtaking scenery punctuated by moments of sheer panic, we came upon something I’d never expected to see. French motorcyclists.

My initial confusion was that they weren’t on skinny ten-speeds from the 1960s with long sticks of crusty French bread sticking out of wicker baskets, and none of them were wearing jaunty berets. (Everything I know about France I learned from puzzles. And it’s completely okay for me to poke fun at France. The only language my books have ever been translated into is German. I’m like Hasselhoff over there.)

Decked out in apocalyptic-looking safety gear and a week’s worth of dirt, they were obviously a long way from home. Lost in the deepest middle of nowhere I’d ever experienced, the bikers were gesturing to some Vietnamese villagers huddled around a map that was unfolded on the handlebars of one of the bikes.

We pulled over to the side of the road to help them find their next destination. Steve, an American who had lived in Asia for eighteen years, looked out the bus window at the bikers’ map.

“Wow,” he said to Hua, our Vietnamese driver, “that is an amazing map. Look how detailed it is! We should get one of those.”

Then he paused just before lowering his window and said, “Then again, the best map in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t know where you are.”

***

Steve was right. Without a point of origin, even the best map is rendered useless. If you opened up the GPS on your phone right now and tried to get directions, the very first thing the phone would need to know is where you are. Google Earth can’t give you directions across the state or even across the street without a point of origin. Yet most of us, when it comes to figuring out where we’re headed in life, never stop to ask the simple question, “Where am I?”

We just keep marching forward, day after day, cubicle after cubicle, moving faster and faster but not really going anywhere. Eventually, at the end of our lives, we start to do some questioning. We finally pause long enough to reexamine our decisions and maybe even ask hard questions of young, single-browed authors on airplanes.

That’s what a grandmother in her early 70s did to me on a flight from Dallas to Baltimore. She was flying back from a gambling trip in Reno with her sister. They were two grandmothers on the run, laughing and joking with each other in the back of a Southwest plane. During the flight, I gave her a copy of my book
Quitter
. I promise, I don’t do that every time I fly. I don’t wear cargo pants full of my books and then say, “Oh, what’s this? How did this get in my pocket? That’s crazy! It’s my
Wall Street Journal
best-selling book! I’ll sign it for you, but please, no flash photography. It dries out my pores.”

But we had been talking about life and dreams, and giving her a copy of
Quitter
, which addresses both, seemed like an okay thing to do.

After she had been reading it for an hour, she leaned in to speak over the engine noise and ask me a question I wasn’t ready for.

“What do you do when all the excuses you used to not chase your dream are gone? What do you do then?”

There was sadness in her words. A sense of fear and resignation that seemed to suck all the joy out of a boisterous weekend trip with a sister. Sadder still, I didn’t have an answer for her. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew there was one.

There had to be, because I didn’t want you or me to get to 80 or 90 years old and realize we mortgaged the best years of our lives doing something we weren’t called to do. I didn’t want to look back on life and wonder where it all went.

That happened to me once when I was 30. Through a series of bad decisions, I finally woke up one day in a cubicle and realized I’d coasted through the last ten years of my life. And I knew that same thing would happen again if I wasn’t careful.

Realizing where I was headed, I started to write about that woman’s question. I wrote 50,000 words trying to find the answer, but like most things in life, it snuck up on me when I was looking the other way.

One afternoon while meeting with a friend, I started to dissect Dave Ramsey’s life on a whiteboard. He’s been an incredibly successful author and businessman, something I aspire to be too. I was curious how he accomplished so much. As I started to map out the trajectory of his life, I made a pretty simple discovery about what it takes to be awesome. It’s not that complicated or unique; in fact, since the dawn of time, every awesome life has gone through the same five stages.

1. Learning

2. Editing

3. Mastering

4. Harvesting

5. Guiding

Like a simple map through life, those are the five stages on the road to awesome. And until recently, they have matched up pretty closely with your age.

In your 20s, you resided in Learning.

You went to college, got a job, or joined the military. You didn’t yet know what you were made of, so you sampled many endeavors and did as much as you could to learn about yourself, the world around you, and where you best fit in.

In your 30s, you moved on up to Editing.

You started to focus on the handful of things that worked well in your 20s. You were not done learning, but you started editing down the list of things you thought were really important. You prioritized your passions. You eliminated old habits that wrecked you in your 20s and concentrated on doing more of the things you love and less of the things you hate. It was a winnowing period. You focused your career, your relationships, and every part of your life.

In your 40s, you ascended to Mastering.

You edited your life to the most important things in your 30s, and then it came time to master them. You were going to be an awesome parent, awesome friend, awesome employee, etc. You didn’t narrow your life further; you just had greater certainty about what you were good at and how to do it regularly. You were no longer the young upstart at work; you were the one with fifteen to twenty years of experience. Tried and true. You started leading bigger projects and initiatives. You were not an expert yet, but you were next in line.

In your 50s, you basked in Harvesting.

The seeds you planted in your 20s, 30s, and 40s finally began blooming. You made the most money in your career during this decade and reaped what you sowed. This wasn’t rocket science. If you spent your 30s and 40s working hard to be considered an expert in your field, you would obviously have more job opportunities than if you jumped around forty-seven times and blamed your bosses for “not recognizing your talent.” If you were deliberate about pouring into relationships in your 20s, 30s, and 40s, guess what? You harvested abundant relationships in your 50s. When your collegiate son crashed his car, you harvested an outpouring of support and love. Lots of people came to the hospital, and someone probably even brought a casserole.

In your 60s, you entered a place of Guiding.

You retired with a gold watch and a ranch-style home in Florida. You were a grandfather or a grandmother. You were the elder statesman, the one with the wisdom. You got to give back generously to people who were traveling the path on which you spent forty-plus years. Corncob pipe whittling was not mandatory but highly likely.

If you wanted to achieve awesomeness, that’s the path you followed. Tens of thousands of people have proved it’s the way to awesome.

If it’s that easy to walk down the path though, if the steps are so clearly marked, why don’t more people do it? Well, the bad news is it’s not the only path on the map. And, like a back road through the mountains, the path to awesome is much narrower than the other, more common path.

Billions of people have traveled and continue to travel the other path, and it grows wider every year. The terrain is easy—grassy even—and after a brief incline it follows a safe and steady decline that mostly allows for casual coasting.

It sounds nice. It feels effortless when you’re on it.

The trouble is that on this wide path, you don’t end up at awesome. You just end up at old. This path is called “average.”

The trickiest thing is that both paths begin in the same place. And both paths end in harvesting and guiding.

The key difference is that if you’ve trekked the path of awesome, the harvest is abundant and you will guide other people down their own abundant paths. If, on the other hand, you’ve coasted the path of average, never daring to believe you could learn, edit, and master your own bit of awesomeness, you will harvest a crop neither you nor anyone else desires. And you will then guide, but instead of illuminating an awesome path for others, you’ll become a lighthouse indicating the rocks on which you crashed your life.

You may not have a haunted house or an abnormally large furnace in the basement à la
The Burbs
, but people will still refer to you in hushed tones like they did my old neighbors.

They grew so bitter that they eventually decided to spend their time making sure any ball or Frisbee that lighted upon their lawn was quickly confiscated and cataloged. After a few years of draining the entire neighborhood of toys, they took my friend Marc to court, at which point they presented all their evidence. I can only imagine the jury’s faces as they were presented with Wiffle balls bearing dates on them.

Is that what you want your life to come to? Wiffle ball CSI? Me neither.

So then why do most people decide to travel down the average path?

The truth is they don’t decide. The only thing you have to do on the average path is not die.

You graduate from high school or college and effectively shift into neutral. Sure, you’re not moving that fast, but you’re getting great gas mileage and you are making some progress, if you want to call it that. You’re definitely getting older and that means something, right? With age comes wisdom? Not necessarily. Especially if you’re coasting. Eventually, you’ll roll your way right into the grave.

The average path is the easier of the two paths, and it’s dangerously comfortable. I spent many years on it without realizing I’d been there a week.

The awesome path?

It is dangerous too—but the good kind of dangerous. The kind of dangerous through which all great accomplishments must travel. On it are tall mountains, rocky walls, and even an occasional dragon. You’re going to get bloodied, your discipline will be tested, and your dreams will be challenged a thousand times over. But ohhhh, it is awesome.

And here’s the kicker: when I say it’s awesome, I don’t mean “eventually” awesome. I’m talking right-this-second awesome.

I’d never write a book that said, “In forty years you’ll get to harvest some amazing stuff in your life if you’ll just suck it up for four decades.” I don’t want a life like that. Why would I convince you that you needed one?

Awesome is available like never before

The opportunity and speed with which you can reach awesome has never been greater. Three forces of nature have collided to create a once-in-a-century storm even bigger than the one Patrick Swayze surfed at the end of
Point Break
. (Google it.)

1. Retirement is dead.

My friend Luke’s mom was a teacher at the same school for twenty-eight years. She was going to retire eventually because that’s what you did. You worked in one place, trusted in Social Security, and then retired comfortably in a house that had accrued value over a few decades. Then she got laid off. Suddenly, like millions of people in their 40s and 50s, she found herself facing the daunting task of starting a new career or what people are labeling an “encore career.” In her mid-50s, she had to be 20 again. She’s not alone. In 2011, 20 percent of new entrepreneurs were between the ages of 55 and 64.
1

While the market will recover, the ideals won’t. The government, the company, the house—you can’t rely on them for warmth when you tuck into your 60s for a long winter’s nap. In addition, some experts believe the retirement age will eventually stretch to 70 or 80.
2
That’s decades longer than the finish line my wife’s grand-father crossed. For a generation in their 50s, that means starting over. For a generation in their 30s and 40s, that means aiming for a completely different finish line. Retirement is dead.