B00CHVIVMY EBOK (10 page)

Then, at that point, if they hadn’t wrestled the mic away from me because my sweatiness was indicating an imminent rant, here’s how I would have continued:

I once had to call the Apple support desk because the Cloud wrecked my iTunes account. I got stuck in the stratosphere and consequently lost all the music I had purchased over the last ten years. So I called them up and had to spend an hour on the phone with the customer service representative.

While we waited for her to receive information from another department, we started to talk. I asked her, “Is your job hard? I’ve sat beside customer service departments at jobs I’ve had, and it seems like it is.”

That was a pretty safe assumption on my part. Her job seemed a little miserable to me. Every phone call she received was from someone who was unhappy. Her phone never rang with people telling her thank you or “I love my new laptop! It’s working great! I just wanted to let you know!”

People only called when their phone was broken or their hard drive had crashed or the battery in their laptop had overheated and started a small lap fire. (Or when, hypothetically speaking of course, they had spilled coffee inside their laptop and were hoping there was some sort of keyboard shortcut they could press that would open the laptop’s bilge pump. Control + Alt + 3, maybe?)

Think of the worst phone call you got at work last week and then multiply that by forty hours, and you’ve got a clear sense of her job. Or at least I thought that was what she would say. I was wrong.

“I love my job!” she said.

“Really?” I replied. “How so?”

“Well, there are two things I love: learning new things and helping people. And I get to do that all day!” She lit up as she continued to talk about her job.

“Every day I get to help people solve their problems. It’s so fun. And I get to learn new things. The technology is changing so fast that every day is different, and I get to learn all about that.”

I hung up the phone that day realizing that I had been looking at awesome within the context of a specific application.

That girl’s awesome was to help people and learn new things. And once she learned that, once she found that out, she could apply it in a million different ways. She could take a job that a lot of people would say, “It must be hard to do that” and have great joy in it. She had walked through Editing and, instead of digging for a specific job title, she uncovered two joys—learning new things and helping people. Then she looked for ways to apply those more each day.

She understood that being awesome is about finding the core of who you are and what lights you up. Once you’ve discovered that, you can have a million different jobs.

Take me, for instance, since I’m the only one writing this book right now. Once I edited my life and realized that what I really cared about was sharing ideas, suddenly there were a million dream jobs available. I could become a blogger, an author, a podcast host, a public speaker, a radio show host, a counselor, a consultant, or a copywriter.

The world of dream jobs opened up when I got to the core of what I love to do—when I chiseled away that chunk of marble I found in the land of Learning and discovered the David statue inside of me. Once I found that, my job was just another way I could apply my discovery.

Most of us get it backward. We never take the time to walk through the land of Editing. Instead, we spend a little time in Learning and then say, “Now I need to find the perfect job.” But we rarely know what we love doing at that stage, so it’s impossible to find the right job. We usually end up frustrated and resolve to let work just pay the bills.

My current job title is “insight architect.” I admit, that’s a little pretentious sounding. Even typing it kind of made me think,
I wonder if that guy is a jerk?
(The answer is yes, but we’ll cover that later in the book.) But can you imagine if, upon leaving the land of Learning, I said, “Instead of finding the awesome inside me, I’m just going to search for a company hiring insight architects. How hard can that be? Country has to be crawling with open positions for that.”

Don’t just search for a job title. Search for awesome. Once you figure that out, you can be a customer call center representative and still be awesome.

Blow up your scoreboards

Sometimes people will tell me, “You say everyone can find their dream and be awesome. What if my dream is to win a Grammy, but I’m horrible at singing? What then?”

That’s a good challenge and the type of thing that people often throw in the face of those who say, “You can be anything you want to be.” If I suck at singing, how can you say I’ll win a Grammy?

The short answer is autotune.

The longer, more honest answer is you probably won’t.

You can’t be “anything you want,” but you can be something even better: the best version of you. That’s always more enjoyable than trying to force yourself to be something you weren’t designed to be (please refer to my dreams of being in the NBA). You want to win a Grammy even though you have no musical ability? That probably isn’t going to happen. But that’s okay because winning a Grammy isn’t your awesome. It’s not anyone’s. It’s just a result on a scoreboard.

So, what if your awesome is to sing? What if your awesome is to express the natural singing talent you have inside you, that bubbling, passionate talent you’ve kept quiet for so many years? What if you don’t need the Grammys to validate your dream?

What if the real definition of awesome is as simple as “singing more today than I did yesterday”?

That may sound silly, but I assure you it’s powerful.

With that definition, you get to succeed every time you sing. You get to succeed every time you open your mouth and your heart and let out that talent that is dying to see the light of day.

You get to be Seryn.

They’re a band from Denton, Texas. They kind of remind me of Mumford & Sons with more instruments and fewer British accents. Each member plays approximately thirty-seven instruments, and they constantly switch them out in the middle of songs.

I first saw them play at a conference in front of 13,000 people. I was blown away by the energy they filled that arena with that day. Their passion was unbridled, as if they couldn’t believe they got to play music in front of people.

I wrote about them on Facebook. A few days later a guy named Larry in the town next to ours emailed me. He said, “I saw you liked that band Seryn. They’re playing a house show in my living room. Do you and your wife want to come see them?” We did.

An hour after we arrived, Seryn arrived from New York and set up all the aforementioned instruments in Larry’s living room. They tuned everything, had a sip of water, and then launched into their set.

If awesome were measured on a scale of 1 to 10, I expected they’d play at a three or a four, whatever the appropriate level of music is for a corner of taupe carpet next to a loveseat. I was wrong.

The same joy that dominated the stage before 13,000 people was on display in a room full of eighty friends. It was like Seryn couldn’t help but play that way. That was what was inside their hearts. In that moment, I learned a simple lesson about being awesome: always play to the size of your heart, not to the size of your audience.

Awesome doesn’t let the crowd determine the size of the performance. Awesome gets up for two people or 200. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. Awesome sweeps the parts of store floors that no foot will ever touch.

Awesome can’t help itself.

Awesome has a huge heart. And that’s what it always plays to.

The size of the crowd doesn’t matter.

The applause of the audience doesn’t matter.

The money you make singing doesn’t matter.

Don’t get me wrong; I hope you get all those things. I hope you have huge audiences and screaming fans and more money than Scrooge McDuck in his money bin. But more than that, I hope if your definition of awesome is to sing, you do it often. And you realize along the way that singing often is what really matters.

If you live your life that way, the results become gravy instead of the missing ingredient to your joy. If you can grab hold of this concept, you can start living an awesome life right this second. You don’t need the Grammys to validate your version of awesome. Even if someday they do. That happened to my friend Dave Barnes. He wrote a song that got nominated for a Grammy, and we were all excited for him. But what was even more amazing was that for a decade he’d been making the music he wanted to make every day. The Grammy nomination was a delightful consequence of the awesome life he’d been living, not a validation of it. There’s a world of difference, whether you’re a musician, a mom, a business owner, or all three.

The diamond mine

Though this book doesn’t offer any get-rich-quick schemes, there is a diamond mine on the road to awesome that you need to visit as you pass through the land of Editing.

Have you ever been gem mining?

It’s exactly like it sounds, only the gems aren’t really gems, and the mining isn’t really mining. It should be more aptly titled “gravel bathing,” but chances are that mountain tourists wouldn’t be interested in that activity.

Here’s how it works:

On the side of the road in a small mountain community like Boone, North Carolina, you buy a bucket of gravel and dirt from a “gem mine.” You then pour the gravel and dirt into a small container and hold it under a thin stream of water that runs through a trough. As you wash off the mud, you start to see gems like amethyst and fool’s gold. You pluck out the best rocks, clean them, and then have one of the gem store owners tell you that you found some amazing ones today, at which point you hot glue them to a picture frame that is now the sharpest, most dangerous item in your house.

Last summer, during our annual trip to see our in-laws, we went gem mining. At the end of the day, we sat at a counter while a geologist told us what each rock meant. He was getting his degree in geology at a local university and actually knew an incredible amount about each stone. He turned them over in his hands carefully, describing each nuance and the forces of nature deep inside the earth that conspired to create them. He’d grab a small flashlight and shine it into a rock to reveal the green hue of an emerald hidden inside. He’d wash crusted dirt off a bit of rock and show the amethyst that was hiding just below the surface.

The rocks were beautiful, with explosions of color and light that seemed to rival that of more expensive stones like rubies and diamonds. But at the end of the day, they were just rocks. So he placed them in an old plastic bag, wrote my daughter’s name on the outside with a Sharpie, and handed it back to her.

As we drove home, I started to wonder,
Why do some rocks get to be rocks and some rocks get to be diamonds?

There are certainly some mechanical characteristics that make diamonds valuable, but their price is nowhere near what they are actually worth. There are actually several gemstones that are far more rare than diamonds.
1
S
o how come a diamond is a diamond and any other rock is just a rock?

Because somebody decided that’s how it works.

A diamond is just a rock we collectively assigned the highest value to. That’s why the supply is so carefully guarded and monitored, making a diamond worth a lot of money and another stone worth a spot on a picture frame.

Inside the mine in the land of Editing, you’ve got to decide what in your life is going to be a diamond and what’s going to be a rock.

You get to make that decision. You get to assign value to the things in your life, and the value you assign will radically change how you interact with them.

Scientists call this “value attribution.” The value we place on things is a powerful, powerful force. In some ways it guides our perception of the entire planet. The
Washington Post
proved this once with a well-known story about a violinist and a subway.

One morning, in the middle of rush hour, they placed Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, on a subway platform, dressed in casual clothes. Into his skilled hands they placed a $3.5 million violin designed by Antonio Stradivari in 1713. He then proceeded to play the most complicated, amazing arrangements of music. Can you imagine how many people paused during their commute to take in a concert that would normally cost hundreds of dollars in one of the world’s greatest concert halls? The answer is seven.

More than 1,000 people passed Bell as he played, and only seven people stopped to listen.
2

Only seven people stopped for a minute to give the moment the gravity it certainly deserved. The thousand other people who walked by? As the authors of the book
Sway
suggest, they had already assigned value to that subway performer. The sound of the beautiful music wafting through the air couldn’t change that. The design of the multimillion-dollar violin couldn’t break through that. The speed and undeniable skill the violinist’s hands demonstrated couldn’t break through either.

“As they passed by Bell,” write Ori and Rom Brafman, “most subway riders didn’t even glance in his direction. Instead of hearing an outstanding concert, they heard street music.”
3
They had decided the subway was full of rocks, and the appearance of one of the world’s greatest diamonds wasn’t going to change that.

I didn’t particularly like the implications value attribution had in my own life. It was fun to say, “My kids are a top priority to me, my wife is a top priority to me, what I write is a top priority to me,” but sometimes I found myself treating them like rocks.

How did I know? Because I wasn’t giving them the most valuable currency I own—time.

I was forced to ask myself,
Are my wife and kids and writing getting the best of my time and creativity or the rest of my time and creativity?
Was I calling the right things diamonds and the right things rocks? Or was it possible I had it backward?

That’s the goal of our entire time in the land of Editing. We have to, and more importantly
get
to decide what we’ll call diamonds and what we’ll call rocks. That decision, and our ability to constantly come back to it to make sure we’re staying true, has the power to change the way you see the entire world.