B00CHVIVMY EBOK (15 page)

Before I took a few tentative steps into the land of Harvesting, I didn’t expect so many 4 a.m. alarm clocks. I bought into the myth that when you find your awesome, things will be easy. Life will flow like a gentle river of Fresca, passing banks of Twizzler grass. There’s a melon-colored ribbon you twirl. La. La. La.

I was wrong. Here’s the truth:

You will work harder at something you love than at something you like.

You will work harder than you have ever worked when you start chasing a dream.

You will hustle and grind and sweat and push and pull.

You will get up earlier and go to bed later. But that’s okay.

Know why?

Joy is an incredible alarm clock.

It will wake you up and keep you up and pick you up and gently pull you through a thousand rejections along the way.

If your goal is to work less, stay on the road to average. Do something you just kind of like. Settle into life like a long winter’s nap and coast on through to your 80s.

But if you want to dream—if you want to live out some unique talent you’ve been given to steward during your time on this planet—get used to 4 a.m. alarms.

Get going.

Get up.

Continue Harvesting.

The crop circles of support

Don’t become a jerk. Don’t get lazy. Don’t get entitled.

Easier said than done. How do you avoid the surprising number of traps that spring up in the land of Harvesting? You don’t face them alone. You spend some time cultivating the crop circles of support.

And like everything else in this book, they’re not complicated. In fact, there are only three circles of support you need to think about as you continue down the road to awesome.

The level of support you need is highest in the center and lowest on the edges, which is why we’re going to start right there.

Inner Circle: Spouse

The absolute worst place you can put your spouse is on the opposite side of your dream. When that happens, the harder you lean into your awesome, the farther you push your spouse away. Without even realizing how you got to such different places, you start saying things like, “Don’t you want me to pursue my dream? Is that it? Your dream is for me to be unhappy? Congrats, then—you’re already living your dream!”

Cue plate toss, and not the fun kind like the Greeks do in rings of fire at festivals.

Is that an exaggeration? Maybe slightly, but it’s not far off from a reality that happens every single day. The truth is that if you’re married, awesome is a team sport. Traveling your road to awesome with your spouse is twice as fun as being on it by yourself.

What are the two things you need to do right now if you’re married and trying to be awesome?

Make action payments

Words are so cheap when it comes to dreaming. And yet, most of us, when confronted with the challenge of getting a spouse to support our dream, run right back to words. We believe that perhaps the first ten million we offered just weren’t the right ones. Maybe the next ten million will do the trick. So we talk and we talk and we talk about what we’re going to do with our awesome. And we exhaust our spouses.

Do you know what’s better than words? Action. Actions always beat words. Action always beats intention. What you’ve done is always more powerful than what you’re going to do.

Want a spouse to support you? Get up thirty minutes before the rest of the house wakes up and work on your dream. Turn off the TV and read twenty pages of a book by an expert in the field you’re pursuing. Take a second job to raise the startup money your dream might take instead of draining your savings account.

Make action payments if you want to get your spouse to believe you’re serious about the pursuit of awesome. Because chances are, this isn’t the first time you’ve flirted with a dream. This is probably the thirty-seventh time, and the minute you start with a new one, all those words and all those intentions you never followed through on are going to burst into your spouse’s memory.

Erase them with action payments. And they have to be drawn out of your account, not hers or his. You don’t gain any support if you sacrifice your spouse’s time for your dream. It has to be your time. If you come home and say, “In order to show you how important this dream is to me, I’m going to cancel our date night,” you won’t go deeper into the land of Harvesting. You’ll go deeper into the land of couch sleeping.

This simple idea is one of the biggest reasons my wife, Jenny, was able to jump on board with the move to Nashville from Atlanta. I’d compiled a history of action payments. I’d made a million other big plans that never went anywhere. But for two years she saw me get up early to write. She saw me say no to a lot of fun things I may have liked to do in order to say yes to the things I felt called to do. She knew I was serious about this. Not because of my words—those are cheap and untrustworthy. But because of my actions, which are expensive and trustworthy.

Master how versus wow

I didn’t come up with this, but I wish I had, because it’s brilliant. A guy named John Woodall in Atlanta once told an audience I was in that in every marriage there are two types of people: a “How” person and a “Wow” person.

The Wow person tends to be the dreamer. They come up with big ideas and big dreams and big wild plans. They bounce off the walls with what might be.

The How person tends to be the strategist. They want the details and the steps and the logistics of any given situation.

They’re both great approaches to life, but when they bump together, disaster can occur.
3

The Wow person says, “I’ve got a great idea. What if we sold our house and invested all the money into an artisanal pickle stand in the hipster section of town? We could wrap each pickle in a napkin with prose written on it. We’ll call it ‘Pickles & Poems.’ It will be huge!”

The How person, wanting to show the Wow person love, offers up their greatest strength, a series of How questions. “How would we make money with that? How would we have health insurance? How many licenses would we need to sell street pickles? How would we print the napkins? How would we outfit a van or a car for pickle distribution?”

Those are all very legitimate questions, only the Wow person doesn’t hear them that way. The Wow person hears an attack. And they attack back.

Then the two storm off and don’t dream together that day.

If you stack enough of those conversations on top of each other, the Wow person eventually stops sharing his or her dreams. It’s not that they stop dreaming, they just stop sharing them with the How spouse. Those dreams go somewhere, often to someone online who “gets me.” That’s how a lot of emotional affairs begin and part of the reason the word
Facebook
showed up on a third of all divorce filings in 2011.
4

To prevent this from happening in my own marriage—because that’s where we were headed with me (the Wow person) and my wife (the How person)—we took Woodall’s advice and started to do two things.

Two weeks of wow

When I first discuss a new Wow idea with my wife, do you know what she says? “Wow.” She doesn’t ask How questions. She doesn’t list the myriad of details she’d love to know. She simply gives me the gift of Wow. What she trusts is that, more than likely, I’m not going to do anything with this idea. In two weeks, or more realistically, two hours, I will have moved on to something else. So for the first two weeks, I get a grace period of Wow. We just bounce the idea around without ever worrying about a How making a cameo in the conversation. If after two weeks I’m still passionate about the idea, Jenny jumps in with some great Hows. She’s a genius, and I am so blessed to be married to her. Her ability to provide shape to the Wows I bring up is unbelievable. As she once said to me, “We should work together more. Together we make one pretty amazing person.” Instead of a How/Wow blow-up, we get to turn our differences into strengths, not weaknesses.

Wow disclaimer

The first thing I say to my wife when I talk with her about a Wow idea is, “I’m not about to sell our house. I’m not thinking about emptying our savings account.” I offer the Wow disclaimer. It turns out that my wife is a fan of stability and security. She digs both of those things. Who knew? It took counseling to wake me up to what was going on when I spouted off dreams
at
Jenny instead of
with
Jenny. At one point, our counselor said, “Jon and Jenny, you both have tremendous insight into Jon.” That was his polite way of saying, “Jon, shut up! You’re filling the entire relationship with you and not thinking at all about Jenny’s perspective.” So in addition to learning to listen, I had to learn to talk too. And part of that meant being up-front about the Wows I was excited about. It’s amazing what a two-sentence disclaimer can do to defuse a situation. Knowing that I’m not about to launch out on some financially fatal adventure (like the ad agency I started) sets Jenny at ease. Always disclaim your dreams if you’re married to a How person.

Middle Circle: Friends and Family

Did you stop chasing awesome because you’re not married yet and feel like without a spouse it’s impossible?

Good, that’s exactly what I was trying to communicate. I’m glad it came across so clearly.

If you’re not married, your middle circle becomes your inner circle. The rings just shift in one, as a best friend or a family member becomes your greatest source of support. The question I most often get, though, when it comes to the middle circle is this: “What do I do if no one supports my dream?”

Maybe that’s your story right now. Your family members, your friends, your coworkers—no one gets on board with what you feel you’re called to do. You explain it to them and share it with as much enthusiasm and clarity as you can possibly muster. But still, nobody is willing to support your dream.

Or maybe you’ve got a little support from friends and family, but you’d love a lot more.

In either situation, the next steps are the same. You have to give people in the middle circle patience and support.

Patience

Awesome is a little weird. You’ve probably already figured that out. I mean, we entered a forest of voices and explored a diamond mine. That’s a little strange. Those kinds of things don’t tend to happen on the road to average. And that’s the problem. People understand average.

We all get how average works. We’re immersed in a world of average every day. If you tell friends and family members, “I’m going to stay average,” they may wonder why you felt the need to say that out loud, but they’ll never call you crazy.

No one pursuing a life of average ever received a dire warning of failure from a family member. No one pursuing a life of average ever left a Thanksgiving dinner feeling like everyone criticized their pursuit. No one pursuing a life of average was ever made fun of by other average people.

But if you decide to travel the road to awesome, you will be.

Family members and friends will not understand your dream. The natural response will be to either change your tactics of communication or lash out. In the first approach, you try for the one millionth time to get Dad to understand your dream 100 percent. In the second, you interpret the lack of understanding as an attack and return the favor. Neither way is that fun or effective.

Instead of reacting that way when someone doesn’t understand your dream, give them the gift of patience. The reality is that they shouldn’t understand your dream 100 percent. If they did, it wouldn’t be your dream—it’d be their dream. They’d be the one chasing it, not you.

You’re the one who has taken a thousand steps down the road to awesome. You’re the one who has had all the experiences. It would be impossible for someone else to understand your dream without having that same journey.

We understand this when it comes to other types of trips we take in life.

For example, my little sister, Molly, spent five months in Seville, Spain. While there, she ran a marathon in Madrid. The summer after the experience, she spent a few weeks at our house in Nashville. She told the most amazing stories. She showed us beautiful photos, gave my kids souvenirs, and unraveled the five months for us.

Which made me an expert on what it feels like to live in Seville, Spain.

I totally understood everything that happened there. On the third night she stayed with us, I stood up, put my hand on Molly’s shoulder, and told her, “Let me stop you right there. I’ve got it. I 100 percent understand what it feels like to live in Spain as an American. I’ve never taken a single step in Madrid, but I know what it’s like to run a marathon there. You don’t have to tell me anything else. I understand.”

If I had told her that, my wife would have leg-swept me and probably made me sleep under the couch in our living room. That would have been an idiotic thing to say, because it’s impossible.

I’ve never been to Spain. How could I ever think that I can perfectly understand what that experience was like for my sister? And that was only five months of her living there. How can we carry dreams in our heart for years, maybe even decades, and then expect our friends and family members to understand them perfectly?

They won’t.

Don’t be surprised by that.

Don’t be devastated by that.

Don’t think it’s because you’ve failed to explain it the right way.

There’s going to be some degree of disconnect. It’s your dream, not theirs.

Give them the gift of patience. Give them time to understand your dream.

Support

One of the best things you can do to get support for your dream is to support somebody else’s first. When you run into a wall of resistance or indifference from friends and family members, stop asking, “How can I get them to be a fan of my dream?” and instead ask, “How can I be a fan of their dream?”

Tell the mom who doesn’t get what you’re trying to do, “I’ve explained my dream a few times, but I’ve never asked you, what’s yours?” Tell the friend who is having a hard time understanding what you’re trying to do, “You know what I’m passionate about, but what’s something that you’re passionate about?” Tell the boyfriend who may think you’re a little crazy, “I feel like I’ve bumped into something I’m designed to do, but what about you? Is there something you feel that way about? Is there a way I can help you pursue that?”