B00CHVIVMY EBOK (16 page)

Asking these questions may be awkward at first because nobody usually asks them. We usually don’t take interest in other people’s hearts and hopes. We stay surface level with so many different relationships that sometimes it feels weird to ask what someone is passionate about. But that’s okay, because there is great kindness in asking someone what their dream is.

If you want help for your dream, start by helping someone else with their dream. If you want support for your hope, start by giving support to someone else’s hope. If you want encouragement as you work on your calling, start by encouraging other people.

Giving support is often the best way to get it.

Outer Circle: Fellow Travelers

The outer support circle is fellow travelers, people who are on their own roads to awesome. They can challenge you, motivate you, and celebrate with you.

Challenge

On Wednesdays, I have breakfast with a group of guys in Nashville. When I moved to the city, I put the group together because I knew how dangerous the road to awesome could be if you walk it alone.

One morning I was telling the guys about a tweetup I had. If you’ve never been to one, then congratulations; you haven’t had to use that horrible word. A tweetup is where you meet with people you know from Twitter. I held my first one in Oklahoma City and told the guys that we had sixty people.

Almost under my breath I said, “But I would have been happy with ten!”

My friend Chris Thomas immediately said, “Really? Would you have been happy with ten?”

I paused dramatically, something I’m always doing in stories I retell, and said, “No, I wouldn’t have. I actually wanted 100. I’m not that happy about sixty.”

He laughed, I laughed, and then we threw a football in the parking lot to break the tension of that brief moment of intimacy.

He was right. I was lying so I’d look humble. I was starting to keep secret metrics and expectations on my road to awesome. And when Chris held up a mirror at breakfast, I got to see them for the first time. When he challenged me, I got to see the rocky road I was on and adjust my course.

Motivation

You know you’ll exercise more often if you have a workout partner. You won’t be as likely to cheat on your diet or skip Pilates if you’ve got someone going through it with you. You’ll get up early or forgo carbs if you know someone else is tracking with you.

If we understand the benefit of having a workout partner, how come we don’t replicate that same thing in other parts of our lives?

Why wouldn’t you have a dream partner? Probably because the phrase “dream partner” is pretty lame. But other than that, it’s a concept you’d see instant results from in the form of motivation.

That’s why my friend Stephen calls me regularly and says, “Be Jay-Z.” He’s using a little shorthand we’ve developed in the last two years. He’s motivating me to be driven and focused and hardworking. After watching Jay-Z methodically build an empire, he’s motivating me to do the same—save for the marriage to Beyoncé and incredibly crisp billed hats.

Is that silly? A little, but it is no less silly than having someone yell, “You got this! Give me three more!” in a gym and expecting results. That person is probably even in tight clothing and sweaty at the time. That’s sillier. But it works, doesn’t it? Motivation from fellow travelers—whether in the gym or on the road to awesome—is a powerful thing.

Celebration

My friend Brewster and I invented a table.

I know what you’re thinking right now:
Of course you did. I’ve seen your photo in this book. Your callus-free writer hands may say
IKEA
, but your picture indicates that you’re burly and rugged and clearly know your way around a bandsaw.

While I appreciate you noticing all those things, it’s not that kind of table. It’s not made of wood. It has no legs and can only hold one thing, but I promise you it’s a table that everyone needs.

What is it?

A brag table.

Brewster and I created it after having breakfast for a few weeks. We’d been trying to become better friends and encourage each other, but we realized we were being a little dishonest. Every week we’d edit the things we were proud of or excited about because we didn’t want to appear cocky or arrogant. We’d paint our weeks with a bit of false humility and share them with each other.

But eventually we realized that’s really dumb.

Excitement isn’t the same thing as arrogance.

Talking about a project you knocked out of the park doesn’t mean you’re cocky.

Celebrating some accomplishment or goal doesn’t make you a jerk.

We decided that everywhere else in life we may need to be quiet. We may need to downplay things or stand behind the scenes, but at the brag table we would cheer as loudly as we wanted for our dreams and each other. We refused to believe that your only two options as a young leader are to be a cocky jerk or to never openly discuss something you’re proud of.

We decided to create a third option—a middle ground. We call it the brag table.

There, at breakfast, we celebrate each other and share our triumphs without the fear of someone saying, “That’s a humble brag,” or “Get over yourself.” Being vulnerable about your failures is only half of the story; you have to be vulnerable enough to share your successes too.

Which is why I loved getting a text from Brewster one day. It said, “Can I approach the brag table?” I said, “Of course!” And then we got to cheer over text about an award he had recently won. The brag table went virtual!

If you’re in the land of Harvesting, be honest. Don’t pretend that being excited about the crop you’re seeing in this land is the same exact thing as being arrogant. It’s not. You’re going to need your own brag table.

Don’t chase more instead of awesome

One day I had two conversations with two very different friends. One was 26 and a business owner from California. One was 58 and an author from Tennessee. On the outside, they didn’t have a lot in common. But they were both having the same problem, and it’s one you’ll face in the land of Harvesting.

When crops pop up in your life, people are going to rush to your side and say, “More!” They will tell you that you could harvest more or grow more or benefit more if you’d just increase production. If you expanded the territory, you’d triple or quadruple your awesome. And they may be right—maybe you could harvest more if you’d just do these few additional things. But when someone tells you, “More!” I want you to ask them, “Why?”

My young friend in California didn’t at first. His company was blowing up. He made $500,000 in one week. I don’t know your salary at 26, but I’m almost positive I didn’t get paid $2 million a month. In the midst of that growth, people were coming out of the woodwork to tell him, “More!” That his harvest was nothing compared to what it could be. If he’d just push a little harder, try a little harder, expand here and grow there, things could be even bigger. He’d have more.

He took the advice for a while, and the only “more” he ended up with was more exhausted. He ended up taking ten days off from the company in the middle of the swirl because he realized he didn’t have any Central Park.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, my friend in Tennessee had just released a new book. He was in a fun scene of Harvesting. A young entrepreneur found out about it and asked him to lunch. Over the meal, he laid out an extensive plan to grow my friend’s book and platform. My friend had a good start, but it could be so much more. If he’d just do the right things on Twitter and social media and maybe travel more, he’d be able to really blow up his book. He’d get more.

Instead of agreeing to the proposal, my friend said what I want you to say in moments like that: “Why?”

“Why do I need to do that? I like my book. I’m proud of the book, and I’ve got twenty years to sell it and grow it. If I follow your proposal, it will be really hard for me to maintain my day job, which I love, or be a good husband or dad. Why do I need more right this second?”

The entrepreneur was stunned. No one asks why to “More!” They just chase it. And strain for it. And often wind up with a whole lot of stuff they never really wanted in the first place—someone else’s idea of awesome, but not their own.

People are going to tell you, “More!” in the land of Harvesting. When they do, ask them, “Why?” And if they don’t have an answer that suits your version of awesome, don’t change a thing.

Don’t chase accomplishments instead of awesome

Eventually, fourteen people are going to come to your breakout session. That’s what happened to me twenty-four hours ago in Pasadena, California.

I was scheduled to give a keynote to about 450 people at a conference on a Tuesday night. But first, I would do a breakout session in the afternoon.

I don’t know what number of people I assumed would attend my breakout, but it was more than fourteen.

After giving people a few extra minutes to come in, I started the session. It was brutal. For one thing, nobody ever sits together in situations like that. The room was massive, with seating for probably 300 people, and there were only fourteen people there. And people don’t laugh when they’re spread out and sitting by themselves.

Normally in situations like that you’re supposed to ask people to move up and sit together, but I was so caught off guard by the low attendance that I became flustered. Part of the reason I was thrown off was that I could hear the laughter through the wall from the breakout next to mine. There were hundreds of people attending that breakout, and the awesomeness they were all experiencing kept washing over into my sad little room. Right as I would try to make a point, a new crescendo of applause and laughter would erupt, and I’d hang my head for a second while it finished.

What was supposed to be a seventy-five-minute speech turned into a forty-five-minute speech. As I was packing up to leave, three people came in late and were surprised it was over already. I decided to stay and do the whole thing over for them.

Overall, it was a rough day, made rougher by the three-month winning streak I had been on. My last five events had been to crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 people. I was starting to focus on my accomplishments. Look at me! Big speaker guy!

Suddenly, the rug was pulled out from under me. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have retreated. If I could have gotten back on a Southwest flight home, pretended a bag of peanuts was enough of a meal for a cross-country flight, and then punched an indie musician in the Nashville airport. But I couldn’t do that.

Three hours after my bomb of a breakout, I had to do my keynote. I had to get back up onstage in the main ballroom and speak to the entire conference.

As I walked back to the hotel to change shirts, I thought about what a lousy fuel accomplishments make. Not that they’re not fun. Not that they’re not to be celebrated or shared at the brag table. Not that you shouldn’t aim for them, but just that they can’t be your chief motivation. They can’t be why you do what you do. They can’t be the gas that powers you down the road to awesome. Because one day, in the middle of Harvesting, some situation is going to fall apart.

You’ll be expecting 100 people to show up for your event, and fourteen will come. You’ll be expecting some video you did to go viral, and it won’t. You’ll be expecting to sell 1,000 copies of your book, and you won’t. And you won’t have time to find a new accomplishment to charge you back up.

You’ll have to take another step, start another job, get back up onstage, and pretend you’re not talking to 436 people who chose not to go to your breakout three hours earlier. Because guess what? It’s time to start being awesome. Whether you had 2 or 2,000 people at your store opening, it’s time be awesome the next day. And the day after that.

You have to love the act of being awesome.

Writing, selling, singing, running a business—
whatever
the act is, that’s what has to fuel you through the land of Harvesting.

Even if you harvest a thousand accomplishments during your time in this land, treat them as rewards for what you do, not the reasons for what you do.

Fear not the harvest

The fear of failure, though widely discussed and understood, is grossly overrated. It is not the scariest fear there is. Far scarier and far more surprising when it hits you in the land of Harvesting is the fear of success.

Even that phrase feels a little ridiculous: “Fear of success.” That doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t that what we’ve been striving for all these weeks or months or years? Wasn’t that always the goal? Now that it finally starts happening in the land of Harvesting, how can we possibly be afraid of it?

In 1915, Sigmund Freud tried to answer those questions in an essay titled “Those Wrecked by Success.” In it, he theorized about the “surprising and even bewildering” tendency of some people to fall apart “precisely when a deeply rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfillment . . . as though they were not able to tolerate happiness.”

What a terrible trap that is, desperate to achieve something but then quick to destroy it when it occurs.

Elissa Sklaroff, a Philadelphia therapist who treats success-fearing executives, continues this line of thinking. “Being on the brink of success brings a crisis,” she wrote, “and all of our neuroses pop right up to the surface. On some level, success-fearing people are running from change—especially from having to change their secret self-image as an unsuccessful or undeserving person.”
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Turns out our secret selves, the ones we each decided we needed to be at the start of this book, are undeserving and unsuccessful.

That’s how I feel some days. It comes down to history. For thirty years, I was a mess-up. I know how to be a mess-up, and nobody expects anything from the mess-up. All you’re expected to do is mess up. Failure becomes more than just an event; it becomes your identity. Average becomes your address. When my first book came out and people started to ask me to speak at different places, it was a little terrifying. The hero’s clothes weighed more than the villain’s or the victim’s clothes to me. I know how to play those roles. I know how to fail and feel sorry for myself. Fear and doubt will try to encourage you to believe you are still the victim or the villain, because they are terrified you will make it to the land of Guiding and help other people down their own roads. But if you think you’re the villain or the victim, you won’t help others. Victims don’t guide. And villains? They spread hurt, not hope.