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2. Stand on the shoulders of giants.

I’m more comfortable onstage as a public speaker than I should be based on the limited amount of experience I’ve had, and that’s because of my dad. He’s a pastor, and I spent eighteen years watching him preach. For almost two decades, he showed me how fun and normal it was to stand up in front of hundreds of people and share ideas with them. I didn’t teach myself how to be calm onstage—my dad taught me that, and I’m standing on his shoulders.

If your dad was a professional baseball player and raised you in the locker room, you’ll have a head start on a baseball career if that’s the path you want to take. You’ll grow up understanding the game in a way most people won’t. If you build on his foundation, you may get to the land of Harvesting a lot faster than other people.

If you’ve got a parent, mentor, boss, or friend who cleared the way for you, you may be able to stand on the shoulders of a giant. And as Andy Stanley says, you’ll go “further, faster” than you would have on your own.

3. Work harder and smarter.

I’ve never met a farmer who was surprised by his crops. Who stood on a front porch, in overalls I’m assuming, and stared out at a crop of blood oranges when he clearly remembered planting soybeans. If you work hard, you tend to expect results. If you decide that you’ll spend ten hours a week on your path to expertise instead of twenty, you’ll get there slower than someone who owns the twenty and gets down to business. If you now want to tweet out, “Hard work pays off, new thought by @jonacuff,” feel free.

4. Harvest someone else’s fields.

Gladwell didn’t throw out the 10,000-hour rule as the definitive reason that Bill Gates became Bill Gates. In fact, he argued that “the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle, and hard work.”
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If Gates hadn’t had access to a computer when he was 13, it may have been difficult for him to accumulate 10,000 hours so quickly. He had opportunities other people didn’t necessarily have. Or in other words, he harvested fields he did not plant.

That happens sometimes in life. You get an opportunity that is beyond what your experience years would dictate. Someone takes a shot on you. Against all logic, a boss believes in you and risks a project under your young lead. A friend has a connection at a record label, and in one relational leap you clear the dozens of hurdles it usually takes for someone to hear your demo.

There will be moments when you get to harvest someone else’s field and shorten a stage or two. We often call this someone’s “big break.” That’s happening to me right now. When he hired me, Dave Ramsey took me from speaking to crowds of 100 to crowds of 10,000 almost overnight. I didn’t earn my way to that opportunity. Dave spent twenty years building his stage and then graciously invited me to join him on it. When I speak at a Dave Ramsey live event, that’s his harvest that he’s generously decided to share with me.

Did I plant the fields Dave is letting me harvest right now? Nope. That was a finish line I couldn’t have possibly predicted. Did I come up with the vision to have new brands like me at his company? Nope. Did I, through my hard work, make Dave a generous leader who is humble enough to share the stage with someone who technically hasn’t earned it? Nope.

But guess where I was when Dave invited me to think about joining his team? At his office. I’d driven up for the third time in two years to speak there. For free. I’d spent years building a brand. I’d spent years writing a blog and a book. I’d spent years hustling and working as hard as I possibly could in the lands of Learning and Editing. Dave didn’t knock on my front door and say, “I’ve never heard of you, but I’m here to change your life with an incredible opportunity.” I’d already kicked down the door of purpose and started traveling the road of awesome when I met Dave. He met me when I was already in motion. My relationship with Dave wasn’t a by-product of luck.
Luck
is a word people who are lazy use to describe people who are hustling. If you ever taste it in your mouth, spit it out as fast as you can.

At first glance, two of those ways to accelerate awesome should make you hate me at least a little. “Great! All I have to do to be awesome is start my dream when I was a toddler! Fantastic. I’ll get a time machine. And I need my dad to have been a successful member of the same exact industry I’m curious about. Thanks for the help, Jon!”

That’s not what I’m saying at all. You don’t need to go back in time to be awesome; you just have to start right now. Regretting that you didn’t start earlier is a great distraction from moving on your dream today, and the reality is that today is earlier than tomorrow. As far as having a mom or dad who showed you the ropes, or a giant in your life, that’s fixable too. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find a giant, someone who is farther down the path than you. People who are awesome are usually surprisingly willing to share their wisdom if you ask humbly.

You may not be able to skip stages, but you’d be amazed what a difference hustle, hard work, and the steps we’ll discuss in this book can make in your ability to shorten them.

Just make sure that while you’re hustling you don’t start thinking you deserve more than you really do.

The Entitlement Trap

When it comes to conference speakers, there are two kinds:

1. Important people

2. People who get interviewed onstage

Important people are generally great speakers who have done great things. Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, is an important person. You may know him. I’ve already quoted him twice in this book and will probably proceed to do so forty-seven more times. He’s great at the craft of speaking and has written some of the best business books of the last fifteen years.

The second category of conference speaker is someone who has done something amazing but may not be a great public speaker. Josh Hamilton, for instance, falls into this category. When he was on the main stage at the Catalyst Conference, a 13,000-person leadership conference in Atlanta, he was interviewed. He’s done something great—he came back from drug addiction to become a Major League All-Star—but he’s not a professional public speaker. That’s not his gift.

I like to think I’m in the first category—that I am an important person—but occasionally conference organizers remind me that I am not. Via email mostly.

While I was writing this book, I found out that a conference I was going to keynote at downgraded me to interview level. Now, clearly that’s okay because I have some wicked awesome stories to talk about from the time I hit a walk-off grand slam to beat the Yankees—I love talking about hitting some dingers!—but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

Upon receiving this news, that I am interview level and not important-people level, I wanted to respond to the email with: “Are you kidding me? Interviews are for celebrities who hate public speaking but have a compelling story that the world is dying to know. Interviews are for people who are unproven on the mic and can’t be trusted with the stage. Interviews are the training wheels of public speaking. I’m doing wheelies, son. Front and back! I’m ready!”

Except, I’m not. I spoke professionally for the first time in 2008. Since then, I’ve done it approximately 100 times. Sure, I’ve had a few big moments, like speaking to 10,000 people at a college, but is anyone who has only done something 100 times really a master?

If I’m being honest, I’m still in the land of Learning when it comes to public speaking. (If you’re booking me to speak, please don’t let this honesty confuse you into paying me a smaller fee.) I’m only in my 20s when it comes to rocking the mic. And therein lies the greatest temptation most of us will face as we reside in the land of Learning.

We want to enter Harvesting without traveling through Learning, Editing, or Mastering.

It only takes a few steps into the land of Learning for you to spot your first entitlement ladder. It’s leaning there with your name on it. “Come on over,” it whispers. “You’ve worked hard enough; here’s a ladder to climb to the top immediately. This is your time!”

I get that—I do. I don’t really want to learn how to be a great public speaker. I don’t really want to spend hours editing that skill. I don’t want to spend time mastering it. I just want to do it a few times, have everyone recognize me as a master, and then enjoy the rewards.

Why do we think we can skip thirty years of life experience? I think there are a lot of reasons, but here are three really obvious ones:

1. The Internet has changed our definition of
expert.

In 2012, a group called Invisible Children came out with a viral video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. There was a lot of opposition to their social justice mission, and one of the sources quoted often was a blog called Visible Children. Was the author of this blog—whom media sources linked to as an expert—a grizzled professor of Ugandan studies? A man in his 60s who had lived in Uganda before returning to the United States to write books about the unique challenges and opportunities the country faced? No, the author of the blog was a college sophomore from Canada. Beseeched by media inquiries, he had to write posts on his blog that said, “I’m a second-year political science student, not an expert, and the
audience
for this post was a group of approximately thirty friends to whom it was emailed originally.”
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And, “Today I’ve turned down media requests from Al Jazeera English, FOX, NBC’s
Today
show, and BBC World Service. Why? Because
my opinion
isn’t what’s relevant.”
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What an honest response, but it does reveal a shift in our culture. Twenty years ago, do you know whom the BBC didn’t contact for expert opinions on geopolitical issues in war-torn African countries? Sophomores at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

2. We celebrate accomplishment-free celebrities.

It’s impossible to go to the grocery store and not be confronted with magazines promoting people who are famous for being famous. The message is simple: you don’t have to do anything to be considered important. Sure, we’ve had gossip magazines and starlets like Marilyn Monroe for decades, but Marilyn Monroe was also in twenty-nine movies. She was famous because she made movies.

3. Everything else in life is instant.

If you ever played Little League sports, then at least fourteen times your coach asserted, “You play like you practice.” If you spend eighteen hours goofing off and halfheartedly exercising during practice, you can’t suddenly flip a switch and be amazing during the game that week. Your practice determines how you play. This is true of almost every facet of life. So what are we practicing right now as a culture? Everything should be instant. That’s the rallying cry of smartphone manufacturers. “It’s the fastest 4G! Your brand-new phone is already so ten seconds ago!” And as soon as you reach fast, you want faster right away, because your definition never stops changing.

When I was in college, I actually said this sentence fairly regularly: “I wasn’t able to get on the Internet today.” I said that sentence because it was true. Connecting to the Internet was this difficult, crazy, chirp-filled experience. And if you were fortunate enough to get on, you were constantly afraid that you were about to get kicked off. That AOL would unexpectedly tell you “Goodbye!” before you were ready, forcing you to start the whole process again. It was the technology version of cranking a Ford Model-T. Now? If my smartphone doesn’t pick up four bars of service in the jungles of Brazil, I am enraged. Comedian Louis C.K. summarizes this expectation with the retort he uses when people are mad that their smartphone isn’t operating quickly. He says, “Give it a second! It’s going to space! Can you give it a second to get back from space?”
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Every day we have the belief that good things should be delivered quickly. Of course our careers and lives and purposes should happen at the same rate. It’d be ridiculous to think they’d take time!

If you live with those three beliefs long enough, you start to feel you’re entitled to being an expert immediately. You start to believe that you deserve to enter the land of Harvesting just after college—even during college, if you play your cards right. That you have the right to skip the lands of Learning, Editing, and Mastering. That you’re ready for a main-stage speaking spot, not just an interview.

You’re not. I’m not either. And that’s okay, because I’ve climbed the entitlement ladder a dozen times, and let me tell you where it leads . . . nowhere.

You just climb and climb and climb, each rung taking you farther away from reality and what it really takes to reach awesome. Your whole perception of the world changes from up there. Other people look really tiny and insignificant. Like pesky ants who are just in the way. They don’t understand you. They’re unable to grasp the full scope of your greatness, but from high on the ladder it all makes sense.

The great peril of the entitlement ladder is that it never ends. It doesn’t stop. You just keep climbing and climbing until the air gets so thin and your judgment so skewed that you eventually yell the sentence you used to make fun of people for saying: “Do you know who I am?” And when someone says, “Do you know who I am?” what they’re really saying is, “Do you know who I am? Because I don’t. I lost sight of that person a long time ago.”

Don’t climb a single rung up the entitlement ladder. Demanding something you haven’t truly earned is a great way to get stuck in the land of Learning for decades, even an entire lifetime. Kick those ladders over and keep walking.

You can shorten your journey with hard work, but the entitlement ladder will lead you nowhere.

Ignore the voices

Stories without dragons are boring.

You don’t get “happily ever after” unless at some point it was in doubt, unless the whole adventure was in question. Success was anyone’s guess. Survival was up for grabs.

A hero without a villain isn’t really a hero. Superman without Lex Luthor would have just been “Man,” and that would have made for a really dull movie.