B00CHVIVMY EBOK (7 page)

No one can reflect back to you that you are lying to you. No one can admit they feel the same way too. No one can help you see what is really going on. No one can encourage you.

So if you’re going to tell your voices, “Kick rocks, punk,” you’ve got to share them with other people.

Now, this is clearly a pretty easy thing to do. You’re going to want to roll up to Starbucks, order a skinny extra hot Venti Vanilla Latte, and when the barista asks, “Do you want your receipt?” say, “No, I don’t need my receipt. What I need is to stop listening to these voices in my head that tell me there are already too many professional photographers in the world. Am I right? Do you hear voices too? No? Okay, I’ll just pay for my coffee and this Jason Mraz World Music CD bundle then. Thanks.”

It’s not easy to find folks to share your voices with. At the conferences I throw, we do that as an exercise. We do a whole session on it, and the tenor of the room changes as people start to realize they’re not alone and that everyone has the same doubts and fear.

You’ve got to tell your close friends or family or a counselor about your voices. The exact person will be different for everyone who reads this book, but never waste time trying to battle a voice alone. In some cases that voice of fear and doubt will have had a ten-year head start on you. Don’t go it alone.

Final thoughts on fear

At its worst, the forest of voices is an insatiable black hole, gobbling up our time, our energy, and our hope.

At its best, it is a compass. As Steven Pressfield says, it can “point to true North . . . that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.”
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Start. And as you pass through the wall of purpose, kick over the ladder of entitlement, and fight back against the voices of fear and doubt, the map to awesome will become a little clearer. The next steps will not be easy, but they will become increasingly rewarding as you stay the course.

4: Learning
 

4

Learning

Save for the cost of this book
(which I hope was paid for in full and then promptly reviewed on Amazon), the road to awesome will not cost you any money. Whether you have a nickel to your name or a billion-dollar empire, you can walk this road.

But the road is not free. It actually costs you a different currency—in fact, the most expensive currency there is: time.

Every land you walk through, from Learning to Guiding, will require deposits of your time. But instead of waiting for more time to magically appear in your day, you’re going to launch a rescue mission of your current days. That starts right now.

All we need is Thirty

Recognizing that time was a fuel that moved me down the road, I immediately tried to go from zero to 1,000 mph overnight. That’s not really surprising. Remember the all-or-nothing voice? The one that tells you “Don’t do it” or “Do it all perfectly”? That one gets loud again when you start to be deliberate about how you spend your time.

The second you think seriously about finding more time in your day or week to work on being more awesome more often, fear will tell you to make sure every second of your day is perfectly mapped out. It will try to get you to pick up a complicated time-management system or, in my case, a sword.

SWORD stood for:

Serve

Worship

Order

Rest

Dance

I decided that every day, all day, I would be making sure my activities fell into one of those five categories. If I was at work, that counted as serving time. Write it down. If I was sleeping, look at all the rest minutes I was racking up! Write it down. If I was exercising, that was dance time. (That’s what happens when you try to come up with an acronym. At least one of the letters in every acronym is going to be hit with the ugly stick. I promise I auditioned fifty other D-words until I was forced to go with
dance
.)

I carried a little notebook around with me, constantly checking off my minutes to make sure I was using the SWORD that would blaze my path to more awesome more often. I wrote multiple, fairly pretentious blog posts about it to tell everyone this amazing plan I had discovered. I was a laser of ridiculousness, regularly asking my wife things like, “Well, I played with the kids outside, which was kind of exercise, so that’s Dance; but I was serving them as well, as their dad. Do you think those six minutes count as Dance or Serve? Should I create a category called SANCE that marries the two?” At which point my wife would slam her head in a drawer a few times.

I gave up on the whole SWORD system after a month and promptly got right back to wasting all my time. I only had two speeds: waste all my time or try to be impossibly perfect with my time.

What I learned in that season was that when it comes to time management, or most other ways to accelerate awesome, change has to be simple. Especially new change. It has to be easily manageable, or we’ll fail at it before we even start. We can add on other changes down the road, but when we’re beginning our journey, we just need to get one thing right. One tiny taste of progress. The mountain can wait. It’s been there for years and will still be there tomorrow. We don’t have to scale it all at once. We don’t have to rescue our entire year at the onset of the journey.

In fact, all we have to do is find thirty minutes in our week. One half hour is all I’m asking you to give at the start. This simple sacrifice was the biggest, most important thing I did to change my career. I can say without a shadow of a doubt if I hadn’t found those thirty minutes, I never would have written four books. I wouldn’t have moved to Nashville for my dream job with Dave Ramsey. And I wouldn’t have made it through the land of Learning. Thirty minutes. That’s all you’re going to rescue, and fortunately, I know where to find yours.

Be selfish at 5:00 a.m.

You’re too busy to be awesome right now. Whether it’s a book or a blog or a project at work or a new job, life is probably too full to really work tirelessly on your “thing.”

You’ve got a lot going on. I do too. And sometimes, when we focus on our dreams and try to take steps down the path of awesome, our wives cry in the kitchen. That’s been my experience, anyway.

One Tuesday during a holiday break, I spent four hours writing a book idea. My kids were occupied with new Christmas presents and my wife was straightening up the house. At about three in the afternoon, I resurfaced from our home office and talked to my wife in the kitchen.

Her words were short and quick. I asked her what was wrong and she immediately replied, “I thought we were going to spend the day together.” Then she started crying.

In that moment and many others, I failed to follow a simple rule of awesomeness. I was selfish at the wrong time of the day. Those hours—in the middle of the day during Christmas vacation—weren’t really mine. When you’re a spouse, parent, or caregiver, your time doesn’t just belong to you. It’s in large part communal property, shared by the entire house.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t be selfish with some of that time. You just have to know when you can be, which is why I mention 5:00 a.m.

The mornings I get up and write from 5:00 to 5:30, you’d be surprised at how infrequently my wife tells me I’ve been ignoring her. You’d be shocked at how rarely my oldest daughter wants me to watch her jump rope before the sun breaks the horizon. You may even be mystified at how seldom my youngest daughter asks to go bike riding at 5:15 a.m.

You can be selfish at 5:00 a.m. Or 11:00 p.m. if your spouse goes to bed early and staying up an extra thirty minutes doesn’t wreck your next day. You can also rescue thirty minutes during lunch. Last I checked, you don’t need a full hour to eat a turkey sandwich, even if the cheese is organic, gluten-free, udder-to-table cheese. The point is that you can carve out time in your day and claim it, if you’re willing to hustle.

If you’re not married or don’t have kids, this idea still applies. Your time is still shared, especially if you have a full-time job. Your boss may never cry in your arms in the kitchen on the day after Christmas. That would be weird. But if you’re selfish with the wrong hours, your boss may indeed say to you, “Hey, last I checked, we were paying you to do work for us. Am I off base here?”

We all have commitments we have to keep. In one form or another, we all have spouses with expectations that should be met. We also have dreams that need attention.

To start, just be selfish at 5:00 a.m.

And if you don’t like the word selfish, then rewrite that idea. I won’t be offended. Call it your “get furious at five” mandate.

Whatever words you want to use, rescue thirty minutes to walk down your path to awesome. If you can’t—if the idea of setting your alarm thirty minutes earlier sounds horrible to you—then you may not be ready for awesome.

If your dream isn’t worth thirty minutes, you’ve either got the wrong dream or you’re just pretending you have one. If the
minimum
you’re willing to pay in order to be awesome is less than thirty minutes, you’d better go back to average. Nobody gets up early on the road to average. Nobody stays up late on the road to average. You can sleep in to your heart’s content or watch late-night TV until the infomercials begin to make
perfect
sense. Either way, you’re safe on the average road.

One reason 5:00 a.m. tends to dominate 11:00 p.m.

“I’m a night owl!” is often the excuse people give me when I encourage them to get up early and work on their dream.

I think that’s a fair push back. I think there are probably some people who may be predisposed to going to bed later than others. But after hearing that response from so many of my friends over the years, I decided to see if my belief about the importance of mornings could be backed up by research. Maybe even with science. Here’s what I found:

Willpower tends to favor the morning.

In a well-known 1996 research project led by Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University, scientists had two groups of people sit down in a room. One group was told that they could eat the warm chocolate-chip cookies in the bowl in front of them. They just had to ignore the other bowl, which was full of radishes. The next group was told just the opposite. Eat the radishes; resist the cookies. After the experiment, researchers came back in the room and told the participants they needed to tabulate the results. Would they mind waiting around? While they were waiting, they could try to solve this simple puzzle. Only the puzzle wasn’t all that simple. It actually had no solution—the scientists just wanted to see how long each person would attempt to solve it.

Can you guess what happened? The people who had to eat the radishes and resist the cookies tried an average of about eight minutes before they gave up and quit. The people who ate the cookies tried an average of about nineteen minutes. Why? It appears that willpower is finite. We have a limited supply of it. The people who ate the radishes and fought back the desire to eat the warm cookies were out of willpower. Their supply was depleted. They didn’t want to do the puzzle. The people who ate the cookies? They had a full supply. They were willing to try more than twice as long. In his book
The Power of Habit
, Charles Duhigg describes how this study helps shed light on things like executives having affairs at night. After a stressful day of being on, making difficult decisions, fighting, and leading, executives have very little left in the tank.
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This suggestion by researchers is by no means a justification for bad behavior, but it does give us a better understanding of how we are wired.

Have you ever had a task or activity that if you didn’t do it in the morning it didn’t happen when you got home from work? If you missed your jog at 6:00 a.m., after a day at the office and a long commute home, there was very little chance it would happen at 6:00 p.m.—even if you were single and lived alone. You may have thought you were being lazy, but what if you’d simply spent your willpower for that day?

In the book
The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working
, Tony Schwartz further explains Roy Baumeister’s analysis of the cookie-versus-radish test:

In short, we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it is depleted by
any
act of conscious self-regulation—whether that’s resisting a cookie, solving a puzzle, or doing anything else that requires effort. “The implication,”
Baumeister
writes, “is that many widely different forms of self-control draw on a common resource, or self-control strength, which is quite limited and hence can be depleted readily.”
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Don’t start getting up earlier on your road to awesome just because it worked in my life.

Get up earlier because you want the best shot at success.

Get up earlier because you want access to your best willpower.

Get up earlier because you want the way your brain works and the way your physiology reacts to be your friend, not your foe.

The five-step secret to getting it all done

You rescued thirty minutes. You put your television and video watching on a diet. You are starting to hustle. You’re making time for all the different things you want to learn about right now. And the truth is, you’re going to be really busy.

We all are.

There are hundreds of things I need to cross off my to-do list each day. Respond to emails. Attend meetings. Return phone calls. Answer text messages. Pick up the kids from gymnastics and art. Finish work projects. Start home projects.

I realized one day that my list was getting longer and my days felt like they were getting shorter. I was having trouble getting it all done.

In order to survive, I came up with a five-step secret to getting it all done. If you’re busy too, feel free to use it:

1. Admit that you can’t possibly get it all done.

2. Give yourself the grace to accept that as reality, not failure.

3. Do the things you can do with your full attention.

4. Celebrate what happens during Step 3 instead of obsessing over the things you didn’t get to.

5. Repeat as necessary.

That’s it. I was thinking about turning that list into an app, but checking it off would just be one more thing you’d have to do each day. Instead, just tear out these pages. Put the list on your fridge or whatever the more relevant appliance is, and start on step 1. If you can get that one done, you’re 99 percent of the way there and will have a much better grasp on being more awesome more often.

The plane crash

Just beyond the forest of voices, where fear first got loud on the road to awesome, you’ll stumble upon a plane crash. And while most of us would walk by with only that shameful curiosity we feel when we pass a car accident on the highway, if we’re going to be awesome we may need to stop and take a closer look. Since we’ve just rescued thirty minutes, we’ve got the time.

I took a closer look a few years ago and, to tell you the truth, I always wanted to be in a plane crash. Not one of those jarring ones in the mountains where you have to eat the people who didn’t survive. That’s gross. I just wanted a section of the roof to come off, have some carry-on bags that were too big in the first place fly out the gaping hole, and then land safely and take a quick ride on the most exclusive slide in the world.

I’d save a few people from a fireball of some sort, jump down that big yellow inflatable wonder, and then wander in a cornfield or float in a shark-free portion of the balmy Caribbean Sea for a few hours. Then I’d do a couple of interviews, maybe go on Letterman in a smart-looking sweater, and write a book.

Best of all, I’d have something that near-death experiences always seem to deliver—a reason to live.

No one ever survives a plane crash and then says, “Really made me want to watch more television. When your life flashes before your eyes, you start to realize how you’ve been taking shows about cake for granted.”

Nope, they say things like: “My life will never be the same again. I hug longer, smell more flowers, and can taste capers in a way that you non-near-death-experience people will never understand.”