Jon Acuff's Blog, page 46

“The president’s wife ruined our school lunches.” – My 4th grade daughter.

“When is the next election dad?” My 9-year-old McRae asked one day.

As a parent, that’s an exciting question to hear from your child. What a great dad I must be! My fourth grader is already civic minded. She’s curious about democracy in our country and is asking how she might get involved in the issues that are shaping our world.

“It’s in 2016 McRae.”

“Good,” she responded, “The president’s wife ruined our school lunches. Maybe it will get better then.”

If I made a list of “reasons my daughter would be interested in the election,” that would not have cracked the top 100.

I joked with McRae for a few minutes about her concerns with the quality of the school lunch and then we talked about other things. I thought the lunch discussion was a passing whimsy.

Three days later, McRae came downstairs with a letter she wanted me to mail to First Lady Michelle Obama. Here is what she wrote:

“Mrs. Obama,

I’m writing to you about how bad the cafeteria food is.

Every couple days I buy lunch. The pizza crust is whole grain and it’s gnarly. All the chips are oven baked and they don’t sell pudding. ☹ I know you are fighting childhood obesity. Always I hungry after lunch. There is something that really concerns me. Lots of people in my class buy multiple ice creams and chips and only eat that for lunch.

Above all my friends in 4th grade and me wish for decent food at NAME OF SCHOOL SHE ATTENDS in Franklin, Tennessee.

Sincerely,

McRae Acuff.”

There are a few things I’d like to point out about this letter.

1. Thank goodness my kid doesn’t know the phrase “Thanks Obama” or she probably would have started the letter that way. Instead she absolutely crushes the first line, addressing her key point right out of the gate. “I’m writing to you about how bad the cafeteria food is.”

2. She’s pretty clear about her main objectives. The pizza crust is whole grain and as a result, gnarly. The chips are oven baked, which is apparently not desirable either. And, crime of all crimes, they don’t even sell pudding any more.

3. She acknowledges First Lady Michelle Obama’s key objective, “fighting childhood obesity.” I’m not even sure where she learned this phrase but good for her recognizing the opposition’s chief aim.

4. Not only does she recognize the issue of childhood obesity, but she points out the fatal error of the new approach to cafeteria food – kids are still eating junk. She’s right on that point; I’ve eaten lunch with her and watched as kids ate multiple ice creams instead of their lunch. Baked chips might be better, but three bags of baked Cheetos does not a vegetable make.

5. She summarizes the whole thing like a champ. “Above all my friends in 4th grade and me wish for decent food …” She’s not asking for filet mignon or Parmesan kale salad with raisins. All she’s asking for is “decent food.” You can almost hear her standing on the cafeteria tables to rally the other fourth graders, imploring them Newsies-style to “Open the gates and seize the day!”

I’d like to think that McRae wrote this letter because her dad writes books like Do Over and she was inspired by own plucky crusade to help people actually enjoy what they do for a living, but I can’t take credit for this.

McRae likes pudding and someone messed with it.

End of story.

There’s no more pudding at school. The president’s wife ruined lunch. – McRae Acuff
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Your Monday will never be as bad as his.

This goes without saying, but please don’t hurt the fastest man in the world today when you’re filming. I don’t even know how that would be possible, but just please be careful.

Don’t knock him off his feet or run into his legs with any sort of motorized device. Imagine causing some sort of accident right after he won a race? That would be bonkers!

You know, this sounds dumb to even say this, but especially be careful around him if he’s barefoot.

In the biz we call that the “ole Michael Jordan Oven Mitts” rule. You’d never want to hurt MJ’s hands, like when George Costanza was a hand model.

Seriously, don’t smash into Usain Bolt. You’d have to be Usain to do that. Like Cypress Hill, Usain in the Membrane. Word play!

Have a good day out there!

Get us some good film.

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I have a hearing problem.

I’m not sure when my hearing problem started but here’s what it looks like:

When someone says, “I doubt you can do that,” I hear, “I dare you to do that.”

When someone says, “I doubt you can do that,” I hear, “I dare you to do that.”
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When someone says, “You’re not qualified to do that,” I hear, “I dare you to work hard and get qualified.”

When someone says, “That will never work,” I hear, “I dare you to try.”

When someone says, “You suck,” I hear, “You’re the worst person ever, you should never write again, you should over analyze everything you do and get frozen by obsessing over one negative comment from one stranger who has never met you, talked to you on the phone or texted with you.”

That last one is still a work in progress. I’ve got reasons I see a counselor. Reasons with an S!

But I fear my hearing problem is getting worse because it’s getting harder and harder to worry about what other people think.

When people told me book tours don’t work, I tried anyway and 3,000 people are daring to build careers they enjoy with me this fall. (Here’s how to get your free ticket.)

Do you have that same hearing problem, too?

 

 

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The world will never be changed by the things you’re going to do later.

For the last five years, one tool more than any other has helped me plot adventures, keep commitments, finish projects and accomplish things I care about. Can you guess what it is?

Hint: If you’re waffling between a forged anvil or a 32-ounce ball peen hammer, you may need to reacquaint yourself with my skill set.

Give up? It’s this calendar.

The reason I keep using a NeuYear Calendar is simple: it works.

If you plan when and where you’ll work on your goals, you DOUBLE the chances you’ll actually accomplish them. That’s not an empty motivational statement, that’s what study after study has proven.

(The book Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. details a great study in Germany where a group’s success rate went from 32% to 71% just by writing down when and where they would work on their goals.)

A great example of the power of planning time to work on your goals is the DO Summer Challenge we just finished. Over 11,000 of you participated, and the results were pretty amazing. We polled 125 of you last week to see how much time you spent honing a skill, and the result was over 200,000 minutes! That’s an average of over 26 hours per person this summer spent improving a skill or learning a new one! People didn’t just talk about doing something later, they actually did it in the moment.

The world will never be changed by the things you’re going to do later.
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Of all the responses, my favorite was from Juanita S., a woman in her 70s who spent 4800 minutes this summer learning Spanish, mastering chess, and studying for the bar exam! That’s 80 hours of focused work on some amazing goals, all because she was planning and measuring her time!

If you’re ready to get serious about chasing a dream and launching a Do Over in an area of your life, you will love the Do Over Calendar. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. It’s big and beautiful. 25″ x 36″ with a tall orientation on one side and wide on the reverse.

2. We’re offering two versions this year! A traditional paper version and a dry erase version for people who need more flexibility.

3. It includes 12 challenges/encouragements from my NYT Bestselling book, Do Over . Each one is designed to help slingshot you into a great month of dreaming and more importantly, doing.

2016 is going to be an amazing year! Give yourself the best shot at being awesome with a fun calendar to help along the way!

Get yours today: The 2016 Do Over Calendar.

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Stop saying, “I had to ask!”

“I had to ask!”

No, you didn’t.

You wanted to ask and there’s a big difference between those two things. In Do Over, I spend 25% of the book talking about the importance of relationships. Why? Because relationships often get you the first gig. Someone will take a chance on you because they know you and trust you. Someone will give you an opportunity your skills might not have earned yet because of a friendship. And phrases like “I had to ask” tend to wear away at relationships.

If you say, “I had to ask,” it removes the responsibility from you. Some outside force made you ask. Your hands were tied, there was nothing you could do except ask.

So you did and the person you asked for a favor said no. You responded to his/her no with “I had to ask!” Or, instead you said, “Well, there’s no harm in asking,” only that’s not true either.

There can be harm in asking. Maybe the person you asked feels used. You barely know them and have jumped gigantic intimacy levels by overreaching with your favor request. Maybe they felt manipulated by the ask. Maybe they’ve now quietly moved you from, “People who are my friends” to “People who just want favors” bucket.

Don’t kid yourself. There’s harm in asking, especially if you do it the wrong way with the wrong person.

Does that mean you shouldn’t ask anyone for anything? Of course not. Your friends want to help you. They’re excited to help you. The time you’ve invested in that relationship completely changes the request.

Asking is hard but it’s not complicated. Here’s a simple way to remember the right way to do it:

Ask friends for favors. Ask strangers for friendship.

Ask friends for favors. Ask strangers for friendship.
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Never trust a self help “expert” who owns a gorilla.

Success is like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.

An entrepreneur said this recently online.

My first thought was, “You probably shouldn’t wrestle a gorilla.”

I used the word “probably” because even in the quietness of my head I was trying to be polite, not honest.

You definitely shouldn’t wrestle a gorilla.

They’re incredibly strong and capable of ripping your face off. I don’t even think that’s their finishing move. I think that’s maybe an opening move, which says quite a lot about the ferocity of gorillas.

That’s just a meaningless motivational statement, something the Internet is populated with right now. Here are two others I just made up.

“Success is like playing backgammon with an antelope. You never know where it will leap next.”

Success is like playing backgammon with an antelope. You never know where it will leap next.
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“Success is like watching Netflix with a Gaboon Viper. Difficult.”

Success is like watching Netflix with a Gaboon Viper. Difficult.
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Those pearls of wisdom are not in my book Do Over because my editor had this strange thing about “only putting things in the book that will actually help people make the most of their careers and dreams.” Go figure.

If a self-proclaimed self-help expert ever says to you, “To be successful, you have to wrestle this gorilla,” you should really question what it is you’re doing with your life at that exact moment. Or maybe the better question is “Why does this guy have a gorilla?”

Why does his personal definition of success involve opposable thumb to opposable thumb combat?

If he’s honest, he’ll give you one of two possible answers:

1. He runs a terrible human/gorilla fighting tournament and tricking people into competing is the only way to drum up participants. (Convincing the gorilla mainly just involves the procurement of bananas.)

2. We as a society are running out of motivational statements to incorrectly assign to Abraham Lincoln and are now forced to make up our own even if they don’t make sense.

Either way, you definitely shouldn’t wrestle a gorilla.

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Announcing the 15-city fall Do Over tour!

Don’t call it a comeback! Actually, this might be the one time in my life where LL Cool J lyrics are not appropriate.

The spring Do Over tour went so well, we decided we not only wanted to comeback with a fall tour, but we wanted to make it even bigger.

Announcing the fall Do Over tour!

What if you could change the way you looked at your job and your career?

What if you could rescue Monday, reinvent your work, and never get stuck again?

Those are the questions I’ll be answering as I visit fifteen cities this fall to talk about my latest book, Do Over!

The last tour was awesome! In addition to signing books and hanging out with so many friends, I got to do a live illustration of the four career transitions everyone will experience.

A tour might feel a little old fashioned what with the webinars and the Lady Gagas and the hippity hop snapchat these kids are doing these days. But the more time I spend online, the more I realize offline matters more. That’s why I can’t wait to meet so many of you and hear about your Do Over stories.

The events are all free, but space is limited so you need to register to attend.

The fall Do Over Tour is coming to 15 cities. Find out if yours is on the list!
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Register today to reserve your seat:

September 8 – Chattanooga, TN | Books-A-Million Register Here

September 14 – Minneapolis, MN | Half Price Books Register Here

September 17 – Seattle, WA | Half Price Books Register Here

September 21 – Santa Monica, CA | Barnes & Noble Register Here

September 28 – Lancaster, PA | Barnes & Noble Register Here

October 1 – Washington, D.C. | TBD Register Here

October 13 – Detroit, MI | TBD Register Here

October 15 – Indianapolis, IN | Barnes & Noble Register Here

October 20 – Kansas City, MO | Half Price Books Register Here

October 23 – Chicago, IL | The Book Cellar Register Here

October 26 – Charlotte, NC | Barnes & Noble Register Here

November 2 – Austin, TX | Barnes & Noble Register Here

November 5 – Dallas, TX | Barnes & Noble Register Here

November 10 – Tampa, FL | TBD Register Here

November 16 – Orlando, FL | Barnes & Noble Register Here

These events are going to be so much fun, hope to see you there!

p.s. If you haven’t ordered Do Over yet, pick up a copy today!

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Divorce is so ordinary we sometimes forget the extraordinary pain it causes.

Yesterday on my flight, a 13-year-old boy who was traveling alone sat next to me. Before we took off he lowered the tray table in front of him, put his head in his arms and started sobbing. Big tears covered the tray as he wept in his seat.

I asked him, “Are you alright buddy?” He told me he had spent 3 months with his mother for the summer and was flying back to another state to live with his dad.

Sometimes the frequency of divorce makes us forget the heartache of it. It’s such an ordinary thing these days that we tend to rush right by the extraordinary pain it causes.

If you grew up with divorced parents, are going through a divorce or are divorced, I’m sorry for all the times that I didn’t understand how hard that experience can be. It might be common, but it’s never easy.

I wrote those four paragraphs on my Facebook page a few days ago.

Four hours after I did, the mother of that little boy messaged me. A friend who follows me sent her the post. After confirming the details of the flight and his name to make sure it was actually her son, she thanked me.

It had been a hard day for both of them. The division of family, whether for the school year after a summer with mom, or the weekend after a few days with dad, is never easy. I started to cry in the airport while I read her message and had to pretend the tears were falling because I was eating a really transcendent airport food court burrito. You know the kind, no rip down the middle, great structural integrity, bite after bite? Burritos, is there anything they can’t do?

But then a strange thing happened, people started commenting on the post. They started sharing their stories. About dads who did their best and moms who carried homes through storms and hurt that hasn’t disappeared but has healed. The Internet reminded me for the thousandth time that we’re not in this alone as people started to share their stories. (You can read the comments on Facebook right here.)

If you see someone on an airplane crying, ask if he’s OK. If he’s not, talk to him about his favorite football team so he’ll forget he’s sad for a minute. You might think you’re flying to Dallas because you’re supposed to talk to 10,000 people at an event, but there might be just be one person who needs a few words of encouragement even more.

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How to apologize to 27,000 people.

Last year I had a Viking funeral for my email list.

I don’t know if it was technically a Viking funeral because our pyre was a portable fire pit and we put in our driveway, not a river. I also lit it with a bic lighter instead of an arrow that had been set aflame.

I would have done the arrow thing, don’t doubt that for a second, but our HOA would have killed me if I started shooting flaming projectiles at makeshift funeral pyres in our neighborhood pool. (It’s right there in our home owner tenets next to what kind of siding you can have on your house.)

I lit my email list on fire because it had become a sore spot in the Acuff house.

For a year, every time I met with someone smart, they would ask me, “How’s your email list going? It’s all about the email list! You’ve got to get your email list together or you’ll probably have to dance for nickels in the street soon.”

Then I would freak out, tell Jenny I didn’t know how to do an email list but that it was the most important thing in the world and then freak out some more.

Worst of all, I didn’t do anything with my email list for a year. I was so confused by what to do that I decided to do nothing. (That’s kind of like when you’re so busy you decide that the best decision would be to take a nap.)

The email list went cold.

Finally after watching me wring my hands for a year, Jenny told me to let it go. (If you’re the parent of a daughter, you just repeated the phrase “let it go, let it go,” in your head.)

We got the list, crumpled it up, said some kind words and lit it on fire in the driveway.

If that’s a point of advice in any Internet Marketer’s approach to growing your audience please let me know because it sounds like what crazy people do. I’d love to tell you that after that moment things worked well, but that would be a lie.

I started sending out my blog posts via email, but I still had a confusing number of different lists in my system. Faced with more complications, I set it up best I could and then moved into a four part system I call: Laziness, Entitlement, Embarrassment, Empathy or LEEE! for short.

Step 1: Laziness

In this phase, you tell yourself, “I don’t want to do something.” And then you don’t do something. (In this case, I was too lazy to figure out how to use an email list correctly.)

Step 2: Entitlement

In this phase, you tell yourself, “I shouldn’t have to do something.” I write about entitlement a lot because I struggle with it. Case in point. Who exactly was I expecting to handle all my email issues? Why did I think I shouldn’t have to do it? So entitled.

Laziness says, “I don’t want to.” Entitlement says, “I shouldn’t have to.” Both are toxic.
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Step 3: Embarrassment

In this phase, you tell yourself, “I should already know how to do this.” It’s embarrassing to feel like you’re the only one on the planet who doesn’t know how to properly give people your blog posts via email. That’s so 2008 of me.

Step 4: Empathy

In this phase, you finally admit you messed up, apologize and ask for empathy.

That brings us to this exact moment.

I recently found out I had been sending out duplicate emails to 7,000 people. I hate getting emails myself and double emails is twice as terrible. I apologize if that’s been happening to you.

I also have known for a year that 20,000 people signed up to get emails from me and then I didn’t send them any. I was just lazy/confused and didn’t fix the issue. Nothing builds long term trust like telling people, “Sign up for my email list and I’ll send you my blog posts. Just kidding!”

I apologize.

Today, everyone who has ever said, “I’d like to see some ideas from Jon Acuff,” got this blog post sent to them.

If I haven’t sent you anything for a year and you forgot who I was, save for one vague memory of a writer who is really, really, really ridiculously good looking, I understand if you want to unsubscribe. Please, please don’t mark this as spam though.

When you do that, it makes the email provider think I’m some sort of global pirate company selling gold schemes from a relative you didn’t know you had and they suspend my whole account. I’m not a global pirate, I promise.

I’m just a writer who is terrible at email, standing in front of you trying to remember a line from the movie Notting Hill.

I didn’t have a fire in the driveway this time, but I am learning how to do things better.

And apparently that sometimes means being terrible at them first.

Sorry.

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Join me for the Ask An Author Anything Webinar on August 18th!

“What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to write a book?” is one of the hardest questions I routinely get asked. (You’d think that “Where’s the best place for queso?” would be, but the answer to that question is easy. “In my belly.”)

Don’t get me wrong, I love handing out sage pearls of wisdom more than banks love handing out lollipops, but one piece of advice for something as complicated and nuanced as writing a book…that’s tough.

What kind of book do you want to write? Fiction or non-fiction? When are you writing it? Why are you writing it? Do you want to go with traditional publishing, self publishing, or scrimshaw? Do you have an audience already or is your goal to build one with the book? (Needless to say, there’s a lot of factors.)

That’s why I’m excited to join Author Launch for a FREE webinar on writing a book next Tuesday, August 18th!

We’ll take an in-depth look at the writing and publishing process behind Do Over, and I’ll answer some of your questions about writing a book.

It’s a part of their Ask An Author Anything series, and it’s free, but you have to register to be a part.

Want to have your question about writing a book featured in the webinar? Ask it here in the comments and we’ll pick a few of them to use!

This is going to be a lot of fun, so I hope you can join me on Tuesday night, August 18th at 7pm Central (8pm Eastern)! The replay will be available to everyone who registers, as well.

AWESOME BONUS NEWS EXPRESSED IN ALL CAPS: Author Launch is going to be giving away 50 signed copies of Do Over to folks who register for the webinar! How awesome is that!

Sign up here and I’ll see you next Tuesday night! –>  Ask An Author Anything with Jon Acuff

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