Donald Miller's Blog, page 127

Thoughts on Egypt

As I follow the story in Egypt, I'm excited that the people are taking stands for democracy, and taking stands against a ruler who has only given lip service to the ideas of democracy. And yet these things are more complicated than they seem. Here are some perspectives I've been pondering as the hourly updates stream in:

1. Mubarak is anything but an honestly elected official, and had anything but democratic plans for his country. And yet, from an American perspective, he was cooperative. We paid Egypt nearly 1.5 billion per year in foreign aid, mostly to build the Egyptian military and serve as an ali in defending (or at least ignoring) Israel.

2. The people do not like Mubarak because of widespread oppression, but also because they saw him as a puppet for American/Israeli interests.

3. The Egyptian people, as a mass, do not like America because of our support for Israel.

4. An honestly elected leader would have trouble gaining mass support while still maintaining a neutral position toward America and Israel.

5. This revolution is not happening because of twitter or facebook (despite the twenty-something mantra that until the internet, nobody could speak to each other) but has happened many times before in many countries. When the internet went down in Egypt, the crowds grew larger and stronger, perhaps because people were actually talking to each other.

6. Our ability to see what is really happening in Egypt is greatly increased by social networking and the 24 hour news cycle, which has no doubt affected the Obama administrations fast and firm diplomacy.

7. I am wondering if the old-model of supporting dictators through foreign aid which they use to build their military (Saddam Hussein regime) is going to have to change as citizens learn the potential for ousting their leaders. This would mean, no doubt, being more supportive of Islamic interests in the world.

In my opinion, America must not be too late in better understanding Islamic interests, and even supporting the rights of Islamic states and acknowledge their true enemies. A blanket demonization of American interests by Muslim countries, countered by a blanket demonization of Islamic regimes, will simply lead to more bloodshed and strained relationships.

An evangelical position on Israel must evolve from a simple, ignorant "Israel is a Biblical good luck charm" to an understanding of a sacred and sovereign state that is capable of mistakes, and in need of mediation from an outside perspective in exchange for billions (Israel gets nearly 4 Billion from America each year) in aid and support. This, it seems to me, is God's position on Ancient Israel in scripture, that they were his chosen people, and like any people group, were imperfect and in need of occasional rebuke and correction. Why the evangelical church sees the state as perfect, now, is beyond me. Much of the anger pointed at Israel in the Middle East, though hideous, wrong and indefensible, is not without provocation.

Comments are unfortunately disabled but I'm working on it.

Thoughts on Egypt is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Creator is Ready When Luck Strikes

Every successful creator has friends who think he or she is lucky. They met that one curator at a coffee shop, or Oprah's housekeeper accidentally left that book behind in the kitchen. And the truth is their friends are right. They did get lucky. Everybody gets lucky. Luck is like the weather, it comes and goes, it makes crazy things happen randomly. But unless you actually spend the hours painting those paintings, meeting the curator amounts to nothing. And unless you put in the year to write the book, it can't get left behind on Oprah's counter.

Luck favors the prepared.

My friend Melisa told me about some people she'd heard of that win sweepstakes professionally. They enter drawings, lotteries, play bingo and sweepstakes and win an enormous amount of money every year? Are they lucky? Perhaps, but you would be to if you spent eight hours a day filling out forms and entering contests. It's not unlike that with a creators work.

Don't worry about luck. You can't do anything about the weather and you can't do anything about luck. All you can do is work. All you can do is create, and let your work go into as many places as it can so that good things will randomly happen.

A Creator is Ready When Luck Strikes is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Creator Does Not Entertain Hypotheticals

I liked this line from the film True Grit: "I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough."

Most of the things we worry about, as creators, never happen. We are not as rejected as we think we are, in fact, our creation has given us a greater community, even if we do have a few critics. And we did not fail as badly as we thought we would, and if we did fail, people hardly noticed. Most of the fears we entertain as creators have to do with hypothetical situations, things that could happen. But this is a waste of valuable creative energy. Most likely, things we think will happen won't. A creator takes risks, a consumer lives in safety. Are you a creator or consumer?

When you are tempted to entertain thoughts of pending doom, ask yourself what real problems you have, not what hypothetical problems you have. Most likely you have very few real problems. Most likely the resistance between you and your creation is in your head. The only thing you really have to do, then, is work. Let the consumers serve on committees about pending earthquakes, about serial killers, about the return of small pox, you just do your work.

A Creator Does Not Entertain Hypotheticals is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Creator Finds a Rhythm and Loves the Rhythm

So if the work you are creating demands completion before you can find fulfillment, it's doubtful the creation will be finished, and perhaps more doubtful it will be any good when it's done. You'll labor through it, pushing it up a hill like a broken cart. But if you can love the actual work, not the finished product, you're on to something. If you have a rhythm, if you get up every morning and work for a few hours, and you like the getting up and the work, and you don't think about how great it will be when it's done, but rather how great it is every day that you get to get up and do the work, your creation will be tremendous. Don't think about the finished product. Stop rewarding yourself with something that doesn't exist, and may never exist. Instead, think about how delightful it is you get to do this, you get to make this, and how delightful it will be to get up and do it again tomorrow.

A Creator Finds a Rhythm and Loves the Rhythm is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Sunday Morning Music, The Be Good Tanyas

I've loved them for years now and love them no less years later. This morning, enjoy The Be Good Tanyas:

Sunday Morning Music, The Be Good Tanyas is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Sunday Morning Music, The Civil Wars

Caught The Civil Wars at their Portland show las month, just down the street at a renovated funeral home called The Woods. Great, sold out show. I think a lot of us felt like we were seeing them "before" they became huge. They were terrific. Sometimes it's obvious a band has peaked with their first release, but with The Civil Wars, it feels more obvious their very best will be rolled out year after year. I loved this cryptic cover of You Are My Sunshine. Enjoy The Civil Wars:

Sunday Morning Music, The Civil Wars is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Commit to the Work, not the Goals

Instead of committing to lose weight this year or write that book, simply commit to do the work. Five days a week you are going to write, who cares whether a book comes of it or not. Five days a week you'll walk two miles, or you'll cut your carbs down to whatever. If you want to be more grateful this year, then break that down into something you can do, and commit to that. Every Thursday you'll write somebody a thank-you card.

Do you want to be more professional? Commit to shaving every day (Please. Especially if you are in your twenties, because while you think it looks novel and unique, it actually looks like an identity crisis and it's costing you) and sending your clothes to the dry cleaner once a month. And add to that finish the work you're supposed to finish. Want to find romance? Commit to asking a girl out once a week (talk to Henry Cloud if you think that's too much) or, if you're a girl, put yourself on a dating site on the internet and say yes when you get asked out. Don't commit to an idea, commit to a tangible act you can check off of a list.

Goals are very helpful, and writing them down is even more helpful. But once you set a secret goal, break it down into actionable steps, and make your commitment to take those steps, to DO those things. Goals don't accomplish anything, it's all in the work.

Commit to the Work, not the Goals is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Creator Must Believe He Has the Authority to Create

Last month Tom Hooper released his movie The King's Speech, written by David Seidler. The film tells the story of King George VI, played by Colin Firth, who took the throne a short time before World War II, before Churchill became Prime Minister and while Hitler was amassing power. England, indeed the free world needed a King, a statesman, and while George VI had moral fortitude, he also had a stammer. He'd be the first king to broadcast his voice widely on the radio, and at a time when all of England would be in need of comfort and resolution. And so the story of The King's Speech involves George VI and his unlikely friendship with a failed, Australian actor named Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. Logue is sought out by George IV and his wife to help the soon-to-be King through his oratory problems.

A critical scene in the movie takes place near the end, when Logue is walking George VI through the paces of the crowning ceremony. They are alone in Westminster Abbey. George VI is stammering through his lines, gets up from the throne and throws a tantrum, stuttering on about how the people need a voice and he hasn't got one, about how he isn't fit to be king. He turns from his tirade to see Lionel Logue sitting sloppily on his throne, head in hand as though he were bored with the tirade. And the anger of King George VI worsens. He threatens the actor, commanding him to get out of the chair. Logue contends that he will not, that the man before him has no authority to dismiss him. George VI yells in anger that he does indeed have the authority, that he is the King, and Logue's eyes light up. The King could not be King until he himself believed he was fit for the role. The throne meant nothing unless it meant something to the King. The people would not follow the King unless the King stepped into the authority they had given him.

And this is how it is with stepping into the role of a creator. Made in the image of God, able to speak something into nothing, able to create solutions to the worlds problems, we stammer about in disbelief, waiting for somebody else to take responsibility for our lives and for the lives we have been given to care for. We are all creators, but too many reject the God-given right to create and instead become consumers, hiding in the safety of some government, some corporation, some self-help philosophy to take care of us. And so why should we be surprised when we turn around and somebody is sitting in our chair, dictating how our marriage will go, how our career will go, whether or not we can have peace with our neighbors? We shouldn't be surprised. We handed them our authority.

Until we believe we are creators, nothing will change save what some other creator changes for us. We are their servants, the consumers of whatever fate is dictated to us by the bold, be they good or bad.

A Creator Must Believe He Has the Authority to Create is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Creator Doesn't Just Talk About Their Work, They Work

I think half the battle of a creator is in finishing their projects. I wonder how many of the worlds greatest creators never created anything great, because while they may have had the intelligence and even the skill, they weren't finishers. Finishing is part of the art.

A guy I met once ran into Norman Mailer at an airport and asked him what he was working on. Mailer politely declined to answer the question, saying that when he talks about a book too much, it steals his motivation to write it. I agree with Mailer, and I also think it was a brilliant way to get out of answering a question most writers are asked fifty-thousand times a day! Regardless of his intention, it's true that when we talk about our work, we give ourselves the feeling that we are working on something when truthfully, we aren't.

If you sat down with a pen and paper and counted the hours you've been working on your project, would the number be embarrassing?

Lets stop talking about our work over coffee with friends. We can talk plenty about it when it's done.

A Creator Doesn't Just Talk About Their Work, They Work is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

For a Creator, There's no Benefit to Romantic Preoccupations

My two favorite books are Catcher in the Rye and A Moveable Feast. Both are books with elusive plots, which is interesting since I often maintain story is everything, but I confess I rarely read books for story or even content, I read for style. I can hear the critics chiming now style is content…I know, I know, what I mean is I read to see how a writer handled their subject, not to learn about the subject.

But that's hardly what this post is about. This post is about romantic trickery, and how easy it is for a creator to get caught up in the romanticism of a life that hardly exists. The allure of Catcher and Feast rest in the easy lilt of the prose, and perhaps in the subtext that one can be unemployed, ride around in taxi's, flirt with girls at clubs, smoke pipes in cafes in Paris, drive around with F. Scott Fitzgerald, bet a little on the horses and not have any bad days.

I picked up Feast in the airport in Boston. The older, black woman at the counter clutched her heart when I set it on the counter. It's his best, she said. It's the only book he wrote while he was happy. I sat at my gate and started the book. They loaded my plane fifteen feet from me, they called my name, the plane took off and I kept reading. I missed my flight to New York for the goodness of that book. I didn't know at the time that little of the book is taken from Hemingway's journals at the time, but that he edited it decades later to reflect a more romantic interpretation of the time.

That said, life was not so good for either writer. Hemingway went through wives as did Salinger. Their biographies are not as flattering as the stories they told about themselves, and neither died with any kind of dignity. Hemingway failed to produce much good work toward the end and killed himself.

It makes you wonder if the days in Paris were any less fiction than the accounts of Middle Earth. A good writer is a very good liar, and a great reader is more than willing to believe. I think the devil is better than Shakespeare, and I wonder if in heaven his books won't be contraband, the stuff kids read behind the corner store, trying out cigarettes.

What's this got to do with you? A lot. There's the romantic life of a creator, and the fulfilling life a creator can actually live, and they are different. One is in the clouds and the other is grounded in reality. We do our work, we submit our lives in virtue, we create over a love of the creation and not to be thought of as a creator, and perhaps the story we tell with our actual lives will be meaningful. Will our real lives be as good as the stories that get told in books? No, they won't, but the only story that actually tells the truth is the story you have lived, good or bad.

How's the real story going? How's the work ethic of the lead character? How is the love story developing? What chapter of the real story are you in? What's it about? What's important to the protagonist? What should be important? What will it feel like when it ends? We won't have the luxury of editing this one.

For a Creator, There's no Benefit to Romantic Preoccupations is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog