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“Yes, I can ignore what you’re saying and just look at your actions. Our actions always reveal our real values.”
I had been fooling myself for years, telling myself I wanted to do this, but my actions proved otherwise. Yes, I wanted it a little bit, but I wanted something else more.
No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want.
There are two smart reactions to this: Stop lying to yourself, and admit your real priorities. Start doing what you say you want to do, and see if it’s really true.
Keep earning your title, or it expires Until yesterday, I called myself an entrepreneur. Now, I don’t. It’s been years since I started a company, so I can’t keep using that title. Someone who played football in high school can’t call himself an athlete forever. Someone who did something successful long ago can’t keep calling himself a success. You have to keep earning it. Holding on...
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And if you don’t like the idea of losing your title, then do something about it! This goes for titles like “leader,” “risk-taker,” and “good friend,” too.
For example, one way to make money is to take on a lot of responsibility, which means letting go of some freedoms.
If you want freedom, then own a business but delegate all the work.
He told this story in the great book Turning Pro, the third in his series of little books about the creative struggle, including The War of Art and Do the Work. Read all three.
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
When I finished, I looked at the time: forty-five minutes. Wait — what?!? How could that be? Yep. I double-checked: forty-five minutes, as compared to my usual forty-three. So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.
Do you have a list of conditions you need to have met before you do something? Try changing “and” to “or.”
People sometimes ask my help in making big decisions. They’re usually trying to decide between two options. But that’s not a decision — that’s a self-created dilemma! You have to remember that there are always more than two options.
Many people are so worried about looking good that they never do anything great. Many people are so worried about doing something great that they never do anything at all. You destroy that paralysis when you think of yourself as just a student, and your current actions as just practice.
Everything is my fault I used to get mad at people. They lied. They betrayed me. They disappeared. Do you hear the pattern? “They this. They that.” When someone upsets you, it’s human nature to feel it’s their fault. But one day I tried thinking of everything as my fault. I created the environment that made them feel they had to lie. I mistook their neutral behavior as betrayal. I made it more appealing for them to disappear than to communicate. It felt so good to think it was all my fault! This is way better than forgiving. When you forgive, you’re still assuming that they’re wrong and you’re
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If we’re not surprised, we’re not learning.
What are the odds of winning the big lottery? Fifty million to one? Ah, but that’s if you’re being egocentric and thinking only of yourself! Someone always wins it. So what if you look past yourself and ask, “What are the odds that this rare thing will happen to someone?” Almost 100 percent.
Most musicians first record songs in the studio, then go perform them in concert. Fela Kuti did the opposite. He performed only new unrecorded songs in concert. Then once he recorded them in the studio, he’d never perform them again. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity. It’s as if to him, the recording was the end of the life of a song, instead of the beginning. It makes just as much sense if you think about it that way. Which of course makes me wonder about all the other beginnings and endings and things we just take for granted as fact, but make just as much sense as their opposites.
People with a well-paying job ask my advice because they want to quit to become full-time artists. But full-time artists ask my advice because they’re finding it impossible to make money. (Let’s define “art” as anything you do for expression, even just blogging or whatever.) For both of them, I prescribe the lifestyle of the happiest people I know: Have a well-paying job. Seriously pursue your art for love, not money.
Don’t expect your job to fulfill all your emotional needs. Don’t taint something you love with the need to make money from it. Don’t try to make your job your whole life. Don’t try to make your art your sole income. Let each be what it is, and put in the extra effort to balance the two, for a great life.
Learning without doing is wasted. If I don’t use what I learn, then it was pointless! How horrible to waste those hundreds of hours I spent learning, and not turn it into action. Like throwing good food in the trash, it’s morally wrong.
So when should you make decisions? When you have the most information, when you’re at your smartest: as late as possible.
Don’t announce anything. Don’t choose a name. Don’t make a website or an app. Don’t build a system. You need to be free to completely change or ditch your idea.
And now, my point: The reason I’m finally writing about this is because I realized that I’m doing all these things for myself as much as for him. By cultivating his long attention span, I’m cultivating my own. By entering his world, I’m letting go of my own, like meditation. By broadening his inputs, I’m broadening my own.
It hurts to go from feeling like an expert to feeling like an idiot. But it’s crucial to go through that pain or I’ll never grow.
“The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
So when someone says, “They’re so stupid!” it means they’ve stopped thinking. They say it because it’s satisfying to jump to that conclusion.
I often tell people about a great book I think will help them, but sometimes they dismiss the book because they heard something they didn’t like about the author. What I think they’re really saying is, “Now that I’ve proven that the messenger is not perfect, I don’t have to listen to anything they say.” But the act of reading a book is really about you and what you get from it. All that matters is what you do with the ideas, no matter the source. Apply them to your own life in your own way. It was never about them. It’s about you.
People surf the web, reading pithy articles, looking for inspiration. People listen to hours of podcasts, looking for inspiration. Musicians, writers, artists, and everyone else, all scouring the world for inspiration. Breathing in, and in, and in, and in. Yet most of them aren’t feeling inspired enough. They’re looking for more, thinking that something else out there will truly inspire them. Want to know why? Because nothing is truly inspiring unless you apply it to your work. (“work” meaning your life’s output, whether creative, business, or personal).
People think that if they keep reading articles, browsing books, listening to talks, or meeting people, they’re going to suddenly get inspired. But constantly seeking inspiration is anti-inspiring. You have to pause the input and focus on your output. For every bit of inspiration you take in, use it and amplify it by applying it to your work. Then you’ll finally feel the inspiration you’ve been looking for. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You grow by doing what excites you and what scares you.
Whatever scares you, go do it.
Fear is just a form of excitement, and you know you should do what excites you.
Best of all, once you do something that scared you, you’re not scared of it anymore!
Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
