Authors: Jon Acuff
The challenge to editing your own value system is that the world will constantly try to convince you that you’ve got it wrong. When you walk out of the mine holding your diamonds in your hand, the rest of the world may try to convince you they are rocks. Don’t listen. You should never chase awesome with someone else’s definition.
Finding your diamonds
Let’s not overcomplicate this.
It’s actually really easy to find your diamonds. They’re hidden in plain sight right on your calendar. In fact, time is the only honest indication of what really matters to us.
Intentions are ambitious liars. If you ask your intentions what your diamonds are right now, they’ll tell you whatever it is you want to hear. Instead, we’re going to do a quick interview of your calendar.
In the last twenty-four hours, what did you spend your time doing? In the last week, what received the greatest deposit of your time? Work, probably, but how much did it really get? And where did the rest of your week go?
When I walked out of the diamond mine believing my wife, kids, and writing were my priorities, I had to consult my calendar. What it instantly revealed was that I was spending fifty to sixty hours a week working. It further indicated that my wife and kids were getting almond-thin slivers of my time—something like one-tenth that amount.
My intentions told me what they had always told me: You’re such a great husband! You’re such a great father!
But my calendar told a different story.
Realizing this, guess what I did at my next job? I worked from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Not everybody did. It wasn’t a given. It was something I had to be deliberate about, something I had to protect. But I couldn’t ignore my family and treat them like rocks all the while pretending I was treating them like diamonds.
Want to find the rocks and diamonds in your life? Look at your calendar. Don’t like what you find? Edit it. You own the calendar. It’s your employee. You don’t report to it; it reports to you. Edit it down so that diamonds can remain diamonds.
The problem of multiple passions
My friend Matt is a pastor. One day he and his wife wrote a book. It took longer than one day, but that’s how fast you assume other writers are able to finish their books.
He was excited about the book releasing but had a bit of a dilemma. Churches across the country were asking him to speak about his book, but he couldn’t go because he worked on Sundays. (My dad was a pastor, and if you’re wondering what pastors do the rest of the week, the answer is Frisbee. It’s essentially a one-day-a-week profession. Cush.)
Matt asked me if he should take a six-month sabbatical from the church when the book came out so that he could go speak about it. I told him in a rambling way what I thought and then came home.
I shared the challenge with my wife. I described it as a real pickle. Jenny listened for thirty seconds and then solved the dilemma with a single question.
“Is he trying to be a pastor or an author? If his long-term goal is to be an author who writes books and travels around the country speaking at 100 different churches, then he should take the sabbatical. If his goal is to be a pastor of a church, then he shouldn’t take the sabbatical. He’s already accomplishing his goal. Being away from his own church for six months would be failure.”
Dang it, Jenny and your succinct wisdom!
She was right. The answer to Matt’s dilemma was pretty simple. What did success look like? If he were to go inside the observatory tower that is along the path through Editing, what would he see in the distance?
If there were two paths in the woods—two passions from which he could choose one to follow—which one ended the way he wanted it to end?
From the observatory tower, which path led to the destination he was most excited about?
Those are the same questions I’d ask you if we were having cinnamon dulce lattes.
If you’ve got a pile of possibilities in front of you right now and the idea of editing is overwhelming, step up into the observatory tower and gaze into the land of Harvesting. Which destination feels like success?
Which one feels good, but not great?
Which one feels okay, but not awesome?
When I did this exercise, it forced me to realize that to progress as a copywriter in the company I worked for, I would probably need to become a creative director. I would manage projects and people, which would mean I’d spend less time actually writing. That pretty quickly became a destination I wasn’t eager to arrive at.
If you’ve got ten paths, this simple exercise will help you eliminate a few pretty quickly. Especially the ones you’re just good at. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s the road to awesome for you. You may be an amazing dentist. You are able to fix people’s teeth by just gazing at them with your eyes. But if you were honest, if you didn’t have the practice, if people didn’t constantly tell you how great you are at dentistry, if you hadn’t already invested so much of your life down that path, would you admit, “I don’t love being a dentist”?
That’s what happened to a friend of mine who wrote me this email:
I am 28 years old and recently graduated from dental school. I am currently working as a dentist for a chain of dental offices. This may seem well and good, especially financially, but about halfway through school, I discovered that I really have no passion for the dental profession. I have no hopes and dreams for the future. I don’t want my own practice or anything like that. I am not happy practicing dentistry and basically just tolerate each day. Each day seems to get worse as I move along, and given that I’ve only been doing it for about eight months, I don’t know what will happen a few years from now. . . . Basically, I am listless and bored at work. I just feel like I’m drifting and that I’m missing bigger and better opportunities out there. Don’t get me wrong, I have a very good job—it pays well and I have good benefits—but I’m not happy at all. I have no intentions of quitting at the time, but I would if I didn’t have a massive loan debt from school and a degree that only offers me the luxury of practicing dentistry.
Can you imagine the pressure that guy is feeling? Can you imagine waking up at 28 with $200,000 in student loans and realizing you’re in the wrong career? Everything you’ve worked so hard for, all the decisions you made, all the classes you took, everything you aimed at, brought you to a “How did I get here?” moment—question mark, not exclamation point.
He knew in dental school that the destination on the horizon wasn’t where he wanted to end up. Why didn’t he stop? Why didn’t he quit right then and not become a dentist? The same reason you and I end up in places we never intended to be.
With a thousand small steps.
With a premed class in college. With a loan application one summer. With the first class and second class and third class of dental school. Until one day you wake up and you realize you don’t want to be a dentist or a lawyer or an anything. And fear gets loud in that moment. Fear tells you, “It’s too late.”
It’s too late to change now. You’ve made so many decisions already—it’s too late to fix them or change directions.
“It’s too late to be a good parent.”
“It’s too late to go back to school.”
“It’s too late to start a new profession.”
“It’s too late to be anything but what you already are.”
In those moments, fear and doubt and shame cripple us. We’re so frustrated at ourselves that we give up.
We finish the second half of dental school, double our debt, and give fear a few more years of our lives.
I’m not sure what brought you to this moment. I don’t know what passions you brought into the observatory and saw through that telescope. I don’t know how many obstacles you have in your path. But I do know this. It’s not too late.
It’s never too late to start.
“It’s too late” is a lie that will stay with you if you let it. So don’t.
Look through the telescope and see what awesome really looks like for you. Chances are, it’s closer and a lot more possible than you think.
Does that mean if we’ve accrued some bills or amassed some responsibilities that we’re going to ignore them and just “go for it”? No. Never. That mind-set is a dream killer. There’s nothing awesome about kicking off your dream on a foundation of broken promises and ignored responsibilities.
We’re going to pay off our debts.
We’re going to edit the unnecessary pieces of marble around us and then hustle in the right direction.
We’re going to work harder than we’ve ever worked as we enter the land of Mastering.
If the telescope reveals a definition of awesome we’re not excited about, we’re going to leave that dream in the observatory tower, even if that seems very costly.
That’s the pressure Bill Watterson, the creator of the
Calvin and Hobbes
comic strip, faced years ago. He had tens of millions of dollars on the table if he’d just license
Calvin and Hobbes
for products. A mug here, a greeting card there, a calendar and a pair of boxer shorts—there was no end to the list of products Bill Watterson could have put his work on. It would have guaranteed him a fortune.
So then why didn’t he go the licensing route? I’ll let him explain:
As a practical matter, licensing requires a staff of assistants to do the work. The cartoonist must become a factory foreman, delegating responsibilities and overseeing production of things he does not create. Some cartoonists don’t mind this, but I went into cartooning to draw cartoons, not to run a corporate empire. If I were to undermine my own characters like this, I would have taken the rare privilege of being paid to express my own ideas and given it up to be an ordinary salesman and a hired illustrator.
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Watterson stood in the observatory and saw a harvest he didn’t want. Even with millions of dollars on the line, he walked away from the licensing. The joy of cartooning and the magic of the story he got to tell were worth more than becoming a master at something he had never wanted to do. Was Watterson already wealthy from the comic strip? Without a doubt, but if you read any article about him you see a picture of someone who would have drawn cartoons for free because that was his awesome. And when presented with an offer to trade it in for what many would call success, he passed. May we all love whatever it is we do that much.
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Still too many passions?
Hopefully you left a handful of passions in the observatory tower. You like knitting, but running your own knitting store doesn’t sound very fun. That one is just going to be a hobby, not your road to awesome.
But chances are, you still have a number of things you think could be awesome. That’s okay. I had twenty-six different 1099s in 2010 as I walked through the land of Learning. In addition to my full-time job, I tried my hand at fourteen different freelance writing projects. From video scripts to PowerPoint presentations and everything in between. I experimented in the land of Learning. That’s what learning is all about, trying a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.
But we’re Editing now, and maybe you don’t know which passions matter the most to you. People often tell me that. “I have multiple passions. I don’t know which one to start on first.” I think that’s an awesome problem to have. There are too many things you enjoy in life. Boom! Congratulations. There is a danger with that, though, because people with too many passions tend to do something nobody ever says out loud. Out loud they say, “I have too many passions. I don’t know which one to start on first.” But what they really mean is, “I have too many passions. So I won’t start on any.” Then they put their dreams back on the shelf. For another week. Or another month. Or another decade.
If that’s you—if you have too many passions and don’t know which one to focus on—here’s what you do:
Pick one and start.
Don’t try to prioritize your list. I used to tell people to do this, and it was a mistake on my part. I would say, “Make a list of all your passions, from most interesting to least interesting. Then start working on the one you are most interested in.”
This seemed like good advice, but it’s not. What would inevitably happen is that the prioritization lesson would become another point of paralysis. I’d say fifty times, “As you make your list, don’t try to make it perfect. Go through it quickly. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” And then people would take their handful of passions and immediately get stuck trying to come up with a perfect list.
The list is miserable. It’s a crippling waste of time. Instead, just pick one and start.
If they’re all passions, then what is the worst thing that can happen? You spend time doing something you enjoy and realize along the way it’s not what you enjoy the most?
How is that a fail?
That’s called an edit. If you wait to create a perfect prioritized list or just simply wait because you don’t know where to start, you are guaranteed zero percent joy because you’ve worked on zero percent of your passions. I’m horrible at math, but even I know some is better than none.
Start on something. Edit it if it’s not your awesome. Move on to the next thing.
The seesaw
One day my friend Preston came into my office and said, “Do you want to be a writer who speaks or a speaker who writes?”
At first when he asked me that, it felt like some sort of Buddhist riddle. Like maybe he was going to hit me with a bamboo staff if I didn’t answer fast enough. Fortunately he didn’t, because it took me six months to understand what he meant.
Was I going to be a writer who writes books and then travels to events to speak about them? Or was I going to be a speaker who writes speeches? If I was going to be a writer, I had to ask myself,
What do writers do?
This one is going to go quickly so I’ll repeat it, but . . . they write. Let me say that again because it’s jaw-dropping: they write.
Writers write, right? That’s their first priority. They don’t book a million speeches throughout the year that prevent them from writing.
They block off their calendars and write.