Authors: Jon Acuff
Alas, in the midst of that tremendous win, critic’s math reared its ugly head. At the end of the night, while Larry was walking to his car, a stranger drove by and yelled, “Larry, you suck!”
Can you guess who Larry thought about on the ride home? Can you guess who he talked about? Can you guess who dominated that day for him?
The stranger who told him he sucked.
2
Critic’s math made an entire stadium disappear. Critic’s math made 50,000 people invisible. David Blaine can’t pull that off. David Copperfield can’t do that trick. Criss Angel is not capable of that.
That’s how powerful critic’s math is.
Larry spent the ride back from the Bronx obsessing over that moment, running it over and over in his mind. It was as if the other 50,000 people, the ones who loved him, didn’t exist. “Who’s that guy? What was that?” he asked. “Who would do that? Why would you say something like that?”
The tricky thing about critic’s math is:
It doesn’t instantly go away with success.
If right now you’re thinking,
If I sell a certain number of books or get a job promotion, I won’t worry so much about what critics think
, you’re wrong. If you had a hard time with critic’s math with ten followers on Twitter, you’ll still have a hard time with 1 million followers. Don’t chase success as a way to beat critic’s math. You’ll only hurt yourself.
Every time you believe critic’s math, you make it more powerful.
Fear and doubt are like muscles. Every time you believe a lie, it gets easier to believe the next time.
Knowing that it’s poison, how do we beat it?
Let’s look to the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, for a brilliant suggestion.
Years ago, there was a woman who wrote so many letters of complaint to Southwest that she became nicknamed “Pen Pal” around the corporate headquarters. After every flight, she mailed in a complaint. She hated that there was no first class. She wanted a meal. She wanted to have assigned seats. Letter after letter hit Southwest. The company prided themselves on answering every correspondence from customers, but nothing they said would satisfy this customer.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s desk with a note: “This one’s yours.”
Now, the majority of CEOs are going to read that letter and send that offended customer a stack of free drink coupons. Ease the customer’s pain with a gift. Instead, Herb Kelleher took sixty seconds out of his day and wrote the woman back a four-word message. They are four words I want you to keep in mind when critic’s math gets loud. He wrote, “We will miss you.”
3
Your dream will not be for everyone. Your road to awesome is not all-inclusive. There are going to be some haters who lob rocks at you from deep in the land of Mastering. The temptation will be to stop along your journey and engage with them. To turn their rocks into an altar and offer up something that will ease their frustration with you. You will be tempted to try to win them back to your side. To explain your case to them. Ignore this temptation. In the face of critic’s math, be like Herb. Say, “We will miss you,” and then keep moving so your words are true as you leave the haters behind you.
The last stop in the land of Mastering
In the summer of 2010, I got empty.
Sensing the imminent arrival of burnout, I spent ten days turning everything off. I didn’t do anything on social media. But do you know what that felt like? Every day of 2003. And also every day of the first thirty years of my life. (The pats on the back we give ourselves for not using social media for brief moments of time are ridiculous.)
The biggest thing I did was turn off my ideas. For years, I believed I was an idea guy, and coming up with new ideas was how I relaxed on vacation. Ideas were a big part of my awesome, and it only seemed right that I would take them on vacation with me. I’d use time off to brainstorm, focus on new plans for the future, read a ton of self-help or business books, and get ahead on any projects I was working on. Then I’d return from vacation completely exhausted and wonder why.
But this time I spent those ten days reading nothing but fiction. I put down my journals and my iPhone. I built sandcastles on the beach with my kids. I had long conversations with my wife. I tried not to write horrible poetry about ocean waves.
It was awesome, and for the first time in years I came home empty, but full of life.
A week later I told my friend Al Andrews about the experience. He smiled and said, “Wow! That’s great! Now, how do you do that next Tuesday? How do you do that next month without a beach? How do you make sure you don’t kill yourself for fifty weeks of the year with the hope that you can make it to those two weeks of vacation?”
I told him I didn’t know.
Without missing a beat, he said, “You need to build your own Central Park.”
I had no idea what that meant, so he explained the idea.
“Well,” he said, “if you fly over New York City, Central Park kind of looks like this wasted green space. There in the heart of this bustling city is this lump of grass. Imagine all the buildings and commerce and innovation we could put on that space! But New York City knows that, without Central Park, it would combust. It would implode and collapse on itself without that space, that sanctuary. The problem is that most people have put buildings on top of every part of their lives. They have no Central Park in their day or their week or their month. That’s how you’ve been living, Jon. It’s time to knock down some buildings. You need to cultivate your own Central Park.”
That conversation and challenge changed my life. I started building my own Central Park. I started going to a botanical garden in town. I started taking regular fiction breaks. I started running more. I started to knock down some buildings.
You are going to work harder than you ever have on the road to awesome. You are going to do reps and volunteer and edit and learn and a million other things. But make sure that in the midst of this adventure you don’t confuse “building up your dream” with “burning out your dream.” Don’t be afraid to take a break. To walk away from what you’re doing to catch your breath. To knock down a few buildings. That’s one more tension you’ll have to embrace on the road to awesome—the need to both hustle and rest. It’s an important one because there’s too much fun to be had in the land of Harvesting for us to burn out before we even get there.
And when we do get there, let’s make sure we’re careful about one more thing—our expectations. If we’re not honest about them, we’ll wreck the land of Harvesting, like I wrecked my honeymoon.
Weeks before we flew to Jamaica as newlyweds, Jenny told me a story that shaped the entire week for me. A girl she worked with went to a similar Sandals resort. While at the all-inclusive vacation destination, she and her husband met another couple enjoying their honeymoon. Over a period of sun-soaked Caribbean days, the two couples became great friends. They dined together, snorkeled together, and played shuffleboard together. When the trip was over, they returned to the States not just with new marriages, but with new best friends.
Years later they still got together to celebrate their friendship.
My fiancee said that to me in passing, but in the moment I started to grow an expectation in my head: “Jenny and I will make lifelong best friends on our honeymoon.”
That only sounds stupid because it was, but in my defense, it’s difficult to make “couple friends.” It’s hard to find another couple you click with on everything. Just when you think you’ve found someone both husband and wife love hanging out with, they tell you they own a ferret farm they call “Ferretopia.” Recognizing that challenge even before I got married, I decided to look for a shortcut. And lo and behold, one was presented to me in the form of my honeymoon.
Who knew that a honeymoon could be such a treasure trove of friendships?
In the weeks leading up to the honeymoon, my expectation that we would meet our best friends in Jamaica began to grow.
I didn’t tell anyone; I just quietly watered it with hope and foolishness. By the time we landed in Jamaica, my expectation was no longer small and adorable—it was a monster of massive proportions. As we sat down on the bus to the resort, I started eyeballing the other passengers.
Who here looks like they could be our lifelong couple friends? Those two over there look pretty interesting . . . h
e’s
got cool sunglasses on . . . she seems pretty normal. Based on how sh
e’s
sitting on a bus. It’s an admittedly small sample group of information, but it’s all I have to work with right now.
I continued to plot and plan this way during the entire drive. That night, when we got to the hotel, I asked my wife if there was anyone she wanted to invite to dinner.
She seemed a little taken back by this question, like maybe she hadn’t been doing best-friend recon. She seemed to think,
Yes. You. My husband of twenty-four hours. That’s who I would like to go to dinner with.
Good to know. Apparently I was the only one committed to this friendship mission. The rest of the week I kept trying to initiate lifelong friendship conversations with anyone who made eye contact with me. It wasn’t easy. A lot of the people there seemed to be distracted by their new spouses or something.
Finally recognizing that we’d already missed our shot at the two coolest couples there that week—they paired off on day two, much to my poolside chagrin—I asked a different couple to dinner with us.
We had absolutely nothing in common with them. They were both from small towns and had never been to the big city before. When their car got broken into in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, the wife assumed a bomb had been planted in it. People in cities are constantly planting bombs in used Accords on the fifth floor of parking garages. She wouldn’t get in the car until the husband had inspected it. What sort of bomb-inspecting skills he possessed was never fully discussed, but I assume they boiled down to just looking for big red sticks of dynamite with a slowly burning fuse.
I knew in the first five minutes that we were in for a long night and probably weren’t going to call each other after we got back from our honeymoons, but it didn’t matter.
I was desperate. My expectation was a monster that had mutated into a demand. And demands will suck the beauty out of anything if you let them grow, even honeymoons.
On the flight home, sensing my dejected spirit, my brand-new wife asked me what was wrong. I confessed my great disappointment that we had never managed to make new best friends during our honeymoon. She quietly looked down at her left hand and tried to see if she could slide the ring off without causing a scene.
She couldn’t. The diamond I bought her was so large and heavy she could barely lift her arm, never mind her finger. We landed. I got over it. But something was lost.
The joy of that week was tarnished. As silly as that whole story is, my expectation came with a cost. I missed some of that week because I was lost inside my expectation. I had so overbuilt my expectation that it was impossible for life to deliver. I had created this stock photography version of my honeymoon, and the second it didn’t meet that, I started to feel like I had failed my honeymoon.
The same thing will happen to you in the land of Harvesting if you’re not careful.
When we realize that expectations can cause damage, our natural response is to think, Stupid expectations. I’ll fix this by never having any
!
But that doesn’t work. It’s impossible to have zero expectations. Try as you might, you are going to carry at least a thread of expectation into every part of your life.
The other reason it doesn’t work is that all too often it becomes a protectionist move. You think, I’ll go in with low expectations. If they’re met or exceeded, then great! I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If they’re not? I won’t be disappointed. And on the surface that sounds okay, but over time, that approach tends to morph into you thinking, If I get my hope up and it doesn’t come true, I’ll be hurt. So I’ll protect myself from being hurt by not having any hope or expectations. I’ll hurt myself first before the situation has a chance to.
Maybe you’re wired differently than I am. Maybe you can compare your expectations to the experience and not feel like at least a little bit of a failure, but I have my doubts.
I think you need crazy expectations. You can’t dream without creating expectations, and they can be an encouraging source of motivation. Expectations of the future can inspire you to reach for things that feel impossible in the present. As you get ready to open your business, write your book, finish your college degree, or any number of things, I want you to take huge, wild expectations into that. I want you to throw expectation after expectation into the furnace of your life until there is a bonfire of excitement that rivals the sun in intensity.
But after expectation has played its role, after you’ve squeezed every last drop of encouragement out of it, I want you to then let it go as you leave the land of Mastering and enter the land of Harvesting.
There are going to be some crops you harvest that wildly exceed your expectations. There will be surprises—both good and bad—that you could not have possibly foreseen when you started down the road to awesome. We agreed at the beginning of this book that you can’t control the finish line; you can only control the starting line. Well, now we’re toward the end of our journey. What you’ve sown and grown will now come to fruition. Don’t ruin it with unmet expectations you refuse to let go of in the face of the fun things that actually do happen. And don’t act like it doesn’t matter and use apathy as a protective shield. The things you harvest do matter—that’s the joy of doing work that matters. Enjoy the harvest.
7: Harvesting
7
Harvesting
Just inside the border
of the land of Harvesting, there is an exit. The path is wide, the road is easy, and you will have barely taken a step into Harvesting before you see it plain as day. And if you take it now, if you explore it at this point, you will undo all the awesome you’ve set into motion thus far.
What is the exit? Turns out it’s a simple secret, and it holds the answer to more than you think.
How to be an awesome public speaker and just about everything else too
Want to know the secret to being an awesome public speaker? Want to know how to book more gigs, make more money, and do more repeat business? Want to know how to play in the NFL past your prime? Want to know how to be awesome at just about everything else too? It’s simple.
Don’t be a jerk.
If you want to take a moment and scribble that on a note you hang on the fridge, I’ll wait before unpacking it.
That gem may not be new knowledge to you, but it was to me. I learned it backstage at dozens of speaking events.
I thought the only fuel that drove awesome was talent. I thought if you really wanted to be awesome at something, you just had to stockpile enough talent or skill in any given industry or career. But then I started to have conversations with clients who booked me to speak.
I’d go speak at the event, step off stage, and end up in quick conversations on the way back to the airport. The host of the event wouldn’t talk much about what I said from stage. They wouldn’t comment on the content of my speech. They wouldn’t point out an idea I shared. Instead, they all said the same thing: “Thanks for being so nice!”
Turns out, there’s a large population of jerk speakers and jerk musicians traveling about the country, making my job incredibly easy. They berate the staff at events, refuse to do Q&A sessions with conference attendees, and hide in their hotels instead of taking photos or shaking hands or break dancing. Sometimes they even refuse to speak until the room is full. If that’s you, let me simply say, thank you.
What a gift you have given me and every other public speaker on the planet who is not a jerk. You’ve created such a low bar of kindness that a toddler could jump over it with the greatest of ease.
When people compliment me for being nice, they are usually not remarking on some grand show of kindness I have performed from stage. I have not sent them bouquets of flowers. I have not purchased them a vehicle or carved a tree stump that was struck by lightning into the shape of their college’s mascot.
I just haven’t been a jerk.
I wish it were more difficult than that, but it’s not.
If you want to harvest more awesome, don’t take the jerkdome exit, which you’ll see a thousand times in the land of Harvesting. Stay the course so that when you arrive in the land of Guiding, there will actually be someone to guide.
People don’t like working with jerks. They don’t listen to jerks. People don’t do favors for jerks. Because people don’t want jerks to win.
That’s something Terrell Owens discovered the hard way. He’s one of the greatest wide receivers in the history of the NFL. He’s second in career receiving yards only to Jerry Rice. He’s caught more than 1,000 touchdowns, something only eight other people can claim. He is a six-time Pro Bowler. And on the day I wrote this page, he was released from the Allen Wranglers—not an NFL franchise—an arena football team.
How did he end up there?
As a
GQ
profile reported, it’s “hard to live down the reputation as a team poison.” And NFL executives have long memories. “It’s not his knee that’s the problem; it’s his attitude,” said one executive from one of the better teams, who didn’t want to be named. The ratio that once made it worth it for owners to sign him—two parts genius to two parts trouble—has shifted now that he’s not quite as fast and his body is not as reliable. “With
T. O.,
no matter how brilliant he can be on the field, the dark side is always lurking. You don’t know which T. O. you’re going to get, and no one is comfortable risking that.”
1
Whether you’re in the NFL or a cubicle, the same truth about being a jerk holds: wild talent and a bad attitude eventually lose to mild talent and a good attitude.
And the sad thing is that the “eventually” tends to occur in the land of Harvesting. These should be the years when Terrell Owens is harvesting the rewards of a long, productive career—statistically one of the best careers for a wide receiver in NFL history. He should be enjoying the fruits of his labor and soon heading to the land of Guiding to help other young receivers be awesome too. Or he could be on television, talking about his years in the NFL and offering expert insight. There are dozens and dozens of sports shows he could be on right now, harvesting his career.
Instead, he’s getting fired from the Allen Wranglers.
Don’t be a jerk. Avoid those exits with everything you’ve got.
Your fifteen minutes could cost you a lifetime
If you manage to walk down the road to awesome without becoming a jerk, then you’ll successfully avoid the largest exit back to average. But you’re not out of the woods yet. There’s one more massive exit hidden in every land—but most prominently in Harvesting. It’s called “fame.”
In 1968, Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
2
At the time, that must have seemed like a ludicrous thought, but the Internet has proven Warhol a prophet.
With the click of a button, you’ve got access to the entire world. And with a single tweet or viral video, you can have your fifteen—or more—minutes of fame. You may not think your pursuit of awesome will ever generate any kind of fame for you, but you’d be surprised. Even if you’ve got a niche passion, there are people around the world who share that exact same passion. And if you decide to master it and harvest it, you will gain some degree of fame, no matter how small. The challenge is that a little fame can do a lot of damage.
The problem is that the minute you have a single fan or follower, people start to build an expectation of who you are. You’re the funny guy or fashion-forward mom or sports enthusiast, and with that comes an expectation of how each of those people should act. You’re smart and may enjoy the attention, so you begin playing up to that expectation. Now there’s a divide starting to happen, and it’s subtle, but it’s there. You’re now two people—the person you really are and the person the public sees. You start to maintain a public image, which is exhausting. Instead of actually continuing down the road to awesome, you build a façade of what it looks like to walk down the road of awesome. And the progress you’ve made takes a detour back to average as you get stuck chasing fame, not more awesome.
I almost didn’t put this section in the book because the reality is that we won’t all be famous. That’s mathematically impossible. But we all have the tools to have a little bit of fame, and that’s enough to wreck many a dream.
One time I ate a cheeseburger at a small restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee. When I got home, I saw on Twitter that the restaurant had tweeted about me being there. I’m not going to lie; that felt good. But do you know what happened the next time I went out to eat? I expected another tweet.
I started thinking,
Who is noticing that I’m in here? Who is watching me right now? I can’t wait to check Twitter once I’m done with lunch to see who witnessed my greatness!
I was able to generate that amount of distraction and insanity from a single tweet by a hamburger joint. Who knows what will happen if whatever bit of awesome you’re harvesting lands you in the newspaper? Or if you end up on TV or at the top of a blogging empire?
Don’t get me wrong; fame can be a wonderful harvest, and you can use it for good. Ask Bono about that. But don’t let it be the exit that leads you right back to average.
Boooooo
Buzzkill! This is the land of Harvesting! The hard work has been done. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the fruit of all our labors! It’s time to coast.
Only it’s not. Ask a farmer someday if the harvest season is easy. And don’t confuse Harvesting with retirement. Don’t confuse Harvesting with vacation. Don’t confuse Harvesting with the end of the story. That’d be like running a marathon and then lying down fifty feet from the finish line for a nap.
I tried that last year, and it didn’t go very well for me.
How to lose 99 percent of your progress
The problem with the entitlement ladder in the land of Harvesting is that you don’t usually know you’re on one until you fall off it. You don’t realize how high you are and how disconnected from reality you are until you crash back down to earth. Or in my case, lose 99 percent of your Facebook fans.
At some point during 2011, I started climbing an entitlement ladder. The problem was that I started to get lazy because of my job.
I have been given a very unique opportunity. In 2010, Dave Ramsey essentially said, “I dare you to be awesome.” Then he hired me and said, “Go for it.” That was an intimidating proposition in some ways. It was way easier to complain and moan on the sidelines about what I could do if I weren’t too busy. “I’d write so many books and speak at so many places and chase my dream so much if I only had the time.” I could make bold statements like this because I had a day job that owned forty hours of my week.
Then Dave hired me and threw away the governor belt. He brought me into a 300-person company and said, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
At which point I got lazy.
It snuck up on me; I swear it did. I didn’t even see that ladder. But before I knew it, I was a few rungs up, coasting the day away, shouting down to all who could hear: “Look at me! I’m Jon Acuff! I work for Dave Ramsey!”
I started to believe that other people in the building would take care of things for me. My attitude became, “I’m an
author
, and I can only sully my hands with adjectives and perhaps the en dash or em dash.” I started ignoring some important responsibilities. I quietly acted like
I
had a team of 300 people. Like maybe
I
had built the company.
But I hadn’t. I’m a team member. I’m a small, small cog in a very big machine that is named Dave Ramsey, not Jon Acuff. And though I’d taken a few steps into Harvesting and was seeing opportunities crop up that I had set in motion four years earlier, I started to coast. And in the process, I lost 99 percent of my Facebook fans.
When my book
Stuff Christians Like
came out, I started a
Stuff Christians Like
group on Facebook. I built the group to around 10,000 people. I hustled on it, participated in it, and worked hard to keep it going.
Then I got on the entitlement ladder and forgot it existed.
Surely someone else at Dave Ramsey’s headquarters can monitor that. I’m Jon Acuff! People want my photo! I autograph Kindles. Not just books, Kindles!
A year later, after talking with a friend who reminded me that Facebook is roughly the size of the planet and only dumb people aren’t actively using it to grow their projects, I checked out the Stuff Christians Like group.
The top of the page said: “Your group has been migrated.”
Hooray!
I thought.
I don’t know what that means, but it sounds great!
Butterflies migrate to Mexico because it’s nice and warm. Canada Geese, the most pretentious birds in the world, migrate to Tennessee because arctic foxes eat them on the tundra. Migration is always a good thing.
The Facebook message continued: “Now that your group has been upgraded to the new groups format, information from your old group is still available, including group posts and discussions.” Fantastic so far!
“Admins from the old group will continue as members.” Man, Zuckerberg, you’ve thought of everything! Thanks for that convenience.
“Only members who asked to stay in the group will continue as members.”
Wait—what? What was that last part? What’s that you say? Hmmm, that’s a weird one that doesn’t really sound like a benefit. But how bad could it be?
So I checked the number of members who stayed with me. And the answer was, “wicked bad.”
The group originally had 10,000 members.
It now had 23.
I’m not great at math, but I’m almost positive that equates to a 99 percent loss. There were 10,000, and now there are 23. Karen, Leo, Nicole—I could name them all and not really take up a lot of space in this book.
The group was gone. While I climbed an entitlement ladder, one field that had taken me years to harvest died. I am certain Facebook gave me notifications. I am sure they warned me and gave me ample opportunity to keep the group going at the same size. But I was too high in the sky to be bothered with it.
And so I lost 9,977 people from my 10,000-person group.
This may not mean much to you. Maybe you’ve got a million people in your Facebook group. Or maybe you’ve never heard of Facebook and bought this book on what we call “paper.” Doesn’t matter a whole lot. This isn’t about social media. This is about fields that will disappear if you coast right now.
If you’re sticking with the road to awesome, you’re going to work the hardest you’ve ever worked in the land of Harvesting.
The harvest rooster
One morning I woke up at 4:00 a.m. in Indianapolis.
I wasn’t there to work out for the Colts, but that’s a pretty good assumption given the cannon I call my right arm.
I was in a hotel, waking up after speaking the night before in Grant County, Indiana. Grant County is sixty miles and seven circles away from Indianapolis. Most maps don’t factor in the circles, but they should if you get the same cab I did. The driver and I could see the hotel glowing in the midnight darkness. We could almost touch it, we were so close to that Holiday Inn Express. But the driver couldn’t find the entrance. So we circled the building a few times like a shark assessing its prey.
We finally found the driveway, and I checked in at 12:30 a.m. Roughly three hours later I was up for a flight to San Antonio to speak.