Authors: Jon Acuff
Success was new and uncharted and ill-fitting to me. I found myself often wanting to slip right back to average where I’d spent all those years before. It was more like home to me than awesome. If you spend too long anywhere, it becomes what you are used to.
For some of you, this will not make any sense. I am glad for that. Perhaps you know the truth of who you really are, and failure is not an identity you ever accepted. But for others, you are feeling a little homesick in the land of Harvesting.
Sometimes we’re afraid of success because if one area of our lives gets awesome, it will force us to deal with the area we’re really afraid of. We will look for any distraction from the issue we really don’t want to deal with. If we can wreck our success, we’ll still have something to focus on that can save us from seeing what’s really hurting us. It can save us from starting again on something else.
There’s a powerful example of this very issue in the movie
Buck
. Buck is a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the man
The Horse Whisperer
is loosely based on. As a child, Buck and his brother were rodeo stars with a hard-driving father. Celebrated around the nation for their roping skills, Buck and his brother seemed to have the perfect life. Off camera, though, their father beat them mercilessly. Eventually, a coach at school saw the bruises on Buck and his brother and promised them he’d make sure no one would ever do that to them again. Years later Buck became famous in horse circles for his unbelievable way to train a horse without ever resorting to violence.
It’s an amazing documentary full of great truth, but the most interesting moment is when a woman brings an incredibly dangerous horse to Buck to train. The stallion is out of control, kicking violently, and eventually bites Buck’s coworker in the head, causing a deep gash.
Buck talks with the owner and asks her about the stallion. She says that he is one of eighteen stallions that live on her farm. Incredulous that the woman would have more than one stallion on her property, Buck cuts right to the chase:
You’re nuts for having that many studs running together, lady, I’m telling you that. Most people don’t need studs, and they don’t need eighteen of them. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. And if you’ve got a lot going on in your life, probably a lot of it is a lot bigger story than this horse. You ought to be a SEAL team member or something as much risk as you like to take. Why don’t you learn how to enjoy your life? Life is too short. This horse tells me quite a bit about you. This is just an amplified situation of what is. Maybe there’s some things for you to learn about you.
She breaks down, and you get the sense that this was never about the horse. This was about some other hurt. Some part of her life that was so raw and unsettled that the only way to ignore it was to make a different part of life even crazier. If she had sold those stallions, established a successful farm, and put out that particular fire in her house, she’d be forced to admit there was an elephant in the room. Later in the film, she cries in her interview and says, “He’s right. I mean, he’s right. I . . . you know? He’s right. It’s not just the horse. He’s right about my life.”
6
The chaos of the horses was the perfect hiding place from some other part of her life. Success with the stallions—essentially an impossibility—would have uncovered her hiding place.
That’s the same reason I threw a tantrum over a hyphen.
My book
Quitter
was about to come out. Speaking engagements were picking up. Opportunities were multiplying, and it felt like I was walking into a season of Harvesting. I instinctually tried to pump the brakes and throw a monkey wrench into the process. I started freaking out about whether or not the cover should have a hyphen in the word
best-selling
. I took pictures of books at airports and texted them to my team members. I emailed people about my concerns and tried to dig my heels in for a long, drawn-out battle over the hyphen.
I didn’t want the book to come out. I was afraid of the success and bent on trying to slow things down. And rather than deal with my issues that the book release was exposing—secretly believing I was meant to be a failure—I clung with everything I had to a hyphen.
Fortunately, no one took my bait. They refused to believe my protests that the hyphen decision would significantly impact the number of books we sold. The book came out. And I had to face some things I’d been running from for years.
It was easier to hide when I was working at a job I didn’t love and not chasing my awesome. I could say things like, “Someday I’ll write a book. Someday I’ll speak. Someday I’ll pursue all these dreams.” Until that day came, I could ignore all the other issues in my life. I had a target for my distraction. But once I had written a book and done a few speaking gigs and experienced a little bit of success, there was suddenly space in my life. In the land of Harvesting, you’ll find that there’s room and an invitation to keep exploring who you are and who you were meant to be. That can be scary. But don’t run from it. Don’t fear the harvest. And don’t fight it. Lean into it and know that in many ways, your adventure in awesome is just beginning. That’s because every harvest ushers in a new start.
8: Guiding
8
Guiding
A friend once told me
that every great story has the same four parts:
Innocence
Innocence lost
Coping with the loss
Resolution
He then proceeded to show me how every successful movie follows that pattern. Take
Toy Story 3,
for instance. In the first scene, the toys are being played with—their definition of innocence. Then their owner, Andy, goes to college, and they find themselves discarded in a trash bag—innocence lost. Then they make it to a day care, but there’s a villain there they must cope with. The movie eventually concludes with the toys living with a new little kid who will play with them like Andy used to do—resolution.
I think that breakdown works perfectly for movies and sitcoms because eventually the credits roll. The lights come back on, the audience goes home, and the story is over. But ours isn’t. Unless they are reading this book out loud at your graveside service, your story has many scenes left. But if you’re not careful, if you think fear is done trying to quietly seduce you back to average, you’ll get stuck firmly in the land of Guiding. You’ll buy the lie that one trip down the road to awesome was enough. You may even think that one harvest was all you are capable of. You’d be wrong.
How to turn a headline into an epitaph
As I’ve already mentioned, in November 2009, the readers of my blog helped raise $60,000 to build two kindergartens in Vietnam.
My favorite part of that story is how quickly they raised the first $30,000. If you remember, 2009 wasn’t the greatest year for our economy. Houses were selling for a nickel, the mortgage industry was imploding, and unemployment was ramping up. Into that landscape we dared attempt to raise an initial $30,000 for a village no one had heard of, in a country most of us would never have the chance to visit.
We thought the project would take weeks to complete. Do you know how long it took? Eighteen hours! The entire $30,000 was raised in less than a day. If you didn’t read my blog that Monday, you missed it. (That’s why we decided to raised another $30,000 and build a second kindergarten.)
It was a fun moment that made for a great headline in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
: “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 hours.”
But three years later I had turned that headline into an epitaph on a gravestone in the land of Guiding.
I didn’t intend to get stuck in the land of Guiding, but nobody ever warned me that the story pattern my friend shared is, in real life, incomplete. Nobody told me that after “Resolution” comes “Start a new story.”
So instead of starting again, I got really comfortable in the land of Guiding. I told the story about our fundraiser dozens of times to dozens of audiences. I knew just which parts to drag out dramatically. I had just the right amount of jokes peppered throughout so it never got too heavy. And then I’d ask the crowd, “Do you know how long it took us to raise the money?” Then I’d pause perfectly and let the tension build before yelling, “Eighteen hours!” (Only once did someone in the crowd actually answer my question by guessing, “Three hours!” before I could reveal the real number. Me then saying, “Eighteen hours” after his impossibly optimistic guess of three hours was a bit of a letdown.)
It was a wonderful story, and with each passing week and month and year, it became firmly ingrained into who I thought I was.
I didn’t even notice that was happening until it came time to tell a new story. My wife and I wanted to do another project. We’d done small ones in the years between but had never jumped back into another big project. One night I told my wife that I was ready. I was ready to start again. I was ready to raise $25,000!
When I told her that, it got a little quiet in the living room. I think she was mentally doing the math in her head.
Okay, first project raised $60,000. Next project, we’re going to really stretch ourselves and raise $25,000!
After a few seconds, she spoke up. In her succinct style that has caused many a reader to say, “When will your wife write a book already?” she said to me, “I dare you to lose some face.”
Oh, Bryan Adams, love does cut like a knife! She had me. I didn’t decide to raise $25,000 because that’s what I felt called to do or that’s the number the charity organization needed. I picked $25,000 because I was afraid I’d fail to raise as much as last time and in the process kill the headline I’d turned into a myth and, ultimately, my epitaph. I picked $25,000 because I thought we would easily eclipse that and I’d get a new headline: “Blogger raises $25,000 in 4 hours!” Hooray for me! Can we pause here for a second and review the depths of my ridiculousness? I was basing this new project to build a hospital in Vietnam on its ability to protect my ego. I don’t know what you did today that was dastardly, but surely it’s not as bad as that. At the bare minimum, you should feel better about your own life while reading this book.
Realizing what I was doing with the $25,000 project, my wife and I decided to regroup and figure out new ways we could partner with organizations to do even bigger projects in the future.
How did I get stuck in the land of Guiding, though? How did I take eighteen months to learn, edit, master, and harvest an idea like building an online community that raises money, only to fall right back into average when it was all said and done?
Fear and doubt.
Though we’ve punched those enemies in the face a thousand times throughout our journey, they refuse to give us a free pass in any land, especially the last one.
But at least they are consistent; at least we know what they are going to tell us in the land of Guiding. At least we won’t be surprised when they attempt to argue both sides of the coin.
The starting cycle
My friend John Crist is a comedian. He’s toured internationally, opened up for some big names, and has a lot of the pieces necessary for a long career in place. But he still bombs. He still has nights where the laughs are few and the heckles are plentiful. One night in the middle of his set, he told the crowd, “I care about the environment; that’s why the chain saw I use to cut down so many trees is solar-powered.” A woman in the crowd stopped the entire show by launching into a loud monologue about the impossibility of a solar-powered chain saw. Turns out she came from a family of loggers.
As you watch John lose the crowd on the video of that night, his face seems to say, “Really? Of all the impossible scenarios I’ve shared tonight in the form of jokes, it’s the solar-powered chain saw that is going to wreck this moment?”
How do you prepare for the possibility of a lumberjack’s aggressive daughter in the audience? You don’t. So on some nights, John bombs. That’s part of comedy, and when we talked about it one day on the phone, I realized it was part of Guiding too.
John told me that the best part of comedy was that he didn’t have to carry around the failures for that long. I asked him what he meant. He explained:
A failure would hurt a lot if I were only performing once a month or once every other month. There’d be a thirty- to sixty-day window for me to carry around that failure. I’d sit with it for all those weeks and it’d be really heavy. But with comedy, if I fail during the 7:00 p.m. show, I only have to carry it for an hour until the 8:00 p.m. show. It doesn’t have time to define me when I start again so quickly.
John learned that if he can shorten his starting cycle, failures don’t have the time to define him. At the end of the night, what happened at 7:00 p.m. doesn’t hold a whole lot of weight when he performed successfully at 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. He starts so often that the shadow of one failure looks tiny in the light of all the new opportunities for success.
The same principle applies with success. If you don’t start again, if you don’t share what you’ve learned with other travelers and head back to the land of Learning with a fresh start, yesterday’s successes will start to define your today and tomorrow. Instead of just celebrating them, which you should do, you’ll start to protect them—to manicure the myth. And you’ll be afraid to start over for fear of losing your successful identity. That’s why I got stuck in the land of Guiding. I didn’t start again quickly enough because I was fearful of losing my successful identity.
That’s the brilliance of fear and doubt. If your first stroll down the road to awesome didn’t generate the results you expected, they will tell you, “See, we told you this whole thing was a waste of time. You failed! Average is where you belong.”
On the other hand, if you do experience some success and make it to the land of Guiding, fear and doubt will whisper, “Don’t leave. What if this was just a lucky break? What if your new next adventure isn’t as successful as this one? What if you can’t maintain this momentum? Don’t try again.”
That’s what happened to another friend of mine. She signed a two-book publishing deal. She made it to the land of Guiding and even helped me with some advice when I was getting started. But she never made it back out herself. Her first book came out in 1995. She told me a wonderful idea for the second book in 2001. It’s now more than a decade later, and there is no second book in sight.
The true tragedy of a “one-hit wonder” isn’t that someone releases one big song and then never has another song that is popular. They’re still making music in that scenario; they just didn’t sell a lot of copies. They’re still living out of their definition of awesome. They’re still sharing their gift.
The real tragedy of a one-hit wonder is when someone succeeds once and then never tries again.
No matter your circumstances, if you want to be more awesome, you’ve got to start again. That begins in the land of Guiding when you start helping others down the paths they’re on. It continues when you return to the land of Learning with something new of your own to start. Though it may look large at first, the gap between the land of Guiding and the land of Learning is surprisingly small.
The borderless lands beyond
“I’ve got a challenge I need your help with.”
That was the email that brought me down to Dave Ramsey’s office seventy-two hours before his new book tour kicked off. He hadn’t written a new book in seven years. He would visit more than twenty cities in thirty days. He would fly around the country and speak to tens of thousands of people. Our entire company was coiled tightly, like a spring ready for the massive launch.
And the challenge Dave had in that moment had nothing to do with the book.
“The reason we do all of this is for the people out there who need hope. During the book tour, I’d love to hear everyone’s story and spend time with them, but if I do that, I won’t be able to serve the people at the back of the line. With 2,000 people per event, how do I let everyone there know that their story matters to us?”
On the edge of a project years in the making, when a lot of leaders would be asking, “How do I get these folks through the line faster?” Dave was asking, “How do I serve them better?” He was asking, “How do I make sure that the woman in Ohio, who just lost her house and is in tears, knows that we’re here to help her?”
This wasn’t something he was doing for the stage or a camera or any sort of publicity. This was him and me alone in his office, talking about the final land on the road to awesome—Guiding.
The secret that Dave knows and the one that took me years to understand is this: helping other people better their lives is way more fun than obsessing about bettering your own.
Awesome always goes viral.
Joy is contagious.
When you find something you love doing, you can’t help but want to tell other people how to find something they love doing too. When the memory fog of average has cleared from your head and the true availability of awesome has been revealed, you want everyone to know. That is the progression of awesome 100 percent of the time.
No one ever uses their new lease on life to make sure other people’s lives are more miserable. Ebenezer Scrooge sprinted through the snowy town when he was given a second chance on life. In
It’s a Wonderful Life
, George Bailey ran through the streets when he was given a second chance at life. If the saying “Hurt people hurt people” is true—and I believe it is—then the opposite is true as well. “Helped people help people.”
You may not be a teacher. You may not think you’re a leader. You may have been selfish your entire life leading up to your first step on the road to awesome (I was). But upon enjoying the fruits of your first harvest and then crossing into the land of Guiding, you’ll start to feel the rumble of the question, “How do I help other people do this?”
To answer that question, you’ll first have to put to bed three Guiding myths. That phrase sounds a little like the name of a soap opera that combines the issues of a modern dynasty based in New Jersey with the problems of the ancient Greeks in years gone by. Guiding Myths: Where Socrates Meets Seacaucus. Guiding, fortunately, will not be that dramatic, and in most cases, it tends to sneak up on you. Though you may not have known it, you’ve been guiding since the moment you took your first step on the road to awesome. Because all it takes to guide is to be one step ahead of someone else.
When you were in the land of Learning, friends who were still stuck on average were watching you. You guided them even if not on purpose. When you were in the land of Editing, family members who were behind you in the land of Learning were monitoring your progress. Some were being inspired by your progress. When you were in Mastering . . . I think you know where I’m going with this. We’ve got five lands—this could take forever.
I personally don’t have a great track record when it comes to guiding. My low point was probably when I got caught shoplifting on the way to a church youth group leader’s meeting in the ninth grade (I had a smidge of what you might call “hypocrisy” in my life). That phone call from the police station was not a fun one for me or my father, the pastor. Since then, though, I have learned how to move beyond the three myths that tend to cripple most people in the land of Guiding.