Authors: Jon Acuff
Myth #1: You shouldn’t guide until you feel ready.
One day I met a visual artist who wanted to work on some new projects. He told me, “I want to help people in Christian filmmaking, but I don’t have any experience in that.” I asked him what he was currently doing. He replied, “I did a lot of the motion graphics for the
Transformer
movies and currently own a design company with about fifty employees.” I tried to suppress a small giggle. “
Transformers
? You worked on the motion graphics for
Transformers
and don’t feel like you’ve got the experience you need to break into the motion graphic scene within Christian filmmaking?”
I immediately called my friend Scott, who runs the ECHO conference in Dallas, and within a matter of days my new friend Sean was scheduled to lead a breakout. Why didn’t Sean see how qualified and ready he was to guide other people? Because no one can see that about themselves. The talent we have the hardest time recognizing is our own. As author Derek Sivers says, the way you look at the world is “obvious to you” but often “amazing to others.”
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You can’t see it because you’ve seen it for years, if not your whole life. But for other people? Your awesome is fresh and new and worthy of being shared. Don’t feel ready to guide? That’s okay; nobody does. Guide anyway.
Myth #2: You should only share your successes.
Sometimes I fail. And when I do, I say these four words: “This too shall post.” It used to be “This too shall pass,” but then I learned something about sharing my failures with readers of my blog posts. People can relate to them. Chances are, they’ve had their own. Chances are, they thought they were the only ones. They can also learn from your experience. If you share honestly about your own failures, people can often avoid having the same thing happen to them. If you stepped in a hole and it hurt, it helps if you tell other people not to step in that same hole.
The temptation, of course, is to only share your success. From the stage as a public speaker or from the mailbox as a neighbor, it’s much more comfortable to tell a story in which you made a wise decision. You look a little like a good guy. You win. Fight this temptation. We’re full-up on guiders who only recount mistakes they made twenty years ago. We’ve got enough people on Facebook telling us about their perfect lives. We’ve got more celebrities crafting fictional reality lives than we can possibly stand. What we’re missing is people who, when they fail, say, “This too shall post.”
We need people who, instead of dramatizing the failure or glamorizing it or over-sharing in inappropriate ways, simply ask the question, “What did I learn in this experience that may help someone else?” You don’t need a blog to “post” either. A post for you may mean coffee with a friend or a phone call to a family member. We all have the chance to post every day in a million different ways.
Now, don’t take this to the extreme and believe the lie that “failure is the best way to learn.” Guiding involves sharing both your failures
and
your successes. Success is actually the best way to learn. It’s also the most fun way to learn. The problem is that you have to ask, “How?” after you succeed. How did that work? How did that succeed? How was that such a win? Success you improve on and share with other people is always a better teacher than failure.
Can failure teach great lessons? Without a doubt. But don’t buy the romanticized version of failure our culture loves to shop around. Losing your only client is horrible. Losing your house is horrible. Getting fired is horrible. You’ll definitely learn some lessons from those experiences, but having a successful business, having a successful job, and having a host of successful clients will teach you far more than failure ever will—if you’ll stop to ask how and then share those results with the people you guide.
Myth #3: Everyone should guide the exact same way.
For the last three years, I’ve had a monthly phone call with my friend Mike Foster. He’s a few years ahead of me on the road to awesome and generously shares his wisdom in our regular hour-long phone calls. Around year two, I started to feel like maybe I needed to pay that forward. Maybe I needed to set up a few phone call meetings with guys younger than me and guide in the same way Mike guides me. My wife, who is smarter and half an inch taller than me, asked me the question I’ve asked you a lot in this book: “Why?”
“Why, do you think because he’s guided you that way that you need to guide someone else that exact same way? You hate the phone. You’re not that great at keeping appointments. Your ability to hold down a long-term work commitment over a period of years is spotty at best. Your strength is helping lots of people start. Play to that—don’t just replicate what Mike is good at if you’re not good at it too.”
She was right. Sometimes in our desire to pay it forward, we think we have to pay it forward in the exact same way we received it. But Guiding, like every other land in this book, is not one-size-fits-all. Maybe a long-term, weekly coffee mentorship is how you need to guide someone. Maybe a blog where you share ideas you’ve learned is how you need to guide. Maybe a monthly discussion with a group of six guys is how you should guide. There are a million ways you can guide. Find the one that works best for you and then do that.
A lot.
How to guide
The desire to help others is a natural by-product of being awesome. Being great at guiding is unfortunately not. Like every other land, Guiding takes discipline and wisdom.
If you’ve wrestled your way through the myths and feel ready to help someone else down their path to awesome, there are three simple ways to start.
Ask a question.
The greatest way to ensure you fail at something new is to attempt to be an expert at it on day one. While we see the absurdity of that approach in physical activities like running—no one wakes up one day having never run and completes a marathon that afternoon—in other areas, we often believe we must go zero to 100 mph in a matter of seconds.
That’s what happens with guiding. We’ve never guided someone else before, and yet we feel the need to one day. We look up the definition of
mentoring
and then think to ourselves,
I just need to find someone who needs my advice and encouragement. We’ll have coffee every morning for the next sixty years, form the kind of friendship that makes you want to jump on a grenade for each other, and then we’ll be buried next to each other in the cemetery. He ain’t heavy; h
e’s
my brother!
The weight of that task feels overwhelming, as it should, so we give up before we even begin.
Not you though. Not me either. We’re not going to go into Guiding like that. All we’re going to do is ask one person one question.
Someone once told me that the secret to being humble is remembering that it’s not all about you. “It’s” meaning the world, the day, the conversation at the copier machine at work, the traffic jam you’re stuck in, etc.
My friend said that in order to really believe it’s not all about you, you have to believe that everyone is more interesting than you. The person who cleans your room at a hotel, the guy next to you in traffic, the businessman who sits next to you on a plane. Everyone.
I thought this was an impossible feat and, honestly, kind of dumb advice. It sounded like the kind of thing people who are secretly arrogant say when they’re trying to pretend they’re humble.
Everyone
is more interesting than you? Come on. I’ve met some boring people; so have you. How in the world do you see everyone as more interesting than you?
It just seemed silly, even when I heard brilliant minds like Jim Collins talk about this very issue. Once, while seeking wisdom about how to be a better teacher, Jim Collins was told by Stanford professor Jim Gardner, “It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?”
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I still didn’t get it, though.
Then, one night on a plane ride from Denver, it suddenly made sense.
How so? Well, I’ve always got access to me. I’m with me all the time. I can’t get away from me. I’m with me 24/7. But the lady on the plane who teaches special-needs college students, who is flying home to join her twin sister and the rest of her family to welcome her brother home from Iraq where he’s been a fighter pilot? I’ll probably never see her again.
She’s got a really interesting story. And I’ll never, ever get to hear it again unless I ask her a question and then listen to what she’s all about.
Most of the people you bump into on an average day are only going to be there for a second or a minute. And then they’re gone, swept back into the rest of the day. And you’ve only got a moment to hear their stories, a second to pause your busy life long enough to hear about somebody else’s and maybe even contribute to it with a bit of guiding. Your access is incredibly limited. And they are more interesting than you. I promise.
That covers intersections with strangers, but what about the people we see all the time? Coworkers, friends, family members. Why are they so interesting?
Because you already know your stories. You’ve heard them a dozen times. What could they possibly tell you? Well, the coworker who is so sarcastic he’s practically surly—do you know that guy? Is he at your office too? He was at mine. He’s going to cry at lunch when you ask him how he’s doing, because it turns out he’s walking away from the wreckage of a second divorce, and he’s exhausted carrying his story alone. It’s really heavy. And he’d gladly share it with you if you weren’t so focused on thinking it’s all about you.
It’s not.
If you’ll ask people a question, more often than not they’ll tell you a story that will blow you away or make you laugh or cry or a million other things. More often than not, whether it’s a conversation on a plane with a stranger you’ll never see again or a coworker you’ve seen for years, that question you ask will begin a conversation. And guiding always starts with a conversation.
Want to guide? Ask one person one question.
Tie guiding to something you already care about.
For months, my friend Stephen and I tried to get breakfast regularly. We’re both in a similar spot in life right now and could use some mutual guidance. For months we weren’t able to.
Something always came up. Our weeks got too full. It was hard to ever get on a regular schedule, until we tied that moment of guidance to something unexpected—the gym.
Instead of going to breakfast, we decided to work out together. We decided that two to three times a week, we’d meet at the Y at 6:15 a.m. We’d spend forty-five minutes talking, exercising, and hanging out. That may sound like a small change, but the success rate of it has been tremendous.
We’re still the same people with the same busy weeks, but tying guiding to the gym changed everything. Because we both know we need to work out regularly. We didn’t need to eat pancakes regularly. We both were already interested in exercise. And going to the gym two to three times a week is something you can do without getting weird. Eating at Cracker Barrel three times a week with the same person is weird. How much old-timey maple syrup does one person need?
I’m not the only one who does this. My wife goes on ten-mile power walks with her friend Emily a few times a week (I didn’t think this qualified as exercise until I tried it and nearly died). Other people will take an art class together or volunteer at an animal shelter together. If you’re going to be successful at guiding, don’t be afraid to tie it to something else that gives you momentum.
While guiding is a natural consequence of being awesome, let’s not kid ourselves that every morning for the rest of your life you’ll wake up with a spring in your step and a song in your heart about helping others. Some mornings it’s my desire for my pants to not be so tight that the top button pops off and kills somebody. That gets me to the gym, not the desire to guide someone. But once I’m at the gym, I’m always glad Stephen and I both make the effort to help each other along the road to awesome.
Pick your spots carefully.
In the land of Editing, we honed our passions down with laser-like focus. Guiding requires the same level of intentionality, unless you want to feel like a jerk for a few years.
That was my initial experience with helping others. After my first book came out, people online started to ask me questions about how to write a book. That’s fun, but I approached guiding too casually.
I wasn’t deliberate about the places I provided guidance. I tried to help people everywhere and ended up not succeeding anywhere.
I couldn’t respond to all the questions on Twitter, and that made me feel like a jerk.
I couldn’t respond to all the questions on my blog, and that made me feel like a jerk.
I couldn’t respond to all the emails I got, and that made me feel like a jerk.
Turns out, the best way to always miss your target is to make sure you never establish one.
You will be swamped with opportunities to guide other people. Maybe not at first. It took months and months for a stranger to ask me to grab coffee so he could “pick my brain.” But it will happen, and I want you to be ready with a few boundaries so you can do the greatest good possible.
I made my boundaries simple.
I don’t give long, detailed advice on Twitter, because it’s not a long, detailed medium. When someone sends me a tweet that says, “Can you please tell me how to write a book?” it’s impossible to successfully fulfill that request via a 140-character reply. Trying, and then feeling bad about the inevitable failure, is a waste of time and energy.
I don’t go to breakfast every day, or lunch or coffee. I once heard a pastor say, “I’d love to go to coffee with every one of you, but then I’d never have time to do all the things that make you want to have coffee with me in the first place. Like studying, reading, researching, and helping the people I’ve committed to.” Instead, I have a lunch window open every Friday for strangers who ask for guidance. That’s a potential lunch with fifty-two new people a year. Instead of it floating around on the calendar and tangling me up with scheduling headaches, I know exactly when I’m available.