Authors: Jon Acuff
Realizing that wasn’t enough for a first Christmas gift, I also bought a woodcarving kit. Our wedding invitations had a silhouette of a topiary on them, and my plan was to carve that same design into the door of the nightstand I lovingly crafted.
Tools in hand, I retreated to the dark basement of our 1920s rental house in Arlington, Massachusetts.
For days I worked, so excited to show my wife how much I loved her. So giddy about discovering this new passion. So eager for our grandkids to one day say, “Grandpa Awesome-Jon, tell us the nightstand story again. Tell us!”
Finally, after many a night of sweat and sawdust, I asked my wife to come downstairs. I couldn’t wait for Christmas. The excitement was too much! She came down the basement stairs, and I took her by the hand.
With the flourish of a magician who insists you call him an illusionist, I revealed to her what I had built and ultimately learned: “I suck at woodworking.”
There, next to our washing machine, was the world’s ugliest box. It weighed roughly fourteen pounds and had approximately thirty-seven crooked nails protruding out of it from all angles.
It didn’t look like a Restoration Hardware nightstand.
We laughed for a few minutes. I may have been crying. Then my dad put me in touch with an elderly friend of his who built furniture. He agreed to build the nightstand if I would be his assistant and supply the wood. So one night in early December I packed up all the lumber I had purchased and headed to his shop.
After I unloaded it, he eyeballed it for approximately three seconds and said, “Were you making a boomerang? This is the most warped wood I’ve ever seen in my life. I can’t believe they actually sold you this. Put it back in the car; we’ll use something else.”
I tried to assist by holding down planks or handing him tools. But about fifteen minutes in, he stopped, turned off the machine he was using, and invited me to go home.
Apparently I wasn’t even qualified to hold lumber. I got the heave-ho from the old man because my very presence was making things difficult. He was very kind about it. He told me, “You go home. I’ll build it for you and call you when it is done.”
To this day it sits in our living room, a constant testament not to failure but to the land of Learning.
The way you pass through the land of Learning is that you try a bunch of things. Fear would love for you to try just one, get discouraged, and then march right back to average.
But you won’t. You need to get a jigsaw, some warped wood, and a bunch of nails and head into the shop. You need to tinker and build and break and put back together. It may not look awesome at first. Maybe woodworking isn’t your particular brand of awesome. It wasn’t mine. Neither was painting. But I didn’t know the truth about either until I tried. And learned.
Your path through Learning may be littered with sawdust and chunks of warped wood with dozens of bent nails sticking out of them. And that’s expected. Give yourself the freedom to make some really ugly furniture.
That’s what Learning is all about. I first saw it in my dad.
He’s an adventurous guy. In the 1980s, he started a Southern Baptist Church in Massachusetts, something that was unheard-of at the time.
He had three kids, a young wife, and a pretty decent mustache. But other than that, he didn’t have a whole lot when he moved our family to Ipswich, Massachusetts. After seminary and working at a church, he decided to plant Grace Baptist in Marlboro.
Decades later, when I talked to him about that experience, he laughed with me and shared how he’s always looked at doing new things. Often when you strike out on a new adventure like the dozens you’re exploring in the land of Learning, people will ask you, “Have you ever done that before?” The particulars of the “that” are immaterial. It could be starting a business, going to college, or traveling around the world. And here is how my dad (and now I) answer when life asks us the question, “Have you ever done that before?”
“No, but I’m about to.”
Have you ever been on national television? No, but I’m about to.
Have you ever written a book of poems before? No, but I’m about to.
Have you ever biked across the country for charity? No, but I’m about to.
You say that simple phrase, and then you do it. That’s it. That’s all it takes to beat back that monster called “my first time.”
Do it once and then twice and then thrice and then ten times, until before you know it, you’re out of the land of Learning.
Every journey has a first step. Every dream has a first destination.
The land of Learning is yours. And now it’s about time to move on to your next destination.
The last stop in the land of Learning
I’m almost positive there’s not a chapter in
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
that talks about what to do if your 1-year-old eats a cigarette butt.
That’s what happened to my friends one night while they were waiting for a table at a Mexican restaurant. Sophie, their incredibly fast toddler, was crawling around on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and made her move before anyone could stop her. For the next day, her adorable little baby breath smelled like Pall Malls. I don’t fault my friends; it’s hard to raise babies.
For the first three years you have a kid, you’re not really parenting. You’re protecting. Your job is to basically keep them from hurting themselves with tables and cabinets and toilets and dogs and cats and knives and anything within their surprisingly long wingspan. Which is why baby earrings have never made sense to me.
Why would I attach a shiny, sharp, windpipe-sized object to my child’s head? I have Fort Knox–style drawer locks that make getting a fork out a Criss Angel magic trick. Why would I make sure my baby is always traveling with tiny little weapons inches from her mouth? Why not just dangle a live scorpion from her pacifier? Just to kind of see what happens?
The only thing that makes even less sense than earrings for babies is Bunsen burners for seventh graders. “I’ve got an idea! Let’s give the most awkward, emotionally charged, hormone-intoxicated humans on the planet access to a flame and a never-ending gas source. The guys are all trying to show off in front of the girls; the girls are distracted wondering if the guys are even noticing them; they’ve all grown long arms and legs they barely know how to use. What better time in life to introduce them to the wonder that is the Bunsen burner? What could possibly go wrong?”
But it happens. In the seventh grade you go from building crooked coat-hanger models of the solar system to having ready access to the sun’s source of heat in the science lab.
Which, as it happens, is also your last stop in the land of Learning.
It’s the last building on the road. On a hook by the door hangs a lab jacket and a pair of safety goggles. (That word is impossible to spell correctly once you’ve typed “Google” a million times.)
As you put them on and walk down the hall, you’ll find yourself in a simple laboratory. There are beakers and colorful liquids, tubes and pipes and jars. If you lost your science notebook in the seventh grade and almost flunked the class because Mrs. Murtaugh did not play around when it came time to deliver your semester-long science notebook, hypothetically speaking, you may be a little nervous.
But don’t be. There’s only one thing you have to do in this laboratory.
Experiment.
That’s it. That’s the action you have to embrace in the land of Learning. Because scientists don’t fail; they experiment. They blow things up. They burn things down. They tinker. They smash. They mix. And when an experiment doesn’t go the right way, they don’t call it a failure. They say, “Look what we learned. We thought it would go one way and it went the opposite! What can we take away from this that will help us with our next experiment?” That’s why James Dyson had 5,126 prototypes before completing his industry-changing vacuum cleaner. It’s why Angry Birds, the wildly popular app, was Rovio’s
fifty-second attempt at a game. It’s why WD-40 had thirty-nine other formulas that came before it. Everyone who succeeds learns through experimentation.
4
No matter what fear and doubt tell you, your identity is not at stake with the decisions you make and the actions you take as you learn. You’re a son or a daughter. You’re a father or a mother. You’re a husband or a wife. The Bunsen burner won’t change that. You were you before you walked in the building. You’ll be you when you walk out. Only more awesome.
So fire it up. It’s time to blow some things up and see what the debris can ultimately teach you about yourself and your truest dreams.
5: Editing
5
Editing
How will you know
when you’ve entered the land of Editing?
You won’t.
Moving on.
Wait, that can’t be right.
We want steps. We want a checklist with fourteen boxes we can check off so we know we’re perfectly prepared for what’s next.
You can’t have them. I can’t either. The map doesn’t work that way. And neither does life.
That’s like asking, “When do you become a man?” I really hope it’s not when you learn how to make furniture by hand. In the movie
Red Dawn
, it was when Thomas C. Howell shot a deer and drank its blood. Or in the remake when Zac Effron shot a unicorn and stole its tail (I haven’t seen the remake, but I’m assuming that happens).
The problem with trying to draw up really precise boundaries is that there’s too much overlap between the stages. They bleed into each other more like the colors of a real rainbow and less like the colors on a paint wheel at a hardware store.
Just when you think you’re out of one stage, you’ll find yourself stepping back into the previous one, and vice versa. For instance, I hope even when you’re in the land of Guiding, you won’t stop learning about your specific version of awesome. I hope if you have the chance to help someone else while you’re in the land of Learning you won’t say, “I’d love to lend you a hand, but I haven’t crossed into Guiding yet, sooooo . . .”
The easiest way to tell you’re in the land of Editing and no longer in Learning is with a math metaphor.
Learning is about addition. Editing is about subtraction.
In the land of Editing, you’re going to take the fifteen or fifteen hundred things you learned and see which ones seem to stick to you. What passions, dreams, hopes, and callings will you be carrying deeper into this journey with you? Which will you leave on the side of the road for someone else to pick up? They are not broken or ruined; they are simply not for us. They are part of someone else’s unique definition of awesome.
Editing is the phase of your journey where Michelangelo stands in front of the meticulously selected block of marble. Out of an entire quarry, this is the one he has chosen. And now, with a chisel and a hammer he will remove the pieces that do not belong so that David is finally revealed.
Cue the fog
My friend Tim in Atlanta often misses breakfast meetings.
He doesn’t want to. He is actually one of the kindest, most conscientious people I’ve ever met. He sends handwritten thank-you notes after he eats dinner at our house, the kind of notes that my wife holds up and says, “See? See? This is how to be a gentleman.”
But he has a hard time getting to breakfast on time or at all.
One morning it was because his iPhone battery was dead and its alarm didn’t go off.
Another morning it was because his iPhone was in another room and he didn’t hear it.
Another morning it was because he had the sound turned down too low and he didn’t hear it.
And still another morning it was because . . . well, you get the picture.
The solution to this dilemma is not very difficult. It is not complex. One must not call a brainstorming meeting to hash out possible fixes.
The solution is a $10 alarm clock.
It couldn’t be simpler. It automatically fixes all the issues he’s had with his iPhone alarm. So why didn’t Tim just fix the problem with that simple solution the first time his iPhone clock plan failed?
Because we love complex problems and are terrified of simple solutions.
We tend to add complexities to our challenges because if the problem is simple to solve, then we have to change. And change is scary. So when faced with a challenge we really don’t want to fix, we tend to overcomplicate the issues. We blame our iPhones for not waking us up. What did we even do before we had cell phones with alarm clocks?
That’s the great temptation with the Editing stage. When we’re there, we get a little skittish and fire up the fog machine. Rather than edit our lives, i.e., start to make decisions, we cloud our path and pretend there’s a fog of complexity in the way. How can we possibly be expected to make any progress in this type of weather? It’d be dangerous to even go out on a night like this. Maybe this whole awesome thing was a mistake and we should head back to the familiar road of average.
And so we retreat, back to what we’ve always known. There is a suffocating comfort to it all. Letting go is not easy. The hoarders we see on TV who are stockpiling cats and newspapers have nothing on us emotional hoarders. At least the things they refuse to give up create physical piles before their eyes. They stink and cause a scene that can’t be ignored.
On the other hand, the dreams you’ve always had but refuse to actually work on tend to create hidden piles you don’t have to look at unless you really force yourself to. The hopes you refuse to edit and learn to master don’t rot so tangibly—at least at first. You can skate through decades without a family member knowing, but then one day you’ll run into me on a flight to Baltimore just like the woman we talked about in the first chapter.
That night we met, she was essentially asking me the same thing I had asked myself at the kindergarten in Vietnam.
How did I get here?
How did I get to 72 with so few of my dreams ever acted on?
How did I get here?
You will say those five words in your life. Everyone will. In the middle of a bad relationship or a career you feel is stealing years of your life, you will say, “How did I get here?”
The first time local media interviews you about your wildly successful business or someone wants you to sign the book you wrote, you will say, “How did I get here!”
And the only difference will be the punctuation.
If you choose to be awesome, you’ll aim for a whole lot more exclamation points and a whole lot fewer question marks. Because it’s not a question of whether you’ll say those five words. It’s a question of
how
you’ll say those five words.
Will you be making a declaration like a thunderstruck blogger in the mountains of Vietnam?
Will you be asking a question like a retiree flying over Baltimore and decades of life?
I can’t find the woman I sat next to on that flight. The Internet still has its limits, but if I could, I now know how I would answer her question. I would tell her the same thing I’d tell you.
Start today, regardless of your age. Turn off the fog machine. Acting on the dreams you learned about in your previous destination is not complicated. Walking deeper into the land of Editing is not as complex as fear and doubt are trying to tell you it is. In fact, it starts with just one question.
The biggest question you can ask
One morning some bakery owners asked me to help them figure out their path to awesome.
They didn’t have big, floppy baker hats on or any artisanal breads with them, which was disappointing, but I got over it. They stopped me in the hall of a hotel at a business event. They were married and told me their story:
“We’re sick of Texas. We want seasons again. And hills and trees. We’ve got a little bakery in town that people love. We make different breads and sandwiches. It’s growing and we’ve started to build up a local following. But now we want to move to Idaho. And we don’t know what we should do when we get there. Should we open another bakery? Should we focus on wholesale? Should we do catering? Should we have a little restaurant?”
As we talked, it became clear that they had gone through a long list of questions as they journeyed through the land of Editing:
What would make the most money?
What did the town in Idaho need?
What type of business could they grow the fastest?
What type of business would have the lowest overhead?
Which idea would take the least amount of equipment?
They had run through a laundry list of questions but had failed to ask the most important question there is in the land of Editing. So there in the hall, I said to them, “Well, what gives you the most joy?”
You would have thought I’d thrown a cat at them. For weeks they’d been debating the move to Idaho. They’d worked hard on the challenge of moving. They’d studied and debated. They were attending an exclusive business event for high-performing entrepreneurs when I met them. They’d looked at the problem from every possible angle, except one: joy.
Most of us never get there. We never ask the question, “What gives me the most joy?”
I think some of us feel guilty even saying those words out loud. As if perhaps it’s a selfish thing to think,
What gives me joy?
As if perhaps joy is acceptable for rare moments on the weekend or surprising glimpses of sunsets while on vacation, but it has no real purpose in the real world. It would be selfish to think we could have more joy. (The truth is that real life-change and the joy of being who you are designed to be always results in selflessness, not selfishness.)
Some of my Christian friends would push back at this idea as a matter of principle. We’ve been so overwhelmed with the prosperity gospel, or “name it and claim it,” that we’ve swung the pendulum the other direction and think that perhaps the only way to serve God is to make sure we’re miserable. In the prodigal son parable, a young son demands his inheritance from his father, spends it all in wild living, and then returns home expecting to be turned into a servant by his greatly disappointed father. Instead, he is thrown a wild, lavish, joyful party. Some Christians in that moment would have refused the party, saying, “No, no, this is too much. Is there somewhere I can serve on the farm instead? A foot-washing station perhaps? This party is giving me way too much joy.”
But whether or not you’re a Christian, the point is we have an uncomfortable relationship with joy when it comes to figuring out our lives.
So instead of asking, “What gives me the most joy?” we ask easier questions, like, “What will make me the most money?” That’s not a bad question. It’s a great question to ask eventually; I have no issue with making money. I wrote this book on a laptop I bought with money. I am a fan of money.
But money isn’t a calling. It’s a consequence.
That’s the problem; most of us ask results questions.
What will make money?
What jobs are available in the market right now?
What industry is growing?
What do I have the most experience doing?
Those are great questions, but they’re not the right questions to ask first, because they don’t reveal your awesome.
There are a million things that will make you money but leave you miserable. That’s not awesome.
Your diploma may say “Merchant Marine” and your greatest joy says “Counselor.”
If steel mills are hiring in your town and the job market is tough, that doesn’t mean steel is your awesome.
You may have spent thirty years being a pastor, and your awesome still says, “Let’s be a beekeeper too.”
Those aren’t fictional examples. Those are real people I know who all dared to ask that question, “What gives me the most joy?”
I dare you to ask it too.
Don’t build park benches if you love Frisbee
Usually when you come across two men in the woods with a hammer, it’s a cause for concern, especially if your hands aren’t weapons like mine. But that Saturday afternoon my dad and I didn’t stumble across something dangerous—we stumbled across something awesome.
There, in a small clearing of a large park near our house in Atlanta, were another father and son. The father, who I think had a beard, because I add beards to a lot of people in my memories, was holding a long signpost. His teenage son stood above him, slowly hammering the post into a hole they had dug in the hard soil.
Turns out they weren’t burying a body—but thanks for that automatic assumption, CBS—they were building signs for the Frisbee golf course. The holes were scattered about the park and hard to find if you didn’t know the course well. So one by one, hole by hole, this dynamic duo was marking the way with eighteen different signs.
The father looked up as we walked upon them. Without letting go of the post, he explained, “My son is getting his Eagle Scout badge. This sure beats building another park bench.” Then he grinned a big (bearded?) smile and got back to work.
I’m not an Eagle Scout, but I remember growing up with a kid who was. I remember my mom kind of pitching me the idea by telling me about the project that had pushed him over the edge and sealed the deal with the Eagle Scout badge committee. Guess what he did?
He cleaned and repainted the fire hydrants in my town. Now, it’s possible that he had a deep passion for fire hydrants. Maybe his daddy was a fire hydrant man. His daddy’s daddy was a fire hydrant man. Hydrants were in his blood. But chances are good that he didn’t love them.
Chances are, he thought earning the honor of being an Eagle Scout meant doing something awful. He had to be a martyr and do the thing no “regular” boy would do.
As you edit your life and search through the things you’re passionate about, don’t build a park bench if you secretly love Frisbee. Don’t buy the lie that changing the world has to be a chore or make you miserable. Be brave enough to have fun with whatever you whittle down in your life.
Awesome isn’t a job title
One day at a conference in Oklahoma a gentleman tried to stump me during a Q&A session. From the back of the room, his hand shot up and he asked, “If everyone finds their dream job, who is going to pick up my trash?”
I would have swept his leg Cobra Kai style, but he was old and even from the stage I could tell that his bones were brittle. So instead, I stammered some ridiculous answer, knowing full well that I would come up with the perfect response a few hours later as I was driving alone to the airport. And I did. Here it is:
“You’re confusing awesome with a job title. Awesome is the core of who you are. It’s your heart, your soul, the fabric of what makes you. A job title is just a consequence of you living out of your awesome. I’m not trying to tell people to go out and find new job titles; I’m telling them to escape average.”