Temporary failure is all the rage. All the cool kids have done it:
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team for lack of skill.
• Steven Spielberg, a high school dropout, was rejected from film school three times.
• Thomas Edison, who was dubbed too stupid to learn anything by a teacher, tried more than nine thousand experiments before successfully creating the light bulb.
• Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Company, was turned down by Toyota for an engineering position so he started his own damn company.
• Beethoven’s music teacher told him he was talentless, and more specifically, was hopeless at composing. Beethoven turned a deaf ear. (I know, so bad. Sorry.)
• Fred Smith wrote a paper while at Yale about his big idea for an overnight delivery service. He got a C. He went on to create FedEx anyway.
The only failure is quitting. Everything else is just gathering information.
There’s no big mystery to this stuff: If you want something badly enough and decide that you will get it, you will. You’ve done it before—you’ve lost the weight, gotten the job, bought the house, quit the nasty habit, gotten in shape, asked someone out, splurged on the front row tickets, grown out your bangs—you just need to remember that you can do it with anything in your life,
even the things that you presently think are out of your reach.
There are plenty of people out there in the world living the kind of life you only dream about living, many of whom are far less fabulous and talented than you are. They key to their success is that they decided to go for it, they stopped listening to their tired old excuses, changed their lousy habits, and got the fuck on the fuck.
Here’s how you can, too:
1. WANT IT BAD
You need to have a ten-ton gorilla of desire behind your decision or else you’ll wimp out the second things get hard. It’s like people who get hypnotized to quit smoking when they really don’t want to quit, or who try to lose weight when they’re more excited by pizza than being able to look down and see their feet. It never works. A few months ago I dragged my ass to yoga class for a solid week even though I just so, so, so did not feel like doing it. I paid my money, sat on my mat, and was surprised to find my hand raised in the air when the instructor asked if anyone had any injuries she should know about. I then heard myself explaining that I’d just gotten the cast off my broken elbow and should really take it easy. I am an adult. I am very busy. I spent money on that class and then lied so I didn’t have to participate. (I
did
have a cast, but it had come off about eight months earlier.) I spent the majority of Yoga Week quietly napping on my mat and conjuring up my best “wincing in pain” face in case she was looking at me whilst I was half-assing Down Dog. It was ridiculous.
If you’re going to push through major obstacles to reach your goal, you can’t just want to want to; you need to be in a full-on tizzy of excitement about what it is you’re going after and hold on to it like a pit bull. In order to do this you need to have the audacity to be honest about what you really want to do, not what you
should
do, believe it’s available to you regardless of any evidence otherwise, and go for it.
2. GET GOOD AT IT
To decide means literally
to cut off
. No wonder so many people are totally freaked out by it! The terror around making the wrong decision can be so overwhelming to some people that they develop the habit of
A) Waffling back and forth, paralyzed by self-doubt and terror, finally eeking out a “decision” that they then proceed to change over and over and over again B) Making decisions hastily, without thinking or feeling into them, their main goal being to escape the discomfort and get the damn thing over with already or C) Being so afraid that if they pick one thing, they’ll miss out on another, so they either choose to do nothing or try to do everything, which are both excellent ways to miss out on all of it. They basically decide to never decide because they don’t want to make the wrong decision. Good times!
Deciding is freedom. Indecision is torture.
Indecision is one of the most popular tricks for staying stuck within the boundaries of what’s safe and familiar. Which is why a common trait of successful people is that they make decisions quickly and change them slowly. And by quickly I don’t mean that you must know exactly what to do the moment a decision presents itself (although there are those people who do), but rather that you immediately face the damn thing and start working through your decision-making process, whatever that may look like: sleeping on it, making a list of the pros and cons, feeling into it, etc.
If you’re a waffler, or prefer to avoid the process altogether, a great thing to do is practice on the little things to build up your decision-making muscle. When eating at restaurants, make yourself pick something off the menu in under thirty seconds. Once you choose, you are unauthorized to change your mind or your order. Give yourself twenty minutes to go online and research the best garlic press and then make the purchase. Pick things off the shelves at the supermarket in under ten seconds. Knock yourself out of the habit of being a deer stuck in the
headlights by demanding you wake up and choose something.
If you’re someone who needs to sleep on it or mull it around a bit, give yourself a deadline. Don’t leave it open until you decide and risk waking up forty years later, finally sure of what to do, long after the opportunity has passed you by. Pay attention to how much time you need to decide (overnight, a week, a month) and demand of yourself that you figure it out by then.
If you’re wired for making instant decisions, practice tuning into your intuition and fully trusting what it says (regardless of what your brain may be screaming about). Get quiet, listen for and feel into the answer, and practice acting on your first, solid impulse.
And whoever you are, puhleeze, stop saying how pathetic you are at making decisions. Erase the phrase “I don’t know,” from your vocabulary and replace it with “I’ll know what to do soon enough.” Decide to become the person who makes quick, smart decisions and you will.
3. ELIMINATE THE NEGOTIATION PROCESS
When I decided to quit smoking, if I even toyed with thoughts like “Well, what harm will one itty-bitty drag do?” I was screwed. Our decisions must be watertight, because excuses will seep through any little cracks in our resolve and before we know it, we’ll be on our asses.
Decisions are not up for negotiation.
The old you, the one who has not yet decided to kick ass, is in the past. Stay present and do not, even for a second, look backward or entertain any ideas of straying from your decision. Think only of the new you.
The whole point of deciding is to stop wasting time and to move forward,
not
to spend time figuring out how you can wiggle out of your decision! It helped me to think of it this way: I’m not going to go home and negotiate about whether or not I’m going to smoke a cigarette just as I’m not going to go home and negotiate about whether or not to snort some horse tranquilizers. I don’t negotiate about snorting horse tranquilizers because I’m not a horse-tranquilizer snorter. Now that I don’t smoke, I’m not going to negotiate about smoking because
I don’t smoke.
4. STICK LIKE GLUE
I used to write for an entrepreneurial magazine where I got to interview all these hugely successful business owners. Whenever I asked them what the secret to their success was, the overwhelming majority answered: Tenacity. Be the last person standing. Wear down your obstacles and excuses and fears and doubts until they’re finally like, “You? Again? Jesus H. Christ, fine, here you go, now get out of my face.”
Birthing your dreams is like. . . . giving birth. Conceiving the idea is the fun part (hopefully), then you go through insane amounts of fear and excitement and dreaming and planning and vomiting and growing and thinking you’re crazy and thinking you’re awesome and stretching and shape shifting until you’re practically unrecognizable to everyone, even your own self. Along the way you clean up your puke and massage your aching back and apologize to all the people whose heads your ripped of in a hormonal killing spree, but you stay the course because you
know
this baby of yours is going to be
the bomb
. Then, finally, just when you can see a light at the end of the tunnel, labor starts. Your innards twist and strangle and force you to stumble around hunched over in the shape of the letter “C” while you breathe and
pray and curse and just when you think it can’t get any more out-of-your-mind painful,
a giant baby head squeezes out of a tiny hole in your body.
Then. A full-blown miracle appears.
In order to change your life and start living a new one that you’ve never lived before, your faith in miracles, and yourself, must be greater than your fear. However easy or rough your birth process is, you have to be willing to fall down, get up, look stupid, cry, laugh, make a mess, clean it up and not stop until you get there. No matter what.
5. LOVE YOURSELF
You can do anything.
I worked for a menial’s hire
Only to learn, dismayed
That any wage I asked of Life
Life would have willingly paid.
—Anonymous
Many years ago, Los Angeles was hit by a relentless rainstorm the likes of which I’d never seen in my life. It rained for what seemed like forty days and forty nights, nonstop and hard. Rivers overflowed. Houses slid down hillsides. Bad hair wreaked chaos throughout the most image-conscious city in the world.
This was the kind of rain you didn’t want to be driving around in in anything, let alone a twenty-three-year-old junker convertible with a leaky roof, no grill, a back window that was duct-taped shut and a front tire that went flat every three days.
I’d been in the market for a new car for a long time and couldn’t find anything I really loved or thought I could afford, but as I sat there
in a puddle, driving to the supermarket with a trash bag under my ass and an old T-shirt slammed in the door to keep the leaking to a minimum, it occurred to me that perhaps I should speed up my search.
At the time, I didn’t have a whole lot of money, but I had my own business that I was trying to grow. The problem was I felt stuck in that place where even though I wanted bigger and better things for myself, monetarily, as well as feeling more mighty and self-actualized in general, I was worried that if I raised my prices I’d lose all my clients. And my self-respect. Or that I’d get called out as a money-grubbing pig. Or a fraud who had no right to charge that much. I was also scared that if I went big and grew my business, I wouldn’t be able to handle it, I’d have to hire tons of people, I’d spend my time doing things I hated, I’d get so busy I’d never get to travel, I’d wither and die trapped behind my computer, fun and freedom skidding away in my rearview mirror never to be seen again blah, blah, blah. I could fill up about four more pages of reasons why I was where I was, but suffice it to say, I was basically playing at the level of someone who drives around in a car like the one I was driving around in.
And the most painful part really was that even though all signs pointed to Broke, Clueless, and Stuck, deep down I knew I could be doing SO much better. Which is why, even though the sound of crickets could be heard echoing throughout my empty bank account, I wandered into the Audi dealership, took the brand new Q5 for a spin and let the sales guy rattle on and on about leather this and premium that. In my head I was thinking, “Do you have any idea who I
am
? I’m just taking a fantasy break before heading over to Honda,” but in my heart I knew better. Way down deep it was about much more than just a damn car.
It was about no longer being the kind of person who takes what she can get, and finally becoming the kind of person who creates exactly what she wants.
It was large, Marge. And because part of me was terrified to grow and part of me wanted to blast out and be huge, and also because I love to drive more than I love to eat, I tortured myself over which car to buy for weeks.
I finally whittled it down to two options:
The Honda CRV, a perfectly excellent little SUV with the following attributes:
• Okay gas mileage
• A sunroof
• Room for friends
• A comfy ride
• A ho-hum stereo
• Reasonably fun to drive
• Decently priced
Or:
The Audi Q5, a stick of butter on four wheels with the following attributes:
• Okay gas mileage
• A sunroof that takes up the entire roof of the car
• Room for friends—big, fat, and tall ones
• Leather seats you could have a sexual relationship with
• A stereo designed by God Himself
• Angels sing when you open the doors
• Sexy, flashy, expensive, pretentious, terrifying
I came very close to buying the Honda, but as I sat there, test-driving it for the tenth time, trying to convince myself that this was the One, I couldn’t shake the nagging truth that I was in love with someone else. Buying the Honda would have been the sensible thing to do, but I knew that adventure, true love, and a whole new way of life awaited me on the other side of my comfort zone.