B00CHVIVMY EBOK (13 page)

Be led. Be taught. Remain a learner.

Don’t ever avoid opportunities to gain more experience and wisdom just because you’re “mastering” something. Learning from those before you is a dying art that can catapult you ahead in the land of Mastering.

Now, do the reps

I am racing the sun, but I will not win.

I am desperate for it to go down, but since it’s 3:00 p.m. and I’m about to take the stage, it’s probably not going to happen. I suppose if the sunset were at three in the afternoon, we’d have bigger issues than me bombing at a music festival, but I’m pretty selfish, so I wasn’t thinking about the ramifications of a solar apocalypse at that moment.

I was thinking about the smattering of high schoolers who were expecting to see a rapper named Lecrae and instead got me. You’ve never seen such disappointed teenagers in your life.

It was the first and only music festival I’ve ever spoken at. I knew the second we booked it that it was going to be tough, but I didn’t know how tough.

Part of the challenge was that it was in the middle of the day. At least if it had been night, there would’ve been a spotlight visually guiding people to the stage. The other part of the challenge was a punk band playing on another stage at the same time. People liked punk in droves when they realized the headlining rapper was not coming out until after some guy speaking.

The music festival was fantastic for music, but I’m not a band. And when you speak, you can always find the person in the crowd who is most disappointed with whatever it is you’re saying. Out of a crowd of a thousand, you’ll have hater-seeking vision for the person asleep, frowning, or shaking his head back and forth as a means of shot-blocking your words back to the stage.

I saw him pretty quickly too. He was about 18 years old and leaning against the security barrier at the front of the stage. I tried to look away, but I kept seeing him in the crowd over and over again, staring and willing me off the stage with a scowl that would have rivaled my own at that age. Mid-speech, I realized the problem; he was a twin. I wasn’t just seeing him. I was seeing him and his identical twin brother. I can only assume that they were like Xamot and Tomax from
GI Joe
because it was clear they were able to feel each other’s pain.

It was a brutal event until I realized something really simple during the middle of my speech. I was doing a rep.

That’s how you reach awesome.

You do reps.

How do you become a master?

You do reps.

If you want to get better at something, you have to do the reps. That’s true for almost every part of life.

Want to be great friends with someone? Do the reps. Go to coffee. Help them move. Stop by on random Tuesday nights. Stack up enough reps until you have the relationship you want. We tend to think it works the other way around. That if we want to have a great friendship, we need to do great moments together. And those are important, but those are few and far between. Every coffee you have with a close friend will not be a moment you journal about later. “Dear diary, Jill cried at coffee today again. We shared our hearts over huckleberry scones and solved several of our problems through the power of conversation and transparency.”

More often than not, you’ll just have coffee. You’ll just talk and laugh. You’ll just do a rep.

And one day you’ll look up and realize you have an awesome friendship.

Dreams work the same way. You don’t get to pick and choose a life of home-run moments. You get to swing the bat, a lot. Some of them are going to connect; some of them won’t. But each one takes you one step closer to awesome.

That’s why I do reps.

That’s why I wrote millions of words on my blog.

That’s why some weeks of the year, I’ll speak six different times on six different days to six different audiences with six different messages.

That’s why I had twenty-six 1099s in 2010.

I had a full-time job and I liked it. But I wanted to get better at freelance writing. I needed to do some reps.

We often think talent is the key to awesome. But if you pull the curtain back on most of the people we’d call “geniuses,” what you find is an incredible amount of hard work. Take Mozart: “By the time he was 28 years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.”

Yay! Claw hands! That sounds great, Jon. Good sell on the value of hard work.

The point isn’t to acquire claw hands—it’s to add hustle to your talent. As author Twyla Tharp says, “Mozart was hardly some naïve prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let the music flow from his fingertips. It’s a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.”
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If you’re going to make your way through the land of Mastering, go to rehab, volunteer, take a part-time job, and above all, do the reps.

Some things are hobbies, and that’s okay

If everything goes according to plan, I will never participate in a triathlon. I will never find myself stripping off a wetsuit upon emerging from a lake or ocean and jumping on a bike with a complicated name and a poorly padded seat. I will never end a grueling day of bike riding with a half marathon or full marathon. I’ve had that goal of not being in a triathlon for years and so far have been able to accomplish it.

I’m happy that a lot of my friends love triathlons. For some people, that type of exercise is part of their awesome, but it’s not part of mine. Though I like running, it’s not something I’m trying to master. It’s not something I want to put through the five stages of awesome. It’s a hobby, and that’s okay.

You’ll have some hobbies too—things that you have fun doing but don’t really want to master. Hopefully in the land of Mastering a few come to mind. “Do I really care enough about ___________ to do the reps or volunteer or get a part-time job?” Maybe you don’t. Maybe what looked like part of your awesome at the beginning of the map has actually revealed itself to be a hobby.

That’s not failure. That’s success, because now you know where to put that particular activity. Give up any guilt you have about your inability to start a quilting business. Maybe quilting is just for you. It’s a small hobby that brings you big happiness. And recognizing that, you can now focus on the things in your life that you want to take beyond a hobby. The things you want to master and harvest and guide.

The things that define your awesome.

Ignore the bullhorns, for now

The road through Mastering is littered with bullhorns. Don’t pick them up. They’re only going to distract you from one of the other keys to mastering your passion. If you grab the bullhorn too soon, you won’t learn that to be awesome you need to spend more time practicing your dream than you do promoting your dream.

The Internet has made it ridiculously easy to promote your dream, your craft, your passion, your whatever. But that ease comes with a consequence.

The temptation is to spend more time on promoting what you’re doing instead of practicing what you’re doing. Mastering your skills, putting in the hours to become great, working hard while no one is watching. Promoting makes people think you’re already a master. Practicing is what actually makes you a master. There’s a huge difference between the two.

Want to stand out from the clutter of social media and be awesome? Spend ten hours practicing your dream for every one hour you spend promoting it.

Want to be awesome even faster? Make that ratio 100 to 1.

There will be haters

Someone is going to hate what you do. That’s not a maybe. That’s a definite. And I don’t mean dislike. I mean hate. With energy and vitriol and a passion that surprises you.

Haters are inevitable. Your response is up for grabs.

The first thing we need to do as we navigate this section of the map is draw a clear distinction between hate and constructive criticism.

Hate leads to a wound.

Constructive criticism leads to an improvement.

Hate’s motive is to hurt.

Constructive criticism’s motive is to help.

Hate is an anchor.

Constructive criticism is a gift.

If you confuse the two, you’ll spend far too much time trying to find a vitamin in the poison of hate, and you’ll miss the benefit of constructive criticism because you interpret it as an attack.

To further distinguish the two, I want you to ask two quick questions the next time your dream gets hated on. You have to ask them immediately before the hate has time to settle in your head and confuse you into thinking it’s constructive criticism.

Question #1: Who said it?

Was it a close friend or a complete stranger? A business colleague or someone driving by you on the highway? It sounds ridiculous that you’d need to ask this question, but you do. Most of us receive all hate as if we’re receiving it from someone who knows us deeply. In the heat of the moment, we act as if this person can see deep into our soul and their words carry truth.

Case in point, a few months ago I got some hate mail. Instead of stopping to ask, “Who said it?” I immediately wrote a long response. I wrestled with it emotionally for hours, never once answering this first question. If I had, I would have quickly realized a stranger said it. Someone who has never met me, had a conversation with me, Skyped with me, or had any interaction with me. So why was I giving his words such power?

When someone leaves a hateful comment on your blog or tweets about you, that’s the equivalent of someone driving by your house and yelling, “I hate your yard! Your heart must be horrible too!” You’d never listen to that person in real life. Don’t listen online.

Question #2: Why did they say it?

What was their motive? Were they exposing a blind spot in my life so that I might improve something I was doing? Or are they mad about something completely different and just looking to lash out at anyone who gets in their path?

Pausing to ask why gives you time to reflect before you act. I once worked with a guy who was really angry and combative. It would have been easy to label the way he acted as hate. But when I stopped to ask, “Why does he say the things he says?” I learned his wife had breast cancer. That wasn’t hate bubbling up; that was hurt. That was fear and hopelessness. His hate didn’t have anything to do with me and, instead, had everything to do with a terrible situation he was facing. Once I knew that, he became invisible as a hater and visible as a guy who needed a friend.

Asking those two questions is all it takes to make 99 percent of all haters invisible.

Who?

Why?

Six simple letters.

Next time you get hate, make sure it’s not valuable criticism from someone who is trying to help you get better. Once you’ve identified who said it and why they said it, chances are you can stop worrying about it and brush the dirt off your shoulder.

Critic’s math

We’ve already removed 99 percent of all hate. There’s only 1 percent left. We’re so efficient! Only there’s a problem: 1 percent is all it takes to steer you off the path to awesome and right back to average.

It’s a math issue, really, but it starts with how we handle compliments. Most people can’t stand to get a compliment. The first thing we do is try to deny it. We reject it quickly and say things like:

“Oh, that was nothing.”

“It’s a lot easier than it looks.”

“It wasn’t that hard.”

We discount compliments and make sure they don’t have a second to touch down on the road of awesome we’re traveling. We ignore them and keep walking.

But when someone insults us or hates on what we’re doing, we have a very different reaction. Suddenly, we stop everything else we’re working on and focus on the hate.

We give it our best attention. We give it our best focus. We give it our best energy.

This person
gets
us. They really know what they are talking about. We need to laser right in on this and spend some time on what they said. In those moments, we tend to believe in critic’s math. And it’s a simple formula, because I’m not good at math. Here’s what it is:

1 insult + 1,000 compliments = 1 insult

Did you catch it?

In the face of 1,000 compliments and only one insult, you and I will only have eyes for the negative.

That sounds silly, but I promise you it is true. I’ve seen it hundreds of times across the country. When I consult with businesses, you would be amazed at how much time and money they spend trying to fix one unhappy customer’s experience. They will hold SWAT team meetings to address Steve-in-Detroit’s problem while at the same time ignoring the 1,000 fans who love what their business does.

And I am not immune to this either. At the time I wrote this book, my third book,
Quitter
, had 160 five-star reviews on Amazon and three one-star reviews. Can you guess which ones I have memorized?

Critic’s math is something everyone struggles with, even people who are proven experts in their field. Larry David is the cocreator of
Seinfeld
, one of the most successful sitcoms in the history of television. He also has a hit show on HBO called
Curb Your Enthusiasm
. One night while waiting for a flight, I grabbed a copy of
Rolling Stone
because he was on the cover. To say that he is successful by any measurement would be an understatement.

As I sat there on the plane, I got a peek at how Larry David, one of the most accomplished men in television today, handles critic’s math.

One day, David had a homecoming in New York. He lives in LA now to film his show. While he was in town he went to a Yankees game. During the middle of the game the stadium managers found out he was in the crowd. As a tribute, they showed his picture on the big screen and played the theme song to his show over the loudspeakers. What a moment! The author of the article captures it perfectly: “An entire stadium of fans stood and cheered for the hopeless case from Brooklyn. It should have been a life-defining moment, the redemptive final scene in the biopic.”