B00CHVIVMY EBOK (3 page)

If you’re 33 and haven’t found something you’re really passionate about, you’re still in your 20s. It’s time to start.

If you’re 52 and embarking on a new career because your job (and maybe your entire industry) disappeared, you’ve returned to your 20s. It’s time to start.

If you’re 22, well that one seems really obvious, doesn’t it? You’re literally in your 20s. It’s time to start.

Regardless of your age or station in life, it all comes down to one simple truth: you just have to start.

2: The Start
 

2

The Start

In Chapter 3, we’ll piñata fear,
but for now, please know this—it’s schizophrenic.

Fear tends to argue both sides of the coin, leaving you absolutely no room to stand. Here are two of the complete opposite things it will tell you: “Don’t chase your dream at all.” And, “If you chase your dream, you have to do it all at once.”

Do you see the absurdity of that? “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” fear screams. Then, when you ignore those cries, fear changes its tactic and screams, “Do it all at once! Do it all at once!”

Both of those statements are lies.

As you stand with one foot still on the road to average and one foot on the road to awesome, you’ve got to kill those concerns. Fortunately, there’s a trick that will take care of them both.

Just start.

It’s going to be a tiny start. A small start. A move the size of the frozen yogurt sample cups they give you, even though they know you’re secretly gaming the system and trying to eat your body weight in tiny portions of Cable Car Chocolate before they catch on.

You’re just going to be a Starter.

The starting line is the only line you completely control.

The start is the only moment you’re the boss of.

The finish? Don’t kid yourself. That’s months, if not years, away. You are going to meet dozens of people who are going to impact your finish. You are going to have countless opportunities, experiences, and challenges that dot the map of awesome you’re following. There are cliffs and rivers and jungles you can’t begin to fathom. You are going to stand on a mountaintop that is better than anything you ever dreamed and laugh at the idea that you thought you could plot out your finish.

The start? You own that, son. That’s yours.

Every industry on the planet is littered with examples of this truth. Take the Segway, for instance. Do you remember those? That device was supposed to change the way we walked. One expert said, “If enough people see the machine, you won’t have to convince them to architect cities around it. It’ll just happen.”

That quote is crazy because the expert didn’t say, “Builders will construct houses around it.” They said people will “architect cities around it.” Whole cities will be impacted by this machine. Not homes. Not streets.
Entire cities.
Who made that outlandish claim? A guy named Steve Jobs. If anyone should be able to predict finish lines it’s him, but he couldn’t.
1

The same is true in publishing. Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling book,
The Help
, was rejected sixty times before it got published. Sixty different people said, “This book will never finish well.”
2

They were all wrong.

So was my friend Tim. (Name changed because I’m about to embarrass him.)

He’s an author, and he endorses every book that’s sent his way. He’s probably endorsed forty different books in the last two years. He never said no. Finally he found one that he thought was a little too cheesy. He didn’t want his name on the back cover of that one. So he passed. He turned down one endorsement in 2011. Want to know the name of the book?

Heaven Is for Real
.

It sold more than ten million copies. Sony picked it up to turn into a movie.

He could have had his name advertised to ten million readers who like books similar to the kind he writes. But he didn’t see that finish.

And neither will you.

It’s impossible to accurately predict the finish. Part of the reason it’s so difficult is that the path often radically changes by the time we get to the end. That’s certainly been the case in my own life.

I’m on the news

It was midnight and I was pacing nervously in a New York hotel trying to memorize five names. They were given to me over the phone two hours earlier and if I messed them up in the morning, millions of people would know.

“Don’t go viral for the wrong reasons,” my wife said to me as I left Nashville that morning.

That was my fear—that in five hours when I was on the national news station, I’d throw up in my sleeve or fall over or be so sweaty with anxiety that I’d slide right off the couch. The host would watch me glide down to the floor and be forced to cover my unexpected exit by saying, “I thought Gary Busey was a squirrely interview, but Jon Acuff . . .”

And then there were those five names, the names of companies the producer wanted me to talk about. I was going on the show to talk about five companies that were hiring right then. The only problem was that I’d never heard of the companies.

Fast-forward a few hours, and I was sitting on a couch in makeup with four Kia-sized cameras pointed at me. The hosts were sitting next to me, prettier and handsomer than you can possibly imagine. One of the guys looked like a more attractive Ryan Reynolds. The woman next to me, who was probably a supermodel in her off time, asked me my question: “What companies are hiring right now?”

I rattled off the five names. I stuck it like an Olympic gymnast. Boom! Worst part is over. Then she asked her next question.

“What types of jobs are they hiring for?”

Wait—what? What types of jobs? I don’t know. I didn’t know these companies existed until seven hours ago.

Unfortunately, when you’re on the news and you’re an expert at helping people find their dream job, you can’t say, “No clue. Good ones, I hope. Is it hot in here? Everyone sure is pretty.”

So like a deer caught in high-definition headlights, I blinked a few times and threw out the only thing I could think of: “All types. From entry level to executive.”

Yes! Covered the whole range at once. That’s got to be true, right? At least one of those companies is hiring a janitor, and at least one is hiring someone who wears pleated pants and has a car with a mahogany steering wheel. I was out of the woods, or so I thought. Then the newscaster asked me another question:

“If I don’t live in one of the states that these companies are located in, how do I find out about these jobs?”

Seriously? You are killing me, lady! How do I know? I don’t even know what states these companies are in. Did we go to college together? Is that what this is about? I was a jerk to you in college, and like a bad ABC drama, you’ve slowly planned revenge against me these last fourteen years? Now your plan has finally come to fruition. I’m wearing makeup (something no one tells you that you’ll have to do when you write a book) on national television, and you’re throwing haymakers at me.

All right, let’s do this then.

“Well, the best way to find out information about the jobs that are available is via the company’s corporate website. That’s going to be your best bet.”

And I was out. I was feeling okay about that answer. It wasn’t the greatest; I essentially said, “Google. You’re going to want to Google it up, ma’am.”

Then, as I walked off the set, had the makeup artist remove the layer of base from my face, and stepped into a limousine for the ride back to LaGuardia, I thought to myself,
This is exactly how I thought things would go when I started my blog.

Sitting there in my kitchen, writing that first 200-word post, I knew that four years later I’d be sitting on a couch talking with millions of people. I knew I’d go from doing zero public-speaking gigs in 2007 to speaking to 80,000 people in 2011. I knew I’d write four books and eventually be forced to shave my unibrow into two distinct eyebrows because the camera hates a man with a single brow.

It happened just as exactly as I planned.

Only it didn’t.

Filing paperwork in a cubicle for ten years didn’t give me any indication of the changes that would occur once I started. The finish was unclear. I had no idea where it would all lead. And I’m so glad, because the truth is, the surprises life gives are always better than the things you think you see coming.

Publishing a book was a surprise to me. Moving to Nashville to work for Dave Ramsey was a surprise to me. Building two kindergartens in Vietnam was a surprise to me. And if I told you those were things I carefully planned along my career path, I would be a liar. The best things that have happened to me in the last five years weren’t things I planned.

But I was the one who took that first step across the starting line. The one who said, “Let’s see where this goes!”

That’s the tension you’ll have to face. You have to work incredibly hard on your start. You have to be deliberate and intentional and focused. You have to be a Starter. And then you have to be brave enough and prepared enough to react when a surprise presents itself.

When Dave asked me to think about joining his team, he didn’t call me out of the blue. I’d spoken to his entire team three times already. I’d spent two years interacting with his company. I’d been on the road booking my own speaking gigs, writing my first book, and learning as much as I could on my own. I’d been starting.

When he offered me a job and a path diverged before me, I was ready. I’d spent two years starting, and I was ready to run once the next leg of the journey came into view.

Don’t plan your life like I used to plan my speeches

One afternoon in Atlanta, a guy named Lanny gave me some horrible feedback. I’d spoken at two camps he’d put on for about 5,000 students, and he had some evaluations he needed to go over with me.

The feedback was horrible because it was true.

According to Lanny, ten to fifteen people who saw me speak said that I “lacked passion” for my material. He said they felt like it was a performance, not material I was really passionate about.

I sat there a little stunned at first. I like to get feedback that says, “You’re awesome. Almost too awesome. You don’t need spotlights on you when you speak because the glow of your greatness illuminates the stage.” And this feedback was not that.

The crowd thought I was fake. They thought I was going through the motions. They thought I was performing words I’d memorized.

And the sad thing is, they were right.

At the time, I was practicing my speeches eight to ten times per gig. I’d stand in my office, face out the window toward the Cracker Barrel next door, and do a full dry run of each speech. Over and over I would practice until I knew every line of my forty-five-minute speech.

I’d do all the hand motions, time myself, and even give pauses for the invisible crowd to laugh in my office. (Invisible people think I’m hilarious!)

I practiced this way because I didn’t want to feel out of control onstage. I was so worried about making a mistake that I tightly clutched my hands around my speech. I had it perfectly manicured so I could control every second. No surprises.

Lanny picked up on that and gave me some advice: “Jon, your speeches are so over-structured that you’re not leaving any space in them for something new to happen in the moment. That’s the best part of a speech, when something brand new appears. When there’s a surprise that both the audience and the speaker get to share. That’s what connects an audience with a speaker, the feeling that you’re going on a journey together, creating something together, and neither one of you knows exactly where it’s going to go, but you’ll end up there together.”

Giving a speech that way takes a courage I didn’t have at the time, and so does taking your first step on the road to awesome.

Average is so popular because average is familiar. We all know how to do average. Ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet do average. The road is well worn, the decisions are obvious, and the next steps are crystal clear.

Awesome? It’s a little dangerous. There may be dragons in those woods (spoiler alert: there are). There are foggy mornings and cloudy nights. Sometimes you’re not completely sure about your next step until you take it.

Average is predictable. Awesome is adventurous. So when faced with the decision to be awesome or stay average, most of us opt for the familiar, for the comfortable. Oh, we like the idea of an awesome adventure, but most of us default to trying to manicure the road to awesome so it’s as safe and predictable as the road to average.

We want to plan the road to awesome. We want to talk about our ten-year visions. We want to detail every step before we take a single one. To make sure there’s no room for mistakes or failure. But when we do that, when we squeeze our lives and purposes that tightly, we eliminate any room for surprises.

We don’t have time for them. They don’t fit within our plan. They don’t have any runway in our day to land on. We scowl when people interrupt what we’re doing at work, grumble when neighbors want to talk at the mailbox, and curse momentary distractions to a day we’ve planned.

The road to awesome, though, is defined by the surprises. It’s not a block in a downtown city laid out long ago by methodical city planners. It’s a rambling dirt road with twists and turns that offers something new at every corner. Let’s leave room on our maps for some surprises.

This idea cost me $2,310—please read it carefully

If taking the first step on the road to awesome were easy, then everybody would already be on it. The road to average would be empty, with just average-sized tumbleweeds blowing along at average speeds on average-temperature days.

The first step isn’t easy, though, and one of the hard things is that you have to get comfortable with tension. You have to step into tension. You have to be:

a realist and a dreamer

practical and impractical

logical and illogical

You have to be brutally realistic about your present circumstances and wildly unrealistic about your future circumstances.

If you don’t embrace this tension, if you don’t accept it and make it work to your favor, you’ll end up stealing money from your grandmother’s church.

That’s what happened to me.

Six years ago, I was feeling restless at my job. If you read
Quitter
, this is not surprising to you. I had made a backward career move—because I wrecked my job at Home Depot—and ended up working at After Hours. Though at first blush that sounds like a ladies dance establishment, I assure you it was not, though given my green belt in Kenpo I could probably be a bouncer if I had the time.