B00CHVIVMY EBOK (4 page)

After Hours was actually a formalwear company that specialized in rental tuxedos. If you’re playing along at home, I went from being one of the copy chiefs at a multibillion-dollar national brand to writing product copy trying to convince teenagers to rent my pants for the prom. Like a boss.

During my less-than-lustrous career at After Hours, I decided to start an ad agency. I’d worked at a small agency before and thought,
How hard can it be?
So I started one with a guy I knew from church. We got a whole bunch of business cards printed with our logo that kind of looked like the ThunderCats, registered our business, and went looking for a client.

We had huge aspirations. We were going to be a massive agency with hundreds of clients, a dream mirrored by our need to order thousands of business cards. Next step? Get someone to pay us to do whatever it is we thought we were capable of doing.

Our first client was a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. My dad’s a pastor, so I understood the mechanics of that world. We were able to convince an incredibly kind woman at the church that our new company could build them a top-notch website. We put together an impressive proposal, and we agreed to build the site for around $30,000.

The church, showing wisdom, didn’t pay us the entire amount up-front and only gave us an initial payment of about $12,000.

Then we got to work. I built a crazy site map, trying to make sense of the thousands of disconnected web pages this church had. The youth department had built their own site; the senior adults had their own section; everyone who had access to a computer had seemingly added a page to this tangled mess. I did my best to make sense of it and then turned over the project to my partner.

That last paragraph makes me sound like a good guy.

The truth is, I bailed on the project. I walked away and left him completely in the lurch. It was a train wreck, and I thought that maybe my partner could magically make sense of it.

Months into the project, a few realities about my present circumstances started to catch up with me: I didn’t know how to run a business. I had never built a website before. Neither my partner nor I had any web developing skills.

After many sweaty nights, we decided to pull the plug and refund the church their remaining money. (Some had been spent on a third-party design firm we had hired to fix reality number 3.)

In the meantime, my partner moved with his family to another state, and I waited patiently for the whole situation to fade into the sunset of my life. But like a zombie who continues to crawl after you without legs, that thing was not going away easily.

The church had not received their refund check. My partner had sole control of the money. I called him over and over again and didn’t get a response. I started to hate his voicemail greeting, which played John Mayer’s song “Waiting on the World to Change.” I wanted to punch John Mayer in the face.

Finally I got through to him and he agreed to overnight the money.

Two days later, I got a voicemail while at my day job: “Hi Jon, this is Sara! Hope you’re having a good day. The check you sent us bounced. Please give me a call back.”

Cue vomit.

The check we had sent—to the church my grandmother had attended for thirty years—bounced.

The money was gone. The account was empty. My partner had spent it.

How had this happened? It’s painfully simple. I broke my own rule: I wasn’t brutally realistic about my present and was wildly unrealistic about my future.

I got the second part right. I crushed that part! I had big, crazy, unrealistic dreams about my future circumstances. (Please refer to my note about the number of business cards we ordered, most of which are still in my garage. One day, when I’m really, really huge, I’ll sell them on eBay for millions!)

Where I failed, and where you will too if you’re not careful, is that I was wildly unrealistic about my future
and
my present.

That was my biggest mistake. Had I been brutally realistic about my present circumstances, I would have realized:

1. I didn’t know the guy from church that well. We’d only known each other for six months. We didn’t have enough relationship equity to justify me trusting him with sole control of all the money for our ad agency.

2. I didn’t have much time to dedicate to the agency. I had a full-time job, a family, and a lot of other responsibilities I’d already committed to.

3. I didn’t have any of the aforementioned skills needed to make this project successful.

Had I accepted all that and been honest about my present, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have started the agency. Not at all. That’s the great misconception—that if you’re honest about your present you can’t be hopeful about your future. That realism has no role in dreaming.

Realism wouldn’t have prevented me from chasing my dream; it would have prevented me from chasing the wrong dream. I would have done a different project. I would have said to the church, “We’re new; can we do a beta project for you? Something small like creating a new site for your preschool department? If that goes well, we can talk about doing a bigger project.”

I would have talked to mentors and friends about the challenges of two strangers starting a business together. The size and ambition of my dreams for the future would not have changed one iota, but the shape of my present would have. My start would have looked different.

Our contact at the church ended up being incredibly kind to me. She was as crushed as I was that the money was gone. She actually said that I didn’t have to pay the remaining money back. But that didn’t seem right, so my wife and I sent them a check for $2,310. I don’t know if that’s carrying-around cash for you—the kind of thing you use to buy cashmere socks when you want to treat yo’self—but at the Acuff house, that is some serious cake.

People always tell you that failure teaches you the best lessons, and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean I want to learn that way. Of the two options—lose $2,310 and learn a great lesson, or keep $2,310 and learn a great lesson—I know which one I’d pick. Don’t be dumb like me. I implore you.

Dream Honestly

Be brutally realistic when you answer the question from the first chapter, “Where am I right now?” Answering that question honestly is critical to your career and maybe even your whole life.

In
Good to Great
, Jim Collins tells the story of Jim
Stockdale,
a US military officer who was held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War and tortured regularly. Collins asked
Stockdale
which soldiers didn’t make it out.
Stockdale
answered,

Oh, that’s easy. The optimists. They were the ones who said, “We’re going to be out by Christmas.” And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. They’d say, “We’re going to be out by Easter.” And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
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Avoid the temptation to believe that being honest about your current reality is somehow not the right way to dream big. Don’t you dare be like my friends who say, “I’ve got $100,000 in student loans, but I’m going to pretend those don’t exist and instead just dream about the future!” Honestly looking at where you currently are in life turns your present into a platform you can jump from instead of a prison that will hold you back. If you’ve got big bills, make big sacrifices at the start.

If you decided to have five kids in the first ten years of your marriage, don’t then tell your family, “Daddy wants to dream. I’m going to quit my job, start an organic radish farm, and act like I’m a 19-year-old single guy with no responsibilities.” Be honest about your present and turn it into a friend, like I should have with my approach to starting an ad agency.

This will not be easy because the world’s definition of dreaming is just the opposite. People will say things like, “Step out in faith,” or, “Follow your dreams and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” Those kinds of ideas make for amazing mugs but have a pretty horrible success rate. At best, those ideas are code for, “Don’t make any plans,” and at worst they are code for, “Abandon your current commitments.”

You see the former in a million colorfully inspiring but ultimately empty sayings on Pinterest and Facebook. You see the latter exhibited in songs like John Mayer’s “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967.”

It’s a beautiful song and such a great example of why John Mayer is a consummate storyteller (just not a good voicemail recording). In the lyrics, Mayer poetically describes the life of Walt Grace, a man who was “desperately hating this whole place.” Walt decides to build a one-man submarine in his basement, “ ’cause when you’re done with this world, you know the next is up to you.” He succeeds against all odds and then rides the submarine all the way to Tokyo. It takes him weeks, but he does it! Hooray, dream fulfilled! Only there’s a problem. Walt’s a husband. Walt’s a father of a few kids. In a song we may hail him as a dreamer, but in reality we’d call him an absentee father. When Mayer sings, “his wife told his kids he was crazy,” it’s nearly impossible to ignore the sadness of that picture—the picture of a man who was “done” with a world that included his wife and children, so he built a “home-made, fan-blade, one-man submarine ride.”
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The world’s definition of dreaming is often incredibly selfish. It involves ignoring everyone you know and love. Working on some private passion in the depths of your basement. Going off on an adventure without anyone else. And then weeks later letting people know you’re not dead.

We tell that story in popular culture so often, we start to believe that dreaming or walking down the road to awesome is an inherently selfish idea. As if you only have two options: abandon every commitment you have and dream, or resign yourself to an average life in order to honor your commitments.

What if there was a third way? A way to honor all your commitments even while you completely change your life and the world in the process?

What if you don’t have to be an absentee dad, a bad employee, or a failure of a spouse to chase a dream with more intensity than you can even imagine?

What if you could start today?

You can, regardless of your current circumstances. But first, you’ve got to deal with a very big wall.

(P.S. Starting with chapter 2, each chapter in this book will have a corresponding set of action steps in the back. You can find them on page 221. I thought about weaving them into the book but realized that would wreck the narrative flow. Like right now. Wasn’t that last part all dramatic? “You’ve got to deal with a very big wall.” It felt very “open the gates and seize the day,”
Newsies-style,
to me. And then I had to ruin it with tactical, practical action steps. Okay, public service announcement over.)

3: What to Expect When You’re Starting

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What to Expect When You’re Starting

This book would’ve been a lot easier to write
if I could just outline how I found my purpose. I’d use a bunch of words like life force and destiny. I’d pull out a few of those reverse sentences motivational speakers like me love: “Don’t just dare to dream—dream to dare!” I’d get some sort of signature look, maybe a suit coat with a hood inexplicably sewn on the back and a watch you can only get in southern Norway. And then I’d go on some sort of “power up” tour around the country where I’d offer self-help advice like the back of a shampoo bottle.

Find your true
purpose.

Be your true
purpose.

Live your
purpose.

Repeat as
necessary.

And I’m not above that—let’s be perfectly clear about that right now. I love books like that. They’re not messy. And I tried to write that book telling you how to find your purpose, but I kept running into one big problem.

I didn’t find my mine. I wish I had. As I mentioned, I went to Vietnam once, and that would have been pretty dramatic, especially because it’s not one of the three big “find yourself in Europe countries” (Italy, England, France). But I didn’t find it there.

My wife and I raised $60,000 to build two kindergartens there with help from the readers of my blog. When the schools were finished, we visited them. One hot afternoon in November, after the aforementioned run-in with the French motorcyclists, we stepped out of an old Land Cruiser into the front courtyard of a kindergarten.

There were hundreds of giggling children, dozens of parents, and a few chickens gathered for the opening ceremony. The local minister of education was there and promptly told me I looked like Prince William. He probably meant “skinny and pale,” but my Vietnamese is no good so I’m going to assume he meant “tall and regal.”

Before we went through the gates of the school, I stopped in the driveway and looked at the building. There were six classrooms, a separate kitchen building, and a bathroom. I resisted the urge to immediately say, “In America, $30,000 wouldn’t even buy you a nice Toyota Sequoia.”

Instead I just stood there, in awe that a group of strangers on a blog had helped make this possible. I was content to leave it at that, to just cherish that moment like a Successories poster.

But out of nowhere, five words popped into my head. And they were the words that would forever ruin my ability to tell you how to find your perfect purpose in life:

How did I get here?

The truth is, I didn’t know.

I could look back on the years leading up to the kindergartens and explain them in 20/20 hindsight, but the overwhelming reality was that I didn’t know how I had come to be standing on a mountain in Vietnam.

I didn’t know how blog readers had come together to change an entire village they’d never even heard of.

I didn’t know how I’d landed halfway around the world to sit at a table while schoolchildren sang songs of celebration about finally having a school they could attend.

I didn’t figure out my purpose and then execute it. I didn’t write “Vietnam” on a whiteboard in Atlanta, scribble down “Nashville and Dave Ramsey,” add “Write three books,” then proceed to take deliberate steps to my very crystal clear finish line, finally crossing it exactly the way I planned all along.

It didn’t happen that way. Not for me. And truly, not for most of us if we are honest. But when we talk about “finding our purpose,” we think it will happen like clockwork, because most of us believe these lies about purpose:

Everyone but you knows exactly what his is.

I don’t know exactly what mine is. I have a rough sense of a handful of things I think are awesome, but I don’t know my perfect purpose. There. Disproved that one. (I hope the rest are this easy.)

You’ll only have one.

I blame any romantic movie where someone is running in an airport for this belief. This is the “soulmate” concept of finding your purpose. You get one, and you’ll just “know it when you know it.” That and the amount of fireworks that will go off and the Natasha Bedingfield song you’ll hear in the background will be your clue. Nonsense.

You should have it figured out by the time you’re 22 years old.

Sure you will. And your SAT score matters a lot too. I can’t tell you how often my SAT score comes up as a 37-year-old. Seems like that’s the first thing anyone wants to know. People are always saying to me, “Your job experience looks great, love your resume, good references, but when I say, ‘Orange is to wrench as blue is to ________,’ what does that mean to you?” Most people don’t have their purpose figured out by 22.

It changes everything instantly.

Your step will be lighter. Colors will seem brighter. Even food will taste different once you find your purpose. You know how you don’t like the texture of strawberries? All those little bumpy things most people are able to ignore but you find disconcerting? Don’t worry about them. As soon as you find your purpose, everything changes, including how strawberries feel in your mouth.

You have to know the finish line before you cross the starting line.

In
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, author Stephen Covey wrote that habit number two is “Begin with the end in mind.”
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I completely agree. It’s good to keep the end in mind. But since that book came out, we’ve mutated that thought into: “Begin with the end in stone.” As if before you take a single step you have to know exactly what your final step will be. That’s the biggest lie of all when it comes to finding your purpose.

The result of these lies is that most of us have forgotten something critical.

Purpose is not a final destination.

One of the worst things you can do is try to find your purpose in life. Nothing cripples you like trying to “find your purpose,” or “figure out your dream,” or “name your passion.”

Regardless of the words you use, it’s all nonsense and none of it ever works. Here’s why:

It puts tremendous pressure on you.

So all you need to do right now is sit down with a blank piece of paper or an empty journal and come up with the one idea that will guide the rest of your time on this planet? Awesome.

It becomes an idol.

As soon as I find my purpose, the rest of my life will fall into place, my worries will vanish, and every morning I will bound out of bed with hope in my heart and jelly beans in my eyes.

It stops you in your tracks.

Until you find your one true purpose, you can’t get started on doing anything else. As soon as you get it, you’ll start sprinting, but until then, stay right where you are.

For these reasons and more, I’m not a fan of “finding your purpose.” I’m a fan of “living with purpose.”

Living with purpose allows you to:

Start today.

There’s no waiting period. It’s not a springboard. It’s a filter for everything you encounter every day. Waiting to find your purpose tomorrow is a great way to ensure you don’t live with purpose today.

Start where you are.

You can live with purpose as a dad, as an employee, as a college student, as a friend, or as anything else.

Start on what matters to you.

Why even pretend that you’re going to find one thing and one thing only that you love doing for the rest of your life at the exclusion of all others? Don’t get locked into a single purpose statement that suffocates you. Live with purpose and enjoy a thousand different passions as you continually walk the road to awesome.

The reality is that many scientists believe our brains aren’t even done physically developing until we’re in our mid-20s. Therefore, the idea that a 19-year-old is capable of choosing a perfect major and a perfect purpose that guides the next fifty years of their life is absurd.

And that’s just your brain. What about your heart? What about your passions? What about your dreams? When do those stop developing? Your mid-30s? Your mid-50s? Hopefully never. So then why do we think we’ll find a singular purpose that will guide us forever?

Forget finding a purpose. It’s a never-ending story that will leave you empty. Live with purpose instead.

Get up and go to work with purpose. Handwrite three thank-you notes to employees today.

Play with your kids with purpose. Apply the same creativity and energy you use for projects at work to your playtime with your kids. Create “family goals” like “Walk my kids to school fifty times this year.”

Love your spouse with purpose. Go on dates, don’t wait for moments to reconnect to happen naturally, and encourage them with intentionality.

Vacation with purpose. Turn off your email for longer than twelve seconds and realize no one died during your absence.

Dream with purpose. Follow the action steps in the back of this book instead of just reading it and putting it right back on a shelf.

Whatever you’re going to do, do it with purpose. Not as if purpose is a key you’re going to find in the bottom of a trunk of old sweaters, but rather as if purpose is an approach to life that can shape everything you do.

The Great Wall

How will you know when you’re living with purpose instead of trying to find purpose? When you stop worrying about the great wall of purpose. That may feel impossible at first because it’s so massive. It stretches miles and miles in either direction. It’s 1,000 feet tall and disappointingly close to the starting line.

It stands like a sentinel on the path to awesome. We can’t dig under it. We can’t scale it. We can’t break through it. But there is a door right there in the middle of the wall. You can see the land of awesome through the keyhole. You can hear awesome if you put your ear against the door. You know awesome is just on the other side. But the great misconception is that you need a key to open the door. You don’t.

The door is unlocked. You just need to turn the knob and walk through it.

That’s the first secret about purpose. The door has been open the whole time. Push the door open and take the next step into awesome.

The second secret about purpose is that it usually finds you. Purpose is attracted to motion. Purpose is attracted to momentum. Purpose loves to surprise you mid-stride. Very rarely will it greet you on your front doorstep. More often than not, you’ll encounter purpose in the middle of the road when you least expect it.

So start. The door has always been open.

But I must warn you. The moment you decide, “I’m going to live with purpose today instead of trying to find my purpose someday,” you’ll be tempted to look for shortcuts. Now that you are free to start down the path of Learning, you may want to turn that freedom into a license to jump ahead. Don’t. It never works out.

Shortcuts

I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted. We escaped average. Took our first step toward awesome. Opened the door in the great wall of purpose. It’s been an arduous few hours. And now we’re on the edge of the land of Learning and the horizon looks massive.

Want to jump right over the first three destinations and land in Harvesting? Wouldn’t you rather leap from the start straight into the land where it rains money? I would. And if you’d prefer that too, congratulations, you’re human.

We all want a shortcut.

When confronted with work and a reward, we all would prefer the reward first or at least as soon as possible. But the path to awesome doesn’t work that way. Ask any honest sage if they were an expert at something the first time they tried it, and they’ll giggle and probably give you a caramel.

We all search for shortcuts. We all secretly hope there’s a back door to our dreams. But there’s not, even if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow.

She is in the Mastering stage when it comes to acting. She’s won an Oscar, been in more than twenty movies, and married somebody famous. I guess that last one doesn’t make you a great actress, but it felt relevant somehow.

One day she decided she wanted to be a musician too. She signed a $900,000 recording deal with Atlantic, starred in a movie called
Country Strong
, played at the Country Music Awards, and planned her debut album.

Years later, the album is nowhere to be seen,
Country Strong
was a box-office failure, and Gwyneth isn’t doing much singing. Why?

She’s not yet a Master when it comes to music. Despite her money, despite her fame, despite her marriage to the front man of one of the most celebrated bands in the last twenty years, she didn’t get to skip the lands of Learning and Editing. Whether your name is Gwyneth Paltrow or something that is considerably easier to spell, guess what? You’ve got to go through the Learning years of being a musician. You’ve got to go through the Editing years, too, if you really want to one day enter the lands of Mastering, Harvesting, and Guiding and be successful there.

Gwyneth Paltrow can’t skip destinations on the map to awesome. You can’t either. (And don’t throw Bo Jackson at me. He played football and baseball his entire life. Those were parallel passions, not him deciding at 31 that he wanted to start a new one. And I will crush you with Bo in Tecmo Bowl.)

So if you’ve spent the last eight years being an accountant and having success at that and then you decide to be a writer, give yourself some grace. You may have been a great accountant, but if you want to be a writer, it’s time to be 20 again.

The truth is, if you want to reach the land of Harvesting, if you want to be more awesome, more often, you have to go through the lands of Learning, Editing, and Mastering each time you pursue something new, whether it’s a major pursuit or a minor one. You have to work hard and sacrifice and lean into your particular brand of awesome with energy and enthusiasm. Anytime you use the word sacrifice in a book, you should immediately offset it with something encouraging so people don’t throw your book down and go play Wii Fit.

So here it is: You can’t skip stages, but as I said earlier, you can accelerate them. There are four ways to shorten the amount of time you spend in each.

1. Start earlier.

In his best-selling book
Outliers
, Malcolm Gladwell references a study that Dr. K. Anders Ericsson conducted. Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and is recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of expertise. Gladwell wrote about the “10,000-hour rule,” an idea that Ericsson put forth that states that expertise takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve (roughly twenty hours a week for ten years).
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So then why, as Gladwell profiled, did Bill Gates become Bill Gates or Tiger Woods become Tiger Woods? In part because they started earlier than other people. Tiger had a golf club in his hand when he was a toddler. Gates started programming computers at the age of 13. By the time he was 6, Mozart had practiced an estimated 3,500 hours.
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Turns out the shortcut to greatness isn’t a shortcut at all. You just start earlier than everybody else. As a result, you are able to reach Editing, Mastering, and Harvesting much sooner in life. It was no fluke that Woods won The Masters by a preposterous twelve strokes when he was only 21 years old. He’d been Learning, Editing, and Mastering golf for eighteen years by then.