B00CHVIVMY EBOK (8 page)

And so in my quest to find meaning, I thought that might be a great shortcut.

The trouble is, it’s not easy to get in a plane crash. Statistically speaking, it’s nearly impossible. So I decided to fake my death.

All I did was build a small plane in my head and then crash it into the ground with a single question: “If I died today, what would I regret not being able to do?”

You’d think it would take more than that, but pretend planes are surprisingly easy to destroy.

I thought about the question at hand for a few minutes, and then I wrote this down in my Five Star college-ruled notebook (wide ruled is for lazy people).

If I died today,

1. I wouldn’t get to write a book.

2. I wouldn’t get to love my wife.

3. I wouldn’t get to play with my kids.

The order of that list should assure you that I am being honest. I put “write a book” above “love my wife” and “play with my kids.” I bronze medaled my own children. What a jerk. And as a Christian, I should have at least given God a cameo on that list. At the bare minimum, I should have said, “4. I wouldn’t get to worship God.” But in my defense, if I’m dead then I’m in heaven with God, so maybe I’m in the clear on that one.

Regardless of the complete lack of nobleness in my list, I had one. And I stared at it for a minute and thought,
That really didn’t do a whole lot for me. I bet capers will taste the same this afternoon, and tomorrow I won’t notice the way fresh morning dew hangs on lilac bushes.

So I asked myself another question: “Are those the things I’m spending time doing right now?”

Stomach punch.

Suddenly what was a fun list of dreams for the future started to haunt me. If those were the three things that mattered to me most, why wasn’t I spending much time pursuing them? What was I waiting for? If they were important, why wasn’t I really doing any of them?

That day, I decided to change my life. I wrote a book. I took my wife out to a candlelight dinner at a restaurant that puts the prices on the menu in cursive. And I built a tree house with my kids that had a trap door and a tire swing. Whole thing took about four hours.

That’s not what I did. I’d like to edit my history and tell you that those two questions became my driving motivation and, from that moment on, my entire life was different. It wasn’t. The land of Learning doesn’t offer escape pods to the land of Mastering.

Instead, I felt like I had received an invitation to be more awesome more often. I wasn’t going to wait for a bout with cancer or a real plane crash to teach me that life is fleeting. I didn’t need to see everything flash before my eyes to know that it would some day.

I’d received a postcard from awesome, and it had two questions on it:

1. If I died today, what would I regret not being able to do?

2. Are those the things I’m spending time doing right now?

And the choice to answer those questions was mine. I could ignore them and wake up at 75 and regret my life, suddenly caught off guard that it’s almost over. Or I could wrestle with those questions and admit a few things:

I was scared to write a book. Talking about it was easier and safer than trying it and possibly finding out I didn’t have what it takes. I had clutched apathy tightly like a shield to my chest for years, pretending I didn’t really care about writing a book.

I was also lazy.

I was content to be an average husband and an average dad.

Those weren’t fun things to admit about myself, but they did bring about a certain amount of clarity. If I didn’t change something, the years were going to stack themselves on top of each other until I didn’t have any left. That’s what happens to most people at the end of their lives and what Bronnie Ware discovered in her patients.

She’s a nurse in Australia who spent years caring for people in the last weeks of their lives. She wrote a book called
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
.

The number-one regret? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

“This was the most common regret of all,” explains Ware. “When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.”
3

For the average person, the reality of death is the only thing more powerful than the fear of living the life you truly desire. But this isn’t a book about being average. It’s a book about being awesome.

I’m not sure how you’d answer those two previous questions, but I know if you’re going to be more awesome more often, you need to. And preferably long before you ever need a nurse like Bronnie Ware.

Climb in your own plane and crash it today. There’s plenty of open ground in the land of Learning for another smoldering wreckage.

The gingerbread trail

Did you come up with a perfect answer to the plane crash questions? It only took me about fifteen minutes. I got a smoothie afterward. Pretty enjoyable afternoon, actually. Must be something wrong with you.

That’s what we think when we start learning ways to be more awesome more often. We think it should be easy work, and when it’s not, we want to give up. The truth is, learning about who we are is rarely easy.

This path may feel new at first. Traversing through the land of Learning may feel like a maiden voyage. But the funny thing is that you’ve hidden yourself clues along this road forever.

The clues were about what you really loved doing. They didn’t all make it this far into your life, but more than you can imagine remain strewn throughout the land of Learning. The clues are the gingerbread trail leading to your definition of awesome.

If you’ve recovered from the pretend trauma and the real disappointment of not riding that yellow inflatable slide, it’s time to look for a few hints. Especially since they can come from the strangest places, or so I learned with my mother-in-law.

When my blog took off and I started really leaning into my dream, people would always ask her, “How does he do it all?”

Her answer to her friends was perfect: “That’s the wrong question to ask. The real question is, ‘How did he
not
do it before?’ ”

Where were the thousands of words that were now going to social media and book-writing going before I started working on my dream?

They weren’t new. I didn’t turn into someone completely different at age 30. I’d always had those ideas inside me and now that they had a home, my mother-in-law had to wonder, where did they live before?

The answer is Post-it notes. And the backs of envelopes, and scrap pieces of paper.

I was writing tweets ten years before Twitter was launched. I would scribble down short thoughts like, “I wish I knew more unhappy rich people,” and then leave them on the kitchen counter. A week later my wife would throw them all away ’cause they looked like a pile of garbage. And then I would tell her she just threw away the great American novel. It was a pretty fun cycle we had going.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my desire to share ideas, to write books, to help people had been trying to break through the surface of my days for years. It had been sending up flares from deep within my heart, trying to get my attention for decades.

But I missed it. And I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.

If you had a hard time answering the plane crash question, let’s approach the idea of awesome from a slightly different angle.

Instead of asking, “What would I love to start doing?” let’s ask, “What can I not stop doing?”

What’s something in your life that you keep coming back to? For me, it was writing ideas. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop leaving notes around the house, writing friends long-winded emails with scattered ideas in them, or dominating dinner parties by cornering friends to hear my thoughts. It was a compulsion.

What’s something you can’t stop doing? Chances are there’s some passion or dream or activity that’s survived for years. You don’t respect it; we never do. My friend Chris, who is in his late 30s, told me one night, “I just don’t know what any of my passions are.” That would have been troubling if he hadn’t just shown me the antique railroad car he had spent months rebuilding and reconditioning by hand. What was once a forgotten piece of wood and metal on a trash heap had been lovingly, painstakingly crafted into a conversation-stopping centerpiece in his living room. But he wasn’t sure what his passions were. We’re horrible at seeing the potential of our own dreams.

They are there. Hiding out in the shadows of our days, waiting for us to admit they matter. Waiting for us to see that a pile of notes could be a book, or a continued love of volunteering at a local animal shelter could be a business, or a compulsion to attend the Mumford & Sons concert three nights in a row could be the start of something bigger.

What can you not stop doing?

Be a student of you

One afternoon I had lunch at Mellow Mushroom with a pastor. He wanted to write a book and didn’t know where to start. He asked me, “Should I take three months off to write it? Take a sabbatical, get a cabin somewhere, and hole up in there until it’s done? Or should I take the opposite route? Write a page a day so that by the end of the year I have over 300 pages done?”

He continued to rattle off options based on a number of different books about writing.

Finally, I asked him, “How old are you?”

“Forty-two,” he replied.

“Then you’ve got forty-two years of research. You’ve got forty-two years of evidence indicating how you best accomplish things. You need to be a student of you. What do you do best?” I asked.

“Well, I love sharing stories in my sermons. I’m a storyteller. That’s my favorite thing to do, and for the last twelve years, that’s what I’ve been doing every Sunday morning when I preach.”

“Well then, get your sermons transcribed. You can have someone transcribe them for $3 an hour. You’ve probably already got a great start down the path of writing a book.”

He was flabbergasted at how smart I am. Or maybe at how obvious that solution was. No one ever thinks that one element of his or her life can inform another. We think we have to start from scratch each time. But we don’t.

You need to be a student of you. Don’t walk down this road to awesome as if you’ve never been awesome before. You have. You’ve succeeded at something. Something came naturally. Something worked. How can you apply that to this?

If you were able to stick to a diet for six months, how did you do it? What about that experience overlaps with your new road to awesome? If you’ve had success at work, even if you don’t love your job, what are the things you can learn from that experience? What skills came out shining?

We usually don’t take enough time to study ourselves. Subsequently, we learn the same things over and over again. Or worse than that, we discount everything we’ve learned for the latest technique espoused in a book.

That’s one of the greatest presumptions of many business and self-help books. They tend to have a one-size-fits-all approach. There’s often that section or specific chapter about goal setting that involves an incredibly complicated, detailed list and a system of checks and balances that exceeds that of the US Treasury. Of course the approach worked perfectly for the author, because she’s an incredibly detailed, organized person. But maybe that’s the absolute worst approach for you. Maybe you’re a painter, not a mathematician. But because the book says, “In order to set goals, you have to set them this way,” you give it a try. Everything about your previous thirty years on the planet indicates that you will not do well with a complicated checklist approach, but the book says this is the only way.

You try it for a day or a week or a month, and it doesn’t take. You then assume you’re lousy at goal setting and quit.

But maybe you’re a bird reading a book about how to be a fish. You can discipline yourself all you want, gather as much willpower as is available to you, but it’s not going to matter. You’ve got wings, not fins.

The solution to this problem is to share principles that are true of everyone and applications that are flexible. As we continue to march down the road to awesome, that’s what we’re going to do. The five stages, for instance, are true for everyone. The road to awesome always travels through them.

However, the method you use to travel from one destination to the next will be determined by your own experience—what you’re made of, what you desire, and what you’ve done to this point.

Measure each action we discuss against what you know to be true of yourself. Be a student of you, and then choose your own means of travel through these stages. I can only describe their existence and offer suggestions on traversing them that have worked for me and other travelers I’ve met along the way. The point is not that you copy exactly what I’ve done. The point is that you take the principles, customize them to what you know of yourself, and keep moving through the lands.

Do this and you will be able to make progress. Continue doing this, and you will reach your version of awesome many times in your lifetime.

***

My first Christmas as a husband I decided to make my wife some furniture.

I’d never learned woodworking. I’d never been taught furniture making. I’m pretty sure I got a B-minus in shop class in the
seventh grade (although I think the issue was that my wooden key caddy was over-shellacked).

Nothing about my previous twenty-four years on the planet would indicate that I would be amazing at building something with my bare hands. But I was in the land of Learning, and when you’re there, you try new things. You take new risks. You explore new passions.

Emboldened with courage, I found a nightstand in a Restoration Hardware catalog. I ripped out the page and went to our local Home Depot. I purchased a jigsaw, ’cause those things seemed interesting, a handsaw, a huge box of nails, and a few pieces of wood.