Several months ago, I came across Merlin Mann‘s “Better“, an essay about trying harder and consuming better things. In my arrogance I missed the point. I fooled myself into thinking he wasn’t writing about me.

I re-read “Better” recently and it was a falcon-punch to the gut. It hurt. A lot. This time, the message was clear: “Maybe the reason you’re not happy with the things you make is that you aren’t really trying.”

It was something I needed to hear because I had become part of the problem I thought I was fighting against.

Looking back with some honesty, my approach to creating was to draft and publish, without much effort. My output was average or slightly above, but rarely was it special. I counted on natural talents to replace hard work and editing. My focus was on shipping.

I’d spend an hour or two putting something together followed by a few button clicks. My work set loose on the world, I’d become frustrated with the ironic slow claps, the lack of recognition, and the silence.

But then there was a question that set off an existential heart attack.

“When was the last time you really tried?”

The threshold to publish is too low and I let my personal expectations adapt to it. I thought I was trying, but I didn’t really know what it meant to try. When almost everything you consume is mediocre, it’s easy to delude yourself into believing the things you create are special.

It was time to acknowledge the things I had been hiding from.

It’s not OK to be just OK, not when you’re capable of more. It’s not fair to the people you love. It’s not fair to your audience. It’s not fair to you.

It’s not OK to expect recognition for your single-run vocal performance or your first draft blog posts. None of that is OK once you acknowledge that you’re capable of special and what’s keeping you from it is actually trying.

No one should expect people to love and care about the things they make if they don’t invest love and care into the things themselves.

Why should they? Why should someone else care about the crummy little thing you made without really trying?

I’m re-learning what it means to try, to edit ruthlessly, to polish, and to work until I’ve reached the edges of my ability. I’ve had to build up my inner QA Department and give it power.  I’m adapting to the absence of rules that I thought existed.

Technology has made it ridiculously easy to publish. Click a button and BOOM! - your short story – your music video – your collage of kittens – is shipped and available for anyone in the world to access.

There isn’t an Global Quality Control Officer holding the keys with one hand and wagging a finger with the other. YouTube doesn’t employ an editor to tell people “No, that ten minute video of you jumping over picnic tables is pretty lame. Try again. Come back later.”

Anyone can make stuff and publish it. Anyone can reach millions.

It’s easy. Too easy. Dangerously easy.

**Click!** Post Blog Entry. – It’s shipped.

**Click!** Upload Video. – It’s shipped.

**Click!** Share Song. – It’s shipped.

In my experience, once something’s shipped, there’s an expectation to keep shipping as much as possible as fast as possible. There’s an odd social pressure to make stuff and share it.

More and more. Faster and faster.

Processes that used to require months of communication and revision with editors and producers are now shortcut-ed by YouTube and Tumblr. No one has to wait. No one gets excited. Even the barricade of patience is gone.

Everything a person creates can be available to a massive audience within seconds of its creation. Everyone can ship, which is great.

But everyone can ship anything and that’s not so great. Actually, it’s terrible.

Not everything deserves an audience, at least not in the form that gets released. Not everything is special, nor could it ever be, but the expectation of special is withering away. The lowered bar does nothing to filter out the mediocre and the unfinished.

Those conditions have created a culture in which “just OK” is OK and not trying is acceptable. That culture has bled into all media. It’s begun to permeate our experience and is poisoning us with apathy. It certainly poisoned me.

That the bar is so low encourages people who make stuff to ship and publish before we’ve put the work in to make that stuff special.

We feel like we have to get our creations out into the world as quickly as possible so that we can ride the top of the deluge. We’ve got to ship, and we’ve got to ship now or no one will ever notice us.

This may sound a little “You kids, get off my lawn!”, but my mistakes have led me here and I’m slowly climbing out of the pit that I stupidly slid into.

The focus on shipping at the expense of quality is a hard habit to break.

There’s a responsibility for those who are creating to try harder, to make great things, fantastic things that stretch us to the borders of our abilities.

We’re on our own. The Global Quality Control Officer isn’t going to suddenly spring to life. We’ve got to adapt. We’ve got to set our own bar on an individual level. And to correct course, we need to be vicious with our definition of “good enough.”

No one is going to step in and tell us to work harder. No one is going to say “It’s not ready yet. Keep polishing.” It’s up to us to edit ourselves.

The editors are gone, but we still need them, at least in spirit.

Photo: J. Paxon Reyes

For me, distraction isn’t watching cat videos and trolling people on Facebook. Granted, I sometimes go on half-day Wikipedia adventures, but those are rare. If there’s a task ahead of me, I’m usually pretty good at avoiding the standard productivity pitfalls.

In fact, my distraction often looks dangerously like progress.

I get distracted by all the meta stuff that surrounds and supports the thing I’m trying to accomplish. If it’s blogging, I spend hours tweaking WordPress and testing new themes and plugins because I convince myself that I’m not avoiding writing.

I learn other people’s songs instead of making my own.

I work on my business website instead of making sales calls.

Maybe it’s because I’m a geek, but I tend to focus on the tools more than the task. I think, “If I keep sharpening this axe, I’ll be able to chop down all the trees way easier than if I tried to right now.”

The problem is, I get so focused on sharpening the axe that I never do anything with it.

Sometimes it’s because I’m convinced that what I’m doing is necessary. But there’s a difference between maintenance and just putting things off. Making sure WordPress Social-Widget 3.5 gets patched to version 3.6 or that my work area is precisely organized doesn’t have a lot to do with me actually writing a blog post.

Other times, especially with writing and music, I distract myself with the meta things because I’m afraid to work on the actual thing.

I want to write a book, but I don’t feel ready to do it. I don’t feel like I’ve found my voice or that I have the necessary level of skill to make it what I want it to be. So, instead of writing, I do writing-related things, like reading.

It’s easy to write off procrastination as laziness. But I think distraction often has a source deeper than laziness. Maybe the reason a lot of people procrastinate and get distracted is because they are scared.

They’re scared of failing, of not being good enough, and of how hard it is to be open and create honest things that people will care about.

OK, maybe that’s not everyone, but it’s certainly me and acknowledging that fear has changed my approach to creativity and work.

Part of that change has been becoming more mindful of my reasoning for how I spend my time. There’s a wealth of utility in being able to ask “Why am I clicking buttons on a settings page? Is it because it needs to be done? Or is it because it will give me the illusion of progress and it’s time spent away from that blank page I’m afraid of filling?”

Where I used to chide myself for being lazy, I now tell myself to be honest and to power through the fear. And where I used to get frustrated with others for not doing what I knew they could do, I’m becoming more empathetic.

I’m pushing myself to say “It’s OK, I’m scared too. How can I help?” rather than “Stop sucking and achieve your potential!” The latter is a lot easier, but infinitely less useful and a lot more hypocritical.

Photo: Freidwall

Lately I’ve been putting a lot of effort towards figuring out what I want my business to be when it grows up.

My goal isn’t to decide “I want to make X-type of these widgets and sell them to Z-demographic.” although I’m working through those things as well. That’s a question of supply and demand.

I’m more interested in the “why” of business. On a fundamental level, why should my business (or any other business) exist?

I asked the folks in my social networks to see what they think and got several good responses. Although it may be skewed because of the type of people I try to associate with, most of them were fairly altruistic.

…to better the quality of life for those impacted: clients, employees, and society.

…to provide a product or service that benefits others.

…to collectively empower people to make cool stuff.

Another group’s answers were more in the vein of MBA-thought.

…to provide a needed service or product to a market who finds the service or product to be a value and will produce a revenue flow for owners/shareholders/stakeholders.

…to invalidate an existing business by making a service cheaper or easier without making it worse.

…to make money.

One response I expected, but didn’t get (maybe because I’m not friends with any lawyers) was:

…to limit personal liability.

None of the responses I received struck me as being “wrong”, but none of them felt satisfactory to me personally. I took the search to Google to see what I could find.

A search for “purpose of business” returned 777,000,000 results, which isn’t very helpful in narrowing things down. But it did make one thing clear: very few people agree on the fundamental purpose of business.

I’m going to add to the confusion.

When A Business Isn’t A Business

The businesses that interest me most are those that focus on solving problems rather than market share and quarterly earnings. Those things are certainly important and are useful metrics to measure the financial health of a business, but to me, they are means to an end.

I agree with Richard Field who wrote:

It is unsatisfying to be in business and have as your only reason that of making money. There is a saying that “you need health to live, but you don’t live to be healthy”. Profits are like that for business. A company needs profits to continue, but profits are not what the business is for.

That’s why enormous banks like Citi and conglomerates like GE aren’t very interesting. These types of companies are defined by their most recent quarter rather than by the actions they perform in the physical world. There’s a disconnect from reality that is hard to get past.

The function of very large businesses, regardless of their classification, seems to be to move money around and create the illusion of action.That kind of makes my skin crawl. Maybe big businesses are vampiric creatures that live in a bizarre meta-space, feeding off of human interactions?

I’ve had some surreal conversations with finance workers from big companies.

“So what do you do?”

“Well, my division did $300m last quarter and we acquired one of our largest competitors.”

“Umm… But what do you do?”

Perhaps the issue is mine. I’m looking for an answer along the lines of “We build bridges.” or “We train doctors.” Those are things I can visualize. When I look at a business like Goldman Sachs, it’s not clear on the surface what the business does. Do they shuffle money?

That seems more like a game than a business. As I’ve learned about things like credit default swaps and derivatives, I’ve become convinced that it is a game. I don’t see any problems being solved, which would indicate business is taking place.

It’s not that I have a beef with the mega corps, I just think they are boring. They seem more parasitic than symbiotic – more draining than useful. My position is more “Meh, we’d probably be better off without you.” than “DOWN WITH THE MAN!”

Honestly, I’m extremely pro business. I love businesses like DEKA, where engineers build cybernetic arms. I appreciate the benefits of Google, whose programmers make it easy for me to search all of combined human knowledge.

I love book stores, coffee shops, grocery stores, movie theaters, doctors offices, and t-shirt printers. Sometimes I even like my bank, when they give me a semi-hassle-free place to store the ones and zeros that represent my money.

Those businesses are all solving tangible problems.

It’s pretty soul-sucking to put in eight-to-twelve hours at an office only to go home and not be able to answer “What did we do today?” Think about an entire  100,000 employee business where no one from the CEO all the way down to the receiving dock can answer that question.

Many of those people could say they paid their bills or supported their families, but what about the business? What did the business do? Past survival, what was its purpose that day?

There’s a point where businesses become so detached from problem solving that no one can answer those types of questions.

My Purpose for Business

If it’s not clear yet, my opinion is that the root purpose of a business should be to solve a problem.

That problem could be “it takes too long to pop popcorn” or “people sometimes need money in the near-term that they can pay back later on.” But, I think identifying and solving problems should be the basis for businesses.

For one, the business plan for a problem solving business is often just a few pages long and looks something like :”The Problem – Our Solution – Expected Revenue – Our Credentials”.

I like that. It’s simple and straightforward, which, in my experience, usually means it’s going to work out OK. Problem solving businesses tend to be successful.

When I read about IT startups on Techcrunch the first thing I look for is what problem the new company is hoping to solve. Unfortunately, I”ve read a ton of company profiles without ever being able to determine what the company was trying to do other than acquire investors.

A lot of the founders seem to suffer from some linguistic syndrome that causes them to repeat the words “disruptive” and “game-changing” over and over. It makes me die a little inside.

It might not be a recipe for guaranteed success but it seems to me that if you can identify an unaddressed (or under-addressed) problem and a workable solution, you’ve got a solid foundation for a business. At the very least it’s a better approach than going after problems that aren’t actually problems (CueCat & QR Codes) with solutions that don’t work (BitCoin).

I don’t necessarily think that the goals of a business have to be altruistic. However, it seems that they might tend to be if the purpose of the business is problem solving.

A business built around problem solving would probably have several positive tendencies.It would likely be customer focused and innovative by nature. While it may not have the same growth arc, a problem solving business might have a better chance at surviving in the long-term than a profit-driven business.

The employees and customers might have more reason to care about the business’ success because they would know what the business was actually doing.

The founders of a problem solving business aren’t likely to be looking for an early exit. The employees might stay around longer as well. And they might be happier because they are able to experience the tangible results of their labors.

I’m not advocating that people should quit their desk jobs and become lumberjacks, although many might find they are happier doing so. But I do think there’s a point where you get so far away from the metal of the machine that it’s unhealthy, for your personal mental state, for your sphere of friends and family, and for society.

So rather than address supply and demand, at a basic level, I’d like for the things I do with business to be concentrated on problems and solutions. It’s the only model I can come  up with that makes me care about doing business.

It’s the only model that doesn’t make me feel dirty.

Photo: jaydot

“I can’t be a baker because I don’t have a baker’s kitchen.”

“I can’t learn to play guitar because I don’t know anyone who gives lessons.”

“I can’t get a good job because I don’t have a degree.”

These are all false statements, but the people who spoke them have fooled themselves into thinking they were true. I’m often guilty of this type of self-delusion and have to catch myself from it by implementing a BS filter.

Because of fear and laziness, we all build up excuses so that they are bigger than the dream that lies behind them. If there isn’t a real barrier, we set one up so that we can justify to ourselves and others why we aren’t doing that thing we say we want to do.

“I can’t be a writer because I don’t have a quiet place to write.”

“I can’t run because my legs are too short.”

“I can’t start a business because I don’t know anything about taxes.”

Sometimes the excuses are undeniably silly. But we use them anyway because it’s easier to make excuses than it is to actually pursue what we want. The reality that sits behind our excuses is almost always a barrier of discomfort or hard-work. We have to stick our necks out for our dreams.

Excuses are comfortable and there’s no work or risk involved. Except there is.

By living a life of excuses and “I can’t” we risk reaching the end of our lives with very little comfort and a big ol’ bag of regret. There’s not one elderly person I’ve talked to who hasn’t said “I wish I would have done ‘X’.”

I already have those types of regrets and am doing my best to prevent them going forward. When I die, I’d rather look back on a string of failures than a list of all the things I wanted to do but never tried. I look around at all the people I know growing older and not getting the things they want.

Seeing all that regret and frustration is terrifying, but being scared of regret feels like a healthier emotion than being scared of failure.

When I start putting up excuses, I think about what I really have in mind. Is it important to me? When I say “I want to…” does the word “want” actually have any meaning or does it just mean “Yeah, it would be cool if this happened randomly without any effort on my part.”?

Before I say “I want…” I check myself to make sure I’m being honest because wanting something means I’m going to have to pursue it, and I need to be prepared and willing to do so.

Lots of people have said “I want to be a writer.” without really meaning it. If you say “I want to be a writer.” and then don’t do anything towards being a writer, you either don’t want to be a writer, or you are scared of failing at being a writer. Once you’re honest about your motives, you can actually start doing stuff.

What I usually find is that the only reason I’m not doing what I want to be doing is that I’m not doing what I want to be doing.

If you really want to be a writer, write.

If you really want to be a runner, run.

If you really want to be a baker, bake.

If you really want to be a noun, verb.

Start verbing and you’ll run into stuff that’s actually worthy of excuse. “I have a hard time writing because I have arthritis… from all the writing I do.” But when you see folks who are dedicated to their dreams, even the excuses grounded in reality fade away.

Stephen King couldn’t sit up straight for more than 30 minutes at a time after having his hip demolished by a van, but he still wrote. He had a real excuse to not write, but he kept going because he really wanted to write.

Oscar Pistorius was born without fibulas but competes as a world-class sprinter using artificial legs. He has a real excuse not to run but he does it anyway, because he really wants to run.

There are countless examples of people with actual excuses to not pursue their dreams who go ahead and do what they want to do. They are all human. None of them are superheroes. They just decided not to let excuses get in the way of verbing.

I have to remind myself everyday that my excuses aren’t real. They are just my reaction to being scared. It’s OK to be scared. But it’s not OK to let fear keep hold you hostage from the things you want. That’s been a hard lesson and one I’d save others from, to keep them from wasting time with excuses.

Photo: Profound Whatever

Within minutes of the official announcement of Steve Jobs’ passing, pre-prepared obituaries began popping up across the web. A little while after that, we started seeing newly minted editorials, most of which were just paraphrasing the obituaries and re-posting Steve’s famous Stanford graduation address.

There are worse ways to be memorialized. It’s a really good speech after-all.

But of all that I read, only Walt Mossberg’s post had any resonance and nuance. I think that speaks to both his personal relationship with Steve and his experience as a journalist & reviewer. Most of the other articles I read seemed to be from individuals struggling to find poignancy and context within minutes of learning about Steve’s death.

I couldn’t write this last night. I can’t contextualize that quickly, at least not to the point where I feel like I’m being anything other than shallow and cursory. It’s very difficult to find the truth of something, much less 15 minutes after that something has occurred. I had to sleep on it and spend some time thinking deeply about what a world without Steve Jobs means to me personally.

My computing experience has been cyclical, beginning with and returning to Steve and Apple. The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe and I’m typing this on a 2011 iMac. But in between, aside from a few short adventures back into Mac territory, I have been a Windows user.

Those early Apple computers that I used, the IIe’s and the first Macintoshes, had a profound effect on the course of my life. I look back on them with similar reverence as I do the first sci-fi novels that I read. They inspired me to dream about the impossible and what might be possible if pursued. There was (and still is) something truly magical about the green glow from the screen of a IIe.

The feeling of specialness when interacting with technology is in itself very special. It’s what separates great products from the ones that are just OK. In all the products that Steve Jobs introduced, he seemed to always be focused on recreating that “Wow!” experience. I think there’s a lot to be said for that type of vision in a world of beige commodity.

The Apple products of my youth were filled with “Wow!” and the products of recent years have brought a lot of that back.

My love of technology and gadgetry started with those computers and grew into a career in IT. Because of that I have a lot of respect for the people who built the industry that puts food on my plate everyday. Jobs, Woz, Gates, and Berners-Lee are all significant figures to me. I feel an obligation towards them for what they built, even if they had no idea what they were doing at the time.

I didn’t know Steve personally. Most of what I know about him is second & third-hand. It seems to me, from what I do know of him, that he was extremely human. That isn’t to say that someone like Bill Gates isn’t human, but Gates’ public persona doesn’t give much of a view into who he is as a person. It’s very controlled.

It likely can’t be said that Steve was absolutely himself in public, but his flaws were more visible and that made him easier to connect with and at least seem a little more real. He reflected the positives and negatives of being doggedly determined and single-minded.  That humanness is more impressive to me than the techno-hero caricature that many have framed around him.

Even so, the results of his vision for how technology should look and work are strewn throughout my house and the homes and offices of millions. They are in our living rooms, offices, laps, and pockets. Steve’s (and Apple’s) influence can be found in countless other products, both as gratuitous copying and subtle design cues.

One of Steve’s best leadership traits was surrounding himself with really bright people. Those people still work at Apple. Hopefully they’ll be able to continue assembling technology that inspires and makes people smile. Assuming they don’t lose Steve’s focus on making the user experience special, I think they are capable.

It feels a bit disingenuous to mourn the loss of someone you never knew personally, yet I’m genuinely saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs.I’m saddened by the loss of what seemed to be a really interesting human. I’m sad for his family and friends.

More personally I am saddened by the loss of “Wow!”

Photo: freeasinfreedom

Writing About Fear

A lot of what I write on this blog is about being scared. I’d like to think that I don’t write about it from a pulpit – I haven’t figured out how to overcome all my fears. More-so, I write about fear because I’m afraid.

Granted, I’m not physically curled up in a ball in a closet, trembling in terror. But that’s sometimes not far off the mark for the me that lives in my head. Even that is enough to be disabling.

Every so often, my fears will affect me physically. I’ll get overwhelmed and stressed out, my immune system shuts down and I’ll become physically ill. Then I’ll start worrying about being sick. “What if I have something serious?” It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve learned to deal with some of my fears just by being mindful and trying to focus on what is. But I’ve also found it helps to read about or talk to other people about their fears.

Knowing that other people are scared too, and in many cases, scared of the same things you are afraid of is comforting. It’s not necessarily schadenfreude but provides a sense of “OK, I’m not crazy, or maybe we all are.”

So here’s a short list of some of the things I’m afraid of. It’s not in order, and definitely not complete, but it’s a fair sampling.

Things I’m Afraid Of

• Failure
• Babies (my own & others)
• Not being good enough
• Being forgotten
• Missing out
• Getting old
• Getting broken
• Cancer
• Not being around for the Singularity
• Being poor
• Being fake
• My computer hard drive dying
• My backup hard drive dying
• Getting fat
• Not being able to help people
• Losing my hands (I use them for stuff.)
• Being alone
• Mingling
• Believing in things that aren’t true
• Hurting other people
• Becoming complacent
• Debt
• Letting down my guard
• Brain injuries
• Stupid people gaining power
• Hateful people gaining power
• Fear

These are the things I could think of in about thirty-seconds. Given an hour I could likely fill a book with all the things I’m afraid of.

My goal in this is to start a discussion. You can be honest or not, superficial or deep. It doesn’t matter. What are you afraid of?

Photo: MadHorse5

A cat grows bold within the grove.
He slides between the trees.
At night he is a fearsome sight,
A silent death machine.

Small, black eyes dart back and forth,
In search of tasty seeds.
A pounce, a cry, a happy sigh,
The twitching of tiny feet.

A mouse grows cold within the grove.

This isn’t a good poem. The rhyme is forced, the meter is wobbly, and there’s not much imagery – it’s too matter of fact.

But it is an important poem, at least to me. It’s little scribbles like this that help me start my writing engine.

The morning I wrote my little cat poem I had been staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to come up with something I felt was worth writing about. I was stuck, as I often am, and couldn’t get started.

As I was getting ready to close my notebook and punt for the day, the word “cat” crossed my mind. I don’t know why. A cat didn’t suddenly come into view. I don’t even have a cat. I just thought “cat”, so I wrote it down. Within a few seconds I had added the first stanza. Thirty more and I had the second.

I stopped writing and read the silliness that I had just committed to paper. I paused and read it again. I then proceeded to fill two pages in my notebook with content that had nothing to do with cats or poetry. It wound up being one of my more productive morning writing sessions.

I’m not particularly curious why the word “cat” popped into my head. It doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that I wrote it down. I trusted “cat” and was rewarded for following the path it set me on. Even though it was a small thing it was enough of a catalyst to push me out of my writing stupor.

As weird as they sometimes seem, I’ve learned to trust the muses. I’ve found writing kickstarts in grocery lists and weather reports. Thousand-word blog posts about computer encryption have started with stuff like “It is cloudy.” and “I have five fingers on my right hand. Each of them is a finger.”

Thinking that it was distracting me from my goal, I used to fight that randomness. Those thoughts would charge towards me and I’d chase them away. Instead of latching onto them and getting words onto paper I would sit and wait for the thoughts I wanted. I spent a lot of time staring at blinking cursors and blank pages because I didn’t understand the value of what my brain was telling me.

Since I’ve embraced the thought-vomit approach to writing, it’s come a lot easier to me. I’ve become OK with writing things down that will never be in the final product. Even if they are discarded, they have a sort of meta-value that helps me with what I’m intending to write by getting me started. Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone, but I think it might be worth a try if you’re having trouble writing or being creative in general.

Just let go of holding out for the perfect words. Trust the cat. Follow the cat.

Photo: David Reece

I recently visited a man who has a a personality that I call “The Hoss.” I’m sure you know someone like him. He greets others in this fashion: “How you doin, Hoss?” “What’s up, Big Guy?” He’s gregarious and loud. He loves sports and drinking beer with the guys.

Life is great for The Hoss.  He has a wife and kids, a supportive family, numerous friends, and a solid mid-level job. By most metrics, he’s a successful, American adult. He appears to know this, because he spends a lot of time talking about how great everything is.

The Hoss has perfected the art of the 30-second conversation. He greets you, bursting with confidence and cheer, and then rapidly departs.Most people probably come away from meeting him thinking “He seems like a pretty good guy. I bet he was captain of his football squad.”

But If you ever have an extended conversation with The Hoss you start to notice that the words of confidence he speaks don’t match the language of his eyes. His eyeballs dart around the room when he’s talking to you. The longer you talk with him, the more uncomfortable he seems. In most cases he finds a way to exit the conversation before the five minute mark.

If you can get past the five minute mark, it becomes apparent that not everything is great with The Hoss. His stories become more and more difficult to believe. He repeat things he’s already told you, but the details change. He begins to lose grip on his lies. His stress and anxiety come out in his demeanor and he becomes jittery and manic.

Studying his face, you can see the physical signs of alcoholism. He has perpetually blood-shot eyes, the hints of gin-blossoms on his cheeks and nose, and a slight puffiness to his skin. If you put a glass or can in his hand a lot of the jitteriness stops.

He looks like a person who’s hurting, but good luck getting him to admit it. Everything is fine with The Hoss. Everything is great.

The Hoss is not who this man is. It’s the character he plays to hold things together, the facade he presents to the world. Underneath the lies and the faux-bravado is a person who isn’t at home in his own skin and is terrified of the world knowing that there isn’t really a The Hoss.

When I’m around The Hoss I want to shake him and tell him “Stop it! This is not who you are. Just be yourself and I promise I will like you even more. I see you now and I will see you then.” But I know that won’t work. More and more I just want to give him a hug, tell him that he is loved and everything is going to be OK.

I used to get angry with The Hoss. I loathed him for being fake and spent very little time contemplating “Why?”. It was hypocritical of me because I have the same fears of being unnoticed and invisible. Most of my grasps for attention took place when I was younger and caused me great stress then. I can’t imagine how much of a burden it must be to carry that discomfort with self into your thirties/forties/fifties.

I remember being in second grade and wishing that I stood out, not in the “Chris is weird and reads books all the time” kind of way, but wanting the same attention that the kids who were good at baseball received.

I decided one day that I was going to do something to stand out, so I took a Walkman and some headphones to school and told everyone it was my hearing aid. I told the teachers that I couldn’t hear very well so I was recording them to play it back louder. Most of them humored me.  For the next week I sat in class with my headphones on, listening to static and white-noise and feeling smug about how different and notable I was.

It was the first of several characters I tried out. I though being someone else would work better than being me but it only seemed to push me further into obscurity and alienation.

A bit later that year, the little girl I had asked to be my girlfriend came to me on the playground bawling, telling me she couldn’t be my girlfriend anymore because the other girls were teasing her for it. I was slowly getting used to people making fun of me, but finding out that someone else was getting punished for associating with me hurt a lot. I’m not sure of all of what I said in response, but I remember telling her “I’m sorry.”

Not long after that I decided that I wasn’t very good at playing pretend. It was too much work and to that point, hadn’t been very successful.

The only person I was good at being was me. It took a while, but I learned to cope with feeling invisible instead of trying to get attention by being something else. That doesn’t mean I’m at peace with myself, but it seems more worthwhile to try to fix the things about me I think could be better (or accept them) than to cover them up.

I still catch myself sliding into my own version of The Hoss from time to time, but once I notice what I’m doing it’s easy to quash it. Just being self-aware enough to know what I’m doing is enough to stop me from doing it.

I’m grateful that I learned this lesson as early as I did. Others aren’t so lucky.

Photo: ChaoticGood01

“What if the doctor actually saw me at the time I came in for my appointment instead of making me wait for an hour?”

“What if I just kept walking west? What’s out there?”

“What if I quit my job to start a business or follow my dream?”

“What if I strapped a monkey to this rocket?”

I fight with “What if?” all the time. As much as it lets me dream big dreams and make plans for the future it also makes me fidgety and clouds my mind with doubt and impatience. And I’ve found that when I give myself over to doubt and impatience I start making bad, sometimes desperate decisions.

When starting a new project too much “What if?” without anything to counter it begins to feed fear and angst. It’s really rare that we ask ourselves “What if this goes amazingly well?” Instead, we tend to focus on “What if this goes horribly wrong?” Too much contingency planning and not enough play tends to make Jack a dull, immobile boy.

“What if?” seems to be most challenging to me when I feel like whatever I’m working on isn’t moving as swiftly or in the direction I would like it to go. By definition, the question is detached from reality. Asking “What if?” is in essence asking “What if this thing is not what it is?” which can quickly become non-sensical. So reality doesn’t matter when I start worrying. I am struck with the same anxiety whether I am playing guitar, writing, running, or trying to build my business. If the task hasn’t gone from zero to awesome in under six seconds I begin to get frustrated.

When I first picked up a guitar, I had to force myself to keep practicing. Not because the practice itself was difficult (although sometimes it is), but because I didn’t want to wait to get good at playing. I wanted to be as good as the guitarists I was listening to, folks that had been playing for years, as their full-time job.

It took a long time for me to calm down and figure out that I wasn’t horrible or naturally disinclined to play guitar, I was just new to it. It took time to get better. I wanted to go go go now, but I had to keep practicing and overcome all the doubt in my mind that kept creeping up and asking me “What if you suck at this forever?”

I think the real problem with “What if?” is that we rarely pair it with “What is?”, a much more practical question. Asking “What is the reality of this situation?” usually provides more immediately useful answers than “What if?”. If I had asked myself “What is?” when I first started playing guitar, I might have been a little more patient. I might have reminded myself that I had just started playing, there was no way I could reasonably expect to be immediately proficient.

If you’ve been following this blog, you might have seen some posts about the business I just started. I suffer from the same impatience with my business as I did with guitar, only amplified 100 times. “What if I don’t get more customers?” “What if they don’t pay me quickly enough?” “What if I fail and have to go back to work for someone else?” Coping with the doubt inherent in building a business is harder for me than making the decision to start in the first place.

I know that I’m doomed if I let those fearful questions consume my thoughts, so I’ve had to start addressing them by replacing “What if?” with “What is?” and by doing so, grounding myself in reality. The biggest difference between the two is that I can actually do something about what is. Focusing on “if” works for inspiring the direction of my actions, but it won’t put food on my plate.

Asking “What is?” is one of the most powerful fear-killers I know of. I use it as an emotional safety net. Bob Parsons (via Merlin Mann), the founder of GoDaddy, wrote something in one of his blog posts a few years ago that really rings true to me. He wrote:

With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be. Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of “undefined consequences.” My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, “Well, Robert, if it doesn’t work, they can’t eat you.”

I do my best to remind myself of that when I start getting fearful. “What is the worst thing than can happen if I fail?” – “Well, nobody is going to eat me, so I guess I’ll probably be OK.” It sounds silly, but I find it an immensely useful tidbit of wisdom. Somehow that answer makes it easier to get up in the morning and start charging down the tasks I’ve set in front of me. Even though there might be horrible screw-ups and mistakes during the day, at the end of it, no one is going to carve me up and eat me. That makes me feel better.