What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.
—Stephen King
I once had an idea for a book called Fire in the Wine.
I had a big black sketchbook on my shelf and I had this insight about the human body and soil and the food we eat and how when we die we’re buried in the earth, which is what we do with seeds that then grow into the food that we consume that sustains our bodies that will be buried when we die . . . so I made a drawing to represent all of that.
It was just one sketch.
And then a few months later I came across a quote which somehow connected with that drawing that I had copied on the next page of that big black sketchbook.
And then something happened to me that reminded me of that first sketch and that quote which connected to something I’d read in a magazine around that time.
This continued for several years until I could see a book emerging on the pages of that sketchbook, a book I decided to call Fire in the Wine. As I began to organize the content of Fire in the Wine into chapters I realized that I needed to do some reading to give more breadth and depth to the ideas I was working on. So I read. And read. And read. Thousands of pages. And whenever I came across something that spurred a thought or clarified something I’d been thinking about, I underlined it or marked the page. I then went back through those books and took notes on what I’d underlined, copying each idea onto a 3×5 card.
Which took months.
I then laid all those cards out on the floor and looked for patterns and connections and common threads. There were a lot of those cards, and so just out of curiosity I started counting them. I lost track somewhere past six hundred.
Once the cards were organized, I started writing the book, crafting the chapters, creating the introduction, working on the first draft.
Which took months.
I turned in that first draft to my editor, who visited me a few weeks later to talk about the book—the book that, he informed me, didn’t appear to have a clear point.
I then rearranged the entire thing, moving the start to the end and the end to the beginning.
Which took months.
Months in which it became clear that the book wasn’t really about fire in the wine, it was about something else. I kept using a phrase that I didn’t realize I was repeating until my editor pointed it out. That phrase seemed like it should be the title of the book, so I changed the name of the book. Changing the name then shifted some of the central themes, which meant I had to go back through and rearrange the entire book, moving the quantum physics part to the beginning and organizing the rest of the book around seven central themes.
Which took months.
By the fifth draft, I had lost my way. I couldn’t figure out how to take all that content and make it flow. It was like I had all the notes but no melody. I’d sit there and stare at the computer screen for hours, trying to figure out how to make it flow.
Some days I’d write one new sentence.
One.
Other days I’d write one new sentence, and then, at the end of the day, I’d delete that one sentence.
Many, many mornings—by this point well over a year of mornings—I’d get up and make my kids breakfast and take them to school and then I’d sit down at my desk and go through the book AGAIN, looking for even the slightest bit of help to find a way forward.
And that’s when the head games started. You know about head games—those voices in your head, questioning who you are and what you’re doing. Telling you you’re no good.
This was the sixth book I’d written, so you’d think it wouldn’t have been so hard. But it was. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever made. It didn’t matter that I’d done it before. It didn’t matter that I’d done months and months of outlining and arranging. It didn’t matter that I cared deeply about the content.
The blinking line can be brutal.
Because the blinking line doesn’t just taunt you with all the possibilities that are before you, the potential, all that you sense could exist but isn’t yet because you haven’t created it. The blinking line also asks a question:
Who are you to do this?
And that question can be paralyzing. It can prevent us from overcoming inertia. It can cause crippling doubt and stress. It can keep us stuck on the couch while life passes us by.
Out of Your Head
To answer the question, Who are you to do this?,
you first have to get out of your head.
I use this phrase out of your head because that’s where it’s easy to get stuck. Somewhere between our hearts and our minds is an internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we think and feel and believe. It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on “repeat,” these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.
To get out of your head, it’s important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one:
Who you aren’t isn’t interesting.
You have a list of all the things you aren’t, the things you can’t do, the things you’ve tried that didn’t go well. Regrets, mistakes that haunt you, moments when you crawled home in humiliation. For many of us, this list is the source of a number of head games, usually involving the words,
Not _________ enough.
Not smart enough,
not talented enough,
not disciplined enough,
not educated enough,
not beautiful, thin, popular, or hardworking enough,
you can fill in the __________.
Here is the truth about those messages:
They aren’t interesting.
What you haven’t done,
where you didn’t go to school,
what you haven’t accomplished,
who you don’t know and what you are scared of
simply aren’t interesting.
I’m not very good at math. If I get too many numbers in front of me I start to space out.
See? Not interesting.
If you focus on who you aren’t, and what you don’t have, or where you haven’t been, or skills or talents or tools or resources you’re convinced aren’t yours, precious energy will slip through your fingers that you could use to do something with that blinking line.
In the same way that who you aren’t isn’t interesting when it comes to getting out of your head,
who “they” are isn’t interesting.
We all have our they—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, superstars who appear to skate by effortlessly while we slog it out. They are the people we fixate on, constantly holding their lives up to our life, using their apparent ease and success as an excuse to hold back from doing our work and pursuing our path in the world.
Siblings who don’t have to study and still get better grades. Brothers-in-law who make more money without appearing to work very hard. Friends who have kids the same age as ours and yet they never seem stressed or tired and always look great.
There’s a moving moment in one of the accounts of Jesus’s life where he’s reunited with one of his disciples, a man named Peter. (I started out as a preacher, and so these stories are in my blood.) Peter is the disciple who had denied that he even knew Jesus earlier in the story, and you can feel his relief when Jesus forgives him, telling him he has work for Peter to do.
And how does Peter respond to this powerful moment of reconciliation?
He points to one of Jesus’s other disciples and asks, What about him?
All Peter can think about is someone else’s path. He’s with Jesus, having a conversation, and yet his mind is over there, wondering about John.
Peter asks,
What about him?
and Jesus responds,
What is that to you?
Comparisons
In the movie Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld runs into a young comedian named Orny Adams backstage at a club where they are both performing and Orny says to him,
“You get to a point where you’re like ‘How much longer can I take it?’”
Jerry is utterly perplexed by Orny’s sentiment, asking, “What—is time running out?”
Orny then begins a litany of complaints and excuses—“I’m getting older. . . . I feel like I’ve sacrificed so much of my life.”
Jerry is amazed, “Is there something else you would rather have been doing? Other appointments or places you gotta be?”
Then Orny pulls out a new line of complaints: “I see my friends are making a lot of money. . . . Did you ever stop and compare your life? Okay, I’m twenty-nine and my friends are all married and they all have kids and houses. They have some sort of sense of normality. What do you tell your parents?”
Jerry’s response: “Are you out of your mind? . . . This has nothing to do with your friends. It’s such a special thing. This has nothing to do with making it.”
I love those lines from Seinfeld:
This has nothing to do with your friends.
It’s such a special thing.
This has nothing to do with making it.
Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else’s life and how it compares with yours.
We each have our own life, our own blinking line, and every path has its own highs and lows, ups and downs, joys, challenges, and difficulties.
When you compare yourself with others, you have no idea what challenges they are facing.
Bruce Springsteen struggled for years with depression. What? The Boss? His shows are three hours long, leaving everybody wondering, How does he do that? Bruce Springsteen, who seems to never run out of energy, who’s thriving more than ever in his sixties?
Yes. The Boss has had his struggles. Everybody does.
We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don’t know about someone else.
You have your life.
And your life is not her life. Or his life.
And his life is not yours,
and neither is hers.
Is there any way in which you’ve been asking,
What about them?
when the better question is,
What is that to you?
There will always be someone who’s smarter than you.
There will always be someone with more raw talent than you.
There will always be someone more experienced and better qualified and harder working and stronger and more articulate and more creative with more stamina who can sing better than you can.
But who you aren’t isn’t interesting.
And who they are isn’t interesting when it comes to who you are and what your path is.
The You Experiment
That question the blinking line asks,
Who are you to do this?
can keep you locked up for years, living in fear and
doubt, looking over your fence or your shoulder,
comparing yourself with the people around you.
But the first word about you is gift,
and you’re here and you’re breathing,
and you get to take part in the ongoing creation of
the world. Creation is exhausting and exhilarating
and draining and invigorating and it’s also a mystery
because
everybody sits down to a blank page.
Or business plan.
Or test or experiment or meeting or deal.
Or child or job or life.
Especially those who have done it before.
The more you do the work, the more you build muscles for that particular work. From shaping metal to forming paragraphs to arguing a case to doing research to making spreadsheets to arranging the parts for the violins to play to organizing staff to raising a child—you can acquire skills and then improve on them as you do the work year after year. This growing technique and expertise can help you create and build and act with more ease and excellence, but it cannot help you avoid the blank page.
This is true for rocket scientists and actors and doctors, and it’s also true for parents and for people who work in restaurants and for your insurance agent.
Whoever you are and whatever work you do, no one has ever lived your life with your particular challenges and possibilities.
No one has ever raised that child before, even if you’ve raised two already.
No one has ever worked in that particular office before with its peculiar mix of personalities and challenges.
No one has ever taken care of that patient at this moment with these particular challenges.
“You” hasn’t been attempted before.
It can be intimidating when you look around and see the superstars in whatever field you’re in doing their thing. You see the tremendous momentum they gain from success after success and it can easily plant the question in your heart, Why should I even try?
Or you can see it another way.
It can be intimidating, or it can be liberating, because if everybody starts with a blank page, then everybody starts from the same place.
This is the great mystery of creation: something comes out of nothing. Whatever it is—a school, a business, a treatment program, a sculpture, a network, a family, a relationship, a strategy—it didn’t exist, and then it did exist, because someone brought it into existence.
When you say “yes” to your life and your path and your work in the world, you are entering into this mystery of creation, a mystery in which everybody starts with a blank page, and “everybody” includes you.
Now, let’s pause and take a breath.
You’ve been given this gift of life.
You were not given his gift or her gift.
You were given your gift.
Is there any way that you’ve been looking over your shoulder or over your fence, comparing your life with someone else’s?
Is there any way in which you wish you had someone else’s life?
Is there any way in which you are not throwing yourself into your life because you’re convinced that you could never do it as well as so-and-so does it?
Is there any way in which the blank page that is your life has got you stuck, terrified, asking that soul-crushing question,
Who am I to do this?
There is a new question,
a better question,
a question that will help you to be here.
The new question is this:
Who am I not to do this?
(Who am’n’t I?)