Your life has been a mad gamble. Make it more so. You have lost now a hundred times running. Roll the dice a hundred and one.
—Rumi
I once told my boys some stories about Dickie Shoehorn. (Where did that name come from? I have no idea. But I love it. It still makes me laugh.)
I told them about the time Dickie went to his friend Joe’s birthday party and gave him a helmet but it turns out Joe had a massive head so all the boys spent the rest of the time trying to fit that small helmet on that huge noggin, including dropping Joe off his roof headfirst while some of them held the helmet upside down on the ground.
I told them about the time Dickie was staying at his uncle Vince’s house and was so excited about the cereal he was eating that he said he would swim in a pool of it if he could. Which is what Uncle Vince did, draining his swimming pool and then filling it with milk and cereal so Dickie could swim in it. Dickie learned that day that you actually can have too much of a good thing.
I told them stories about Dickie riding his bike and Dickie going to his favorite record store and making friends with squirrels—there was no end to Dickie’s adventures.
At the end of a particularly good Dickie story we would shout, DICKIE LIVES!
After a year or so of making up Dickie stories, I thought, I should write these stories down.
So I typed one of them up and after working on it for a while, I showed it to my friend Alan who’s a cartoonist. I told Alan all about Dickie and described some of the adventures Dickie had recently been on, and then I asked him if he’d draw me Dickie Shoehorn. And here’s the amazing thing: Alan’s drawing of Dickie looked exactly like Dickie.
I was so thrilled.
Alan then illustrated one of my Dickie stories. It came out better than I ever could have expected.
Then I tried to get the book published. I showed it to some publishers, telling them how this story was the first in a series called “The Adventures of Dickie Shoehorn.” I talked about the potential for an ongoing cartoon show. I sent them the picture that would go on the home page of the website. I described the T-shirts we’d make with Dickie Lives! printed in big letters on the front. I had so many ideas. This was Dickie Shoehorn, after all, and what we’ve learned from Dickie is that life is an adventure and all sorts of things are possible . . .
But nobody was interested. Not one publisher. No one had even the slightest interest in seeing Dickie live.
And so I put the book in a file in a crate in my garage, and that’s where it’s been to this day.
Whenever you create anything, you take a risk. And that includes your life.
It may work out, it may not.
It may be well received, it not may not be.
Sometimes you do things and you get results and that effort leads to more effort which leads to more results and away you go, success building on success. And then other times you try something new and it ends up in a crate in your garage because no one is interested.
Whoever you are and whatever your ikigai is and however you move in the world, it always involves risk.
Often when we face our blinking line the first thought that comes to mind is,
This is risky.
Which is true. It’s always a risk to take action. It might not work, it might blow up in your face, you might lose money, you might fail. No one may get it.
But that’s not the only risk.
There’s another risk: the risk of not trying it.
How is not trying a risk? You risk settling and continuing in the same direction in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.
I remember asking a man with a Ph.D. who has had the same job for more than a decade what keeps him inspired in his work, and he sighed and said, Well, not much—once or twice a year I hear something that’s kind of encouraging . . .
You could see in his eyes as he said this that he’s bored, weary, cynical—somewhere along the way he settled, buying into the lie that this must be as good as it gets.
There are always two risks. There’s the risk of trying something new, and there’s the risk of not trying it.
You may write the book and no one is interested. You may decide not to write the book and then find yourself wondering, What if I had made that book . . . ?
Either way there’s risk. And sometimes stepping out and trying something new is actually the less risky thing to do.
The question is,
What are the two risks here?
and then,
Which path is actually less risky?
Deep Waters
There is a place within each of us that is the source of our life—it’s the well, the tank, the engine, the overflow in our soul that we live from. In the wisdom of Proverbs it’s the place in our being where the waters run deep.
Sometimes this place is overflowing with life, and sometimes it feels drained and empty. Certain actions and ways of life choke it and starve it and smother it; others cause it to hum with life and vitality.
My friend Chris had an idea for a new business. He and a friend resigned from their jobs, rented a small room with two desks, and then sat there every day starting that business from scratch.
He didn’t know if it was going to work,
he had no guarantees,
he just sat there, day after day, working.
He didn’t make any money that first year. He worked every day for a year and didn’t make one dollar.
And yet he was more alive than ever.
It’s possible to have emptied your savings account and be living in your friend’s basement riding your bike everywhere because you can’t afford a car and yet feel like you’re bursting with vitality.
It’s also possible to have lots of money in the bank, living in the house you had custom built, going on expensive vacations to exotic places, and yet you’re miserable.
When you are bored,
restless,
longing for something more,
unfulfilled,
feeling like you’ve settled,
haunted by the sense of being trapped in your own life, these are the deep waters of your soul speaking to you, telling you something is wrong, something is missing, something needs to change.
It’s written in Proverbs that it takes insight to draw out those deep waters in your heart.
Sometimes we don’t take the risk because of something that happened in the past. We tried something and it blew up in our face and so whenever there’s a new opportunity all we can think about is what happened back then.
Is this you? Are you dying where you are right now but unable to take a leap forward because it seems too risky?
If you stay there, you may continue to feel like you’re dying—
now that is risky.
Failure
Risk sometimes leads to failure, and failure is overrated.
Your business went bankrupt, but when you talk about it years later you realize how much you learned from the experience, how much it humbled you, how much it realigned your priorities, how much it made you a better person.
It was bad, but it also produced an extraordinary amount of good in your life.
You went through a divorce and it left all sorts of scars, but you are a far more compassionate and courageous person because of that experience. Your marriage ended, and yet that ending started something new in your life. It was awful, but what has come out of it has been good.
Your friend died of cancer and to this day you miss her, and yet her death woke you up to the incredible gift that your life is. . . . It was so sad, and yet you now live with so much more gratitude.
You tried something new and made a complete mess of it, but now you don’t live with that nagging question, What if I had tried . . . ?
You now know. You weren’t successful at it, and yet it was something you needed to try.
You failed,
and yet that failure made you a better person.
You failed,
but it worked in your favor.
You failed,
but it made you stronger, more resilient, more appreciative.
You failed,
but it created all sorts of new life and growth and maturity in you.
You failed,
but you’re now realizing that failure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
This is the beautiful, counterintuitive, strange, unexpected, reliable mystery built into the fabric of creation that is at work every time we fail.
You tried.
You leaped.
You took a chance.
You risked.
You paid attention to your deep waters, and you came to the conviction that trying this is where the life is, and so you did it.
That is not failure. That is how you create a life.
You try things and you make things with the awareness that you are always taking risks. Whether you are trying something new or doing the exact same thing, it’s all risky.
Failure is simply another opportunity to learn.
Another opportunity to explore, to grow, to find out who you are.
You try this.
You try that.
Some things go great.
Others crash and burn.
When you do crash and burn, ask yourself lots of questions about whatever it is that happened:
What can you learn here?
How will you see things differently moving forward?
Why did I do that?
leads to,
What have I learned?
leads to,
How will I do it differently in the future?
What you would have called a failure becomes another opportunity for increased clarity about who you are and what you’re doing here.
Alive
The truth is, you want risk.
Not too much that it overwhelms you, but some.
You want some risk in your life.
Risk is where the life is.
One morning I was at the gym near our house when I overheard a man telling his friend that he was going to be DJ’ing on the local radio station that night. He was holding a barbell in each hand, working his biceps, saying to his friend that he had some butterflies in his stomach because he had never DJ’d live on the air before and he was really excited about it.
How many people actually listen to a local radio station?
Who cares?
He was alive.
A little nervous.
Not quite sure how it would go.
Chatting with his friend about his big opportunity.
We love to believe that we are sophisticated, refined people with good taste and a calm, reasoned view of the world. But we’re also very, very simple: We want a little risk in our lives because it keeps things interesting. It wakes us up, it gives us a sense that we’re alive and breathing and doing something with our lives.
So did I fail when I made that Dickie Shoehorn book?
Of course not.
Because—say it with me now—
DICKIE LIVES!