FOR A LONG WHILE IN our society, enthusiasm was embarrassing. We tried to hide it. “Cool” was in; enthusiasm wasn’t.
Here’s an example. Originally, Jay Leno wanted to write his life story as it actually happened. He wanted to tell how enthusiastic he was about becoming a big-time comedian and star, and how much drive and purpose his life took on. He wanted to tell the world that anyone could have done his or her own version of it, and he wanted to link his success to hard, obsessive, concentrated, purposeful work.
So excited was Jay Leno about the power of the formula he had found for success that he wanted to call his autobiography, A Good Dog Will Run Till its Heart Explodes.
But slicker minds prevailed and the culture of the day won out. There was too much raw enthusiasm in the title A Good Dog Will Run Till its Heart Explodes. So they talked him into calling his book Leading With My Chin. Jay had an odd looking, very large chin, and it was “cooler” in this day and age to make fun of a physical defect than to praise a passion for succeeding and becoming great.
So Jay didn’t get to tell us the real uncool secret of his success: that something magical happens when one is willing to go for it. Instead, he presented a self-conscious, vulgar, self-deprecating autobiography full of cutesy stories that made him look sleazy and self-effacing, for a laugh. It wasn’t the real Jay Leno. He caved in to the shallow autobiography because purposeful, focused work was not politically correct. People think there can’t be any reason for such a passion for good work other than greed and ego; therefore it is always better to play it down. You don’t want to embarrass yourself.
Leno’s success, though, has been a tribute to focus. We secretly love how he did it. We are starting to lose patience with the scattered, distracted life brought about by massive appeals to comfort and ease. We’re tired of the electric toothbrush and the ubiquitous cell phone, and pop culture is beginning to reflect that: I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, “Hang Up and Drive!”
I believe that people are also tired of this political correctness that says hard work is greedy and enthusiasm for one’s career is just ego. I believe we secretly long for enthusiasm. That’s why enthusiasm is in the process of making a huge comeback.
People went to watch movies such as Jerry Maguire because when the actor Cuba Gooding, Jr., jumped around yelling, “Show me the money! Show me the money!” he was demonstrating raw enthusiasm, and we secretly loved it. The reason that phrase became so annoyingly popular was because someone was showing unembarrassed enthusiasm for something we are usually “cool” about: money.
In the Julia Roberts movie My Best Friend’s Wedding, an entire table of people together begins singing “I Say a Little Prayer for You” with such enthusiasm that the whole audience was overwhelmed. Some of us in the theater had tears in our eyes.
In Tom Hanks’s exuberant masterpiece That Thing You Do, the transcendent scene occurs when the kids in the rock band hear their song on the radio for the first time. Their unbridled excitement, running through the streets and stores, shouting and dancing for joy, makes the whole movie great.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic was a human embodiment of the concept of enthusiasm. His love of life transcended danger and death itself. It transformed lives. It was the secret inside the movie Titanic that made the music beautiful and lifted the feelings of the entire world. We like seeing proof that the heart will go on.
Enthusiasm is our secret passion.
People listen to Dick Vitale, not because of what he knows about college basketball, but because of how enthusiastic he feels about it.
Now we’re getting out of the house to go to movie theaters to see the thing we are missing most in our lives: enthusiasm. Tom Hanks in The Terminal inspires everyone with his innocent zest for life.
Notice that the most memorable and moving scenes in movies in recent years almost all involve people discarding their personalities and expressing pure spirit. We are paying good money to see that, because it’s exactly what we know we want more of in our own lives.
It was this enthusiasm for life that Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was urging his dying father to find when he said, “Do not go gentle into that good night / but rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek en theos, which means “the God within.” Getting connected to that part of us is the best experience we know.
Your feelings of enthusiasm will always be the result of an internal effort you have made, whether you’re aware of the effort or not. It is the result of something you’ve created through motion and movement, even if the movement is only in your spirit.
That “Yes!” feeling you get when you’re enthused is a result of moving up to a higher level of imagination and spirit, and the knowledge that you moved yourself there. Like the butterfly pushing through the cocoon. Like Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia in the early morning rain. That haunting musical theme to the movie Rocky became a part of our national history because it was about effort. Rocky was not about winning. Rocky didn’t even win his fight. It was about something more inspiring than that.
Knowing the way to your spirit is three-fourths of the battle: seeing it, knowing it, realizing it, and staying awake to it.
In my own life, I had a lot of problems early on in getting out of my victim thinking and into my owner thinking, because I just didn’t see how much I could do it. I thought I was trapped. The trap was tender, but it still felt like a trap. Inside the trap echoed the soft voice of the victim: “Well, what can you do? There’s nothing you can do.” But there was always a lot I could have done. I didn’t see it, that’s all.
To prove to yourself that there’s always something you can do, try this experiment: Take out a clean, lined sheet of paper. On the top of your sheet of paper, list a problem you now have, some situation you wish were not there, some frustrating situation that you think about a lot but don’t know what you can do about. I’m about to show you that your spirit knows.
Now, under the problem, write this sentence: “Five Small Things I Could Do About This Today.” Then number 1 through 5 on the page with space beneath each one for your ideas. Don’t get up until you’ve written the five things. Force yourself to write something.
Once you’ve written the five ideas, take the paper with you throughout the day and don’t go to bed until all five things are done. Remember: These are little things you can do.
By the time you’re finished, you will be surprised at how you have altered the nature of your problem. In many cases, you will have solved it completely. In other cases, you will see in your mind that it is no longer a problem, but, instead, a new project. A work in progress.
Do this a few times and you’ll start to see what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “The more you do, the more you can do.”
And why is that? It’s because you have reinvented yourself from victim to owner. You had been a victim of the big, cloudy, unruly problem. And then you became the owner of a project that you yourself created. When you listed the five small things you could do, you turned it into your own intellectual property.