Follow your bliss.
Pursue your passion.
Do what you love.
Right?
Easy right? I mean, I must subscribe to these ideas to some degree… I have made this sentiment into artwork which features on two t-shirts, a poster and a calendar!
And, to a point… I do believe this, but…
I also believe it’s an incredibly incomplete tip; a part of a larger truth (that maybe doesn't fit onto a mug).
For instance do what you love is great if you know what you love to do.
Follow your bliss sounds delightful, but something tells me it’s the mantra of those contestants from those singing competition shows, you know the ones, they sound like cats with laryngitis screeching out a Ricky Martin song. I can hear them now:
“I’ve given everything to this, It means everything to me, I don’t know how to do anything else! This is my passion!!”
As crazy as they sound, in many ways, following my passion did pay off for me...
I’ve given this conundrum so much thought, it’s ridiculous.
Although, I am extremely prone to being an ‘overthinker’, I feel I’ve made some headway on how to enhance this advice, to a place where it actually solves problems.
Whether you are stuck in a job, not doing creative work of any kind...
stuck doing creative work you don’t want to be doing...
or you feel like you've hit a ceiling in a creative pursuit that used to feel fulfilling...
I think it’s time to find your Pencil in the Stone.
You’ve Got to Want Something
“There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
This post could be titled “Confession: I freaking love Harry Potter”.
Growing up I read 4 of the books, then went to high school and decided that it wasn’t going to help me advance my pursuit of being a ladies man (news flash: I didn’t succeed in that pursuit even though I quit reading harry potter books, lesson? NEVER STOP READING HP).
A few years back my wife and I binged watched all the HP movies while on Christmas holiday.
It was then, that my true crazy fandom was birthed. After the last film I was so shaken up… there was a hole in my soul, the story was over… :(
I laid in bed, and as silly as it sounds, I couldn’t help thinking: why the heck do a I like this so much!?!?
I started to research this ‘hero story’.
You know: Luke Skywalker, Neo... Jesus!
These stories have always deeply resonated with me… and I wanted to know why!
Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung have a lot to say on the subject, if you want to read more about it, I suggest checking out their work on the topic.
After much thought and research, here’s my (possibly less profound than Campbell's or Jung's) conclusion, Mariah Carey was right: a hero lies in you.
Alright, I’m kidding about the Mariah Carey part, but seriously, I believe these stories cut us to our core, change our cultural landscapes, and ultimately change our lives because they speak to something innate about what it means to be human.
Carl Jung calls it the 'Hero Archetype'. He says it’s lodged in the part of our brain that we all have in common, the collective unconscious.
I believe it’s more than that. I believe our lives are all hero stories waiting to be told.
Sounds great, who doesn’t want to be a hero?
"Look around Andy, I don't see many 'hereos'" you may say.
I believe that's because we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing.
Forces of evil (aka facebook) keep us distracted and confused.
I believe we don’t know which path to take, we don’t know what it is we want.
So we go nowhere. We stay put.
Every hero journey starts the same way: the hero wants something...something very specific.
Neo wants to free the minds of the world from the agents.
Luke wants to defeat the Empire.
Harry Potter wants to stop Voldemort.
Andy wants to invent a 0 calorie pepperoni and goat cheese pizza… (you can’t always get what you want).
But what do you do if you can't figure out which path to give your everything to?
Without this burning solitary desire, you will not accomplish anything worthwhile.
Every hero has a blinding white hot passion for one narrow desire. The goal that only they can accomplish...
All you need to do is find yours.
Like King Arthur and his sword, where is the pencil that only you can pull from the stone? What is the creative work that only you can do?
Sounds magical, right? A little too magical maybe??? I agree… let’s stick a pin in that thought, I’ll explain further down, for now let me just tell you a secret: I'm kind of a fool.
Before you allow me to be your Morpheus, I should let you know: I’m kind of an idiot.
Sometimes I think even the king of the idiots (George Costanza) has got nothing on me, baby.
For instance a few years back I had this "amazing" idea.
I was living in England at the time, in the countryside of Yorkshire. Beautiful landscape, giant rolling hills covered in green grass, pastures segregated by stone fences. Old churches and houses lining winding roads, dictated by the topography of the land.
In this time in my life I had become a ‘jogger’. Jogging is where you just run for an extended period of time.
On one occasion, right as I started my jogging routine, miles away in the distance, beyond giant hills and several towns, I could see a giant tower. It wasn’t a special tower. I mean it didn’t have a giant eye at the top or anything, just a standard radio tower.
That sweet mug in the photo is by my friend Jason Sturgill btw. Buy it here.
This is where I had my brilliant idea: I’m going to run to that tower.
And I did, and it was glorious…
All along the way I continued to shoot for the tower. If I took a wrong turn, or I hit a dead end, I would look up where the tower was in relation to myself, and readjust.
I didn’t have a map. I didn’t need one.
With this giant marker in the distance, this clear desire, it was incredibly easy to find my destination, even with minor setbacks and wrong turns.
The pencil in the stone is your marker. Your one desire, your tower in the distance.
If you think I am overstating this, let’s get back to me being an idiot:
My plan on finding the tower was flawless, but you may see where I’m going with this, and in the words of the comedian Mike Birbiglia, I see where it’s going too, because I’m in the future also.
I didn’t have a plan for getting back to my house.
My house was now just a vague blip on the horizon in the opposite direction.
I didn’t have a phone.I didn’t know even one phone number by memory.
I didn’t inform anyone that I would be running to this tower.
And it took me so long to get to the tower, it was now nightfall.
Like I said, I’m an idiot.
When your goals and creative pursuits are a vague blip on the horizon, you are in trouble.
Back to all this feeling a bit like silly warm fuzzy magic.
On the logic v.s. magic spectrum. I definitely fall into the ‘magic side’ of thinking.
I love the invisible, the spiritual, the imaginary… but it has got me into trouble more than once (did I tell you about the time I randomly ran to a tower?)
Follow your bliss is all well and good, but it’s a bit too fuzzy.
Following your bliss too far and you might end up in a back alley in North Dakota, trading your 401k for a handful of magic beans from a guy name Skippy LaRoux.
Like I said, I’ve fallen for the magic too many times. I have enough magic beans to make one of those overstuffed Chipotle burritos. Mmm Chipolte is kind of magic...
I’m not the only one who has seen the flaws in this ideology. Many of us are so fed up with it that if one more person says ‘do what you love’ we’re gonna slap them.
Before we burn ‘do what you love’ at the stake along with all the other magical mumbo jumbo, let’s remember the words of Martin Luther
"Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other."
When we fall off one side of the horse, we shouldn’t get back up with such gusto that we fall off the other side.
Maybe we don't need to throw out the magic of life, just need to balance it a bit.
What if there is a way to take this magic and balance it with logic? What if we don’t have to choose one or the other?
The Sweet Spot just got Sweeter
I know, that title sounds like a Mcdonald’s tagline for an ad for extra sweet tea, but stick with me.
The idea that your sweet spot, your path, can be found at the center point of your passions, skill and a demand in the market is not a new idea.
It’s actually an amazing idea that has been passed around by great minds for some time now.
I love the idea, but I’ve always had a sense that it was missing something.
It leaned a little too far over into the logic category for me. It missed that mysterious force in life that can’t be explained, and shouldn’t be ignored.
This bugged me. I started to think hard about how to balance this equation.
We know that being lead by money or marketing completely, will not lead you where you need to go, but ignoring it is a bad idea too.
Then it hit me, the balance to the demand in the market, to looking outside yourself, is looking inside yourself. It’s listening to your gut, it’s hearing your calling.
To make this as simple as possible, I developed a rudimentary tool / system.
My guess is that it’s not that you can’t think of one desire to pursue, my guess is that you don’t know which to give your everything to.
Any goal worth giving your life to needs to be very significant, and any truly significant goal requires giving it your all.
List out the top 5 - 10 choices, then on a scale from logic to magic, grade these choices, by just applying values that come from your gut.
Grade them with these scales, Skills v.s. Passion and Demand v.s. Calling.
This is how the scale works:
Skill 5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5 Passion
0 being something you are equally skilled and passionate about. A 5 on the left hand side is something you are very skilled at, but not very passionate about.
Do this for the Demand v.s. Calling.
A 5 on the Demand side is something where there is a giant gap in the market, but you don't feel called at all to it.
Here’s where it gets juicy. The pencil in the stone CHART!
Plot your points. I scored a 1 towards Passion in Kids Books, and a 1 towards Calling. So I plot that 1,1 in the Calling / Passion quadrant.
Editorial Illustration is a 2 towards Passion, 2 towards Demand. I plot 2,2 in the Demand / Passion quadrant.
Now we’ve taken all the logic / magic out of your swirling mind, and down to paper.
The thing or few things that land closest to your center point, or your inner circle of higher truth™ ; ) is your Pencil in the Stone. This is your path.
Take that, Magic! (as in: Eat that, Magic! or In Your Face, Magic! Magic hates to be pinned down to paper like a math problem!)
Pencil in the Stone Cheatsheet:
Skills - Either your natural talents or things that you’ve learned. These are undeniable things that you possess, that put you ahead of others in some way.
Passion - These are your interests, the things that you can not get enough of. When you are spending time in this area, you lose track of time, you feel euphoria.
Demand - Basically you are looking for areas where there are industries and markets. Directions in which there are actual existing careers that have real career paths.
Calling - This is that thing in your gut that says ‘I was born to do this thing’. Your calling is your ‘why’, it’s always benefits others, it’s selfless and true.
I didn’t always have this tool, but looking back I've realized that my best pursuits have resulted from this thinking. Some amazing things have come from it in my life. Although I still have miles to go to succeed in my biggest desires, this thinking has dramatically helped me sort through all the confusion, gain clarity, and achieve my goals.
I used to be massively jealous of Neo, Harry Potter & the other 'chosen ones'.
I mean they had a prophecy! Everyone believed in them! It was foretold that they would succeed!
I’ve often struggled to stay motivated on my path, worrying that I wasn’t cut out for the job.
Damn you Harry Potter! You had it so easy!
Then I realized, we are all in the same boat.
Ok, I may not be the ‘chosen one’, but we share the same struggle.
The one thing that caused Luke, Neo and Harry to stumble was this: failing to believe in themselves.
It doesn’t matter if everyone else believes, if you don't believe you're the one.
It doesn’t matter if everyone believes you will succeed, if you don’t believe it.
As Zig Ziglar says, the kid who doesn’t believe he can pass the test, doesn’t study.
Trust Mariah, a hero really does lie in you.
I believe if you’re still on this earth, you have a mission, and you have everything inside of you that you need to fulfill this mission.
Don’t) Just Keep Swimming
If you’re heading the wrong way, but you just keep at it, stick-to-it-iveness / true grit isn't helping you, it's it's hurting you! You’re not making progress, you’re regressing.
If you’re on the wrong path, Dory’s advice is only going to make things worse.
Sometimes I think this truth is what keeps us heading in the wrong direction.
I’ve gone too far to turn back now!
Luckily I believe the universe is like my dad. Let me explain.
So there I was, at dusk, standing at the foot of this radio tower.
Cool tower, now what? Oh crap… I thought to myself.
I decided to try to retrace my path to find my way home.
I'll tell you a secret about old houses, rolling hills and stone fences: they all look exactly the same.
But, I just kept swimming.
I had blisters, it was raining (no duh, it’s England), it was the dead of night, I was now on an unlit backroad that had initially looked familiar, but I now knew I had never seen it before.
I should have given up earlier, when there were still houses around. I could have knocked on a door.
But it had been too daunting. What was I going to say?
“Hi I live in Thurstonland, I don’t know where that is, in relation to here, and I don’t have any phone numbers, so you will have to drive me there.”
Imagine if a foreign man drenched in rain and sweat, in a cut off shirt and shorts showed up on your doorstep with this request.
I didn’t want to deal with the shame.
Admitting you don’t know where you are going is very very hard.
There I was in the pitch black, walking for miles, with no plan, no clue.
A car passed by, which gave me an idea! I could wave down a car!
Damn it, I wish I’d had thought of this before that one car passed by! I thought.
I kept walking. I was actually really scared at this point, to be perfectly honest, I was panicking.
Then, up on the horizon I could see a new set of lights. I started to act like a mad man, trying to wave the car to the side of the road, in hindsight I realize acting like a crazy person on a side road in the dead of night is not the best way to get someone to help you, but... it worked!
He wouldn’t let me in the car (smart dude), but he did let me use his phone.
I didn’t know any numbers… but I decided to take a leap of faith.
I dug into my subconscious. Plucked the only phone number I could cobble together. Dialed.
I got lucky: my dad answered.
You see, I expected my dad to say “What were you thinking! You could have been killed! What’s wrong with!”
Not because I have a bad dad, but because that would have been the rational response to this silly adventure.
He didn’t say that. He was nearly in tears, he had called the police. He was desperately worried.
The man pointed me in the direction of a local pub, my dad drove there.
As silly as it sounds, even with all the blisters and my aching legs, I ran to my dad, and he ran to me. We were both crying. Maybe there wasn't any real danger, but in the moment it felt very epic.
I have good news. I believe the universe is like my dad.
We think when we’ve gone the wrong way, and we give up and turn around we have to travel this giant distance back to the start, walking in shame all the while, but I believe if you take that leap of faith, and you turn around, the universe will use all that you learned on the wrong path, and give you a head start on the true path.
When you start on the true path, you'll actually do better having gone the wrong way, then having started on the right path from the beginning.
So here’s my challenge: turn around.
Go find your Pencil in the Stone.
