Stop the fear, start the awesome

In business and in life you normally stop, start or sustain. You stop bad habits, inappropriate behaviors or ineffective ways of doing things; you start new and more enriching approaches to your relationships, career or family life; you sustain projects that work, businesses that thrive or liaisons that yield positive results.  Your journey revolves around these three S’s. You travel through these lands, separately or simultaneously, and your every experience looks different compared to other people.

Every stride along your path, fear and doubt intimidate, frighten and pull you back to living an average life, but you can always face fear, escape “average,” do work that matters and be awesome. That essentially is the thesis of Start, an inspirational tome by bestselling author Jon Acuff, who started writing it as the result of a conversation with a grandmother on a plane, where he was asked: “What do you do when all your excuses for not chasing your dream are gone?” Acuff observed that it was a profoundly sad moment, because for the first time the grandma was looking back on her life and realizing it had passed her by. He started wondering how he could avoid the same situation; how he could get to 80 and not look back on life and realize he had missed his purpose.

Start is your tour companion through the best exploits of your life, through the terrains of learning, editing, mastering, harvesting, and guiding — what Acuff describes as the five-stage journey from average to awesome.

• Learning is where you start. It happens in your 20s — a time of experimentation and exploration when you try a lot of different paths and approaches. This is the decade of trying a thousand things, exploring a multitude of interests, and discovering what really motivates you. This is the period you rack up experience and start getting a sense of what works and doesn’t work for you.

• Editing is where you initiate applying sense to what you do. You edit in your 30s, the decade of sorting out interests, and discovering what you really care about and who you really are. This is the period where you start dropping the things that drain your energy or don’t fit your aptitudes and passions. It’s about getting focus and finding the work that allows you to be the best version of you, whatever that happens to be.

• Mastering is the time to invest in the best version of you. Your 40s are a period of mastering. This is the decade of narrowing focus, honing skill sets and becoming an expert in your field. It’s when you master your profession, your calling, and the particular brand of awesome that you’re after.

• Harvesting is reaping the rewards of all your learning, editing, and mastering. Your 50s are a period of collecting the benefits of good decisions and enjoying the highest income-earning period of your career. “Don’t confuse this with laying back,” Acuff warns. “Any farmer can tell you that harvest time is when you work the hardest. But it’s also the time rewards are the greatest. In this stage, you’ve never worked harder, nor have your efforts ever been more productive and satisfying.”

• Guiding is helping others on the path. Your 60s are a period of mentoring. This is the time to teach, train, and encourage younger men and women on their own road to success. “There are no walls between these stages,” Acuff says. “You might be in a place of heavy learning and just beginning to edit things down. You might be mastering an area and really seeing the harvest start to come in. Whenever we start, the point is to start. Anyone can do it at any time.”

• There are only two paths in life: average and awesome. The average path is easy because all you have to do is nothing. The awesome path is more challenging because things like fear only bother you when you do work that matters. You have your own unique definitions of awesome, and others also have theirs. Don’t get trapped following someone else’s definition. You’ll never be the best version of yourself if you’re always being a lesser version of someone else. Get real. Work is hard; it might as well be fun, too. There’s the story of a girl in Apple’s customer service. A job like hers was really hard, but she loved it. Her passion was solving problems and discovering new things. As far as she was concerned, helping people was what she was made for. To her, passion is king.

• You keep moving, dreaming, and working hard. The road to awesome tells you that you might have to ignore instances of logic in favor of the unrelenting hustle to pursue it. In fact, you may have multiple dreams and fulfilling each of those dreams might — or will — look different than you could ever have imagined. “The starting line is the only line you completely control,” Acuff says. “The start is the only moment you’re the boss of. The finish? Don’t kid yourself. That’s months, if not years, away.”

• Entitlement is a road blocker. Of the many things that will derail your journey to awesome, one that hurts a lot of people is entitlement, which is a really bad mindset. It’s like a ladder on the road. You walk up a few rungs and feel good about your elevated position. But you’ve stopped making progress on the road. Worse, the higher you climb, the more disconnected you are from reality. You’ve all known colleagues so high up the ladder they’re practically worthless to their team below. This will drain the awesome out of any area of life: work, marriage, and friendships. It’s a deadly distraction.

• It’s wrong to listen to the voices of fear and doubt. They try to keep you from pursuing awesome. They tell you that you’re not cut out for it, you’re not ready, you’re not prepared for it, or you’re too young or too old. But these voices lie. You have to debunk these lies and live in the reality that, yes, you can be awesome despite your fears, despite your doubts.

The voice of fear only gets loud when you’re doing something that matters. There are a lot of haters out there, and a lot of things that will try to crush your dream, including your own voice of fear. When you are dealing with fear, do two things: first, write your fears down. The minute you see your fears on paper, you usually realize how stupid they are. Second, share them with others. Fear and doubt like to make you feel alone. Find someone who can help you see what’s really going on and can encourage you.

• One of the worst things you can do is try to find your purpose in life. Not only does it put tremendous pressure on you, but it also paralyzes you and prevents you from starting anything else. The problem is that you think your purpose has to be perfect and that you only get one. Don’t be a fan of finding your purpose. Be a fan of living with purpose instead. Purpose is not a final destination. You don’t have to know the finish line before you cross the starting line. Purpose is attracted to motion, and if you start where you are, you’ll probably encounter purpose when you least expect it.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is start, but if you want to be in the “zone of awesomeness” you have to kick off with things you want to accomplish, move through the phases of your life feeling motivated to execute programs, events or changes that compel and challenge you. Remember, no matter where you are in your journey toward awesome, action always beats intention. Finish well!

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