Good Life Project - You Are Enough

Episode Date: May 6, 2016

Funny thing about competence. With rare exception, we so often look at others and think they've got it so much more together than us.They're more skilled, smarter, more established, more connected, better able to do the thing we most want to do.Except, it's almost always a lie.We're all in that same "looking at the person ahead of us and wishing" boat. Thinking someday we'll get there. Or, maybe giving up and wondering how do we just be okay being okay.When we determine our own self-worth, happiness or sense of fulfillment in comparison to others, we always lose. Because we're comparing our insides to their outsides. And, even if we knew their insides, they're not us.So, here's the thing.This day. This moment. We ARE enough. You Are Enough.That's what this week's short and sweet GLP Riff is all about. And, it's a response to a listener email we recently received. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So today's Good Life Project riff is actually a question from one of our awesome listeners, and somebody who I've actually known for a number of years. It comes from Kristen, and she writes, these are her words, obviously you're a really intelligent person, and by the way, these are my words. I don't actually see myself that way at all. So let me continue with the accolades and experiences to back you up. I noticed that those with a big following your peers in the online world were also super smarty pants in school graduating on top of their classes too. I'm smart, there's no doubt yet. I wasn't at the tippy top of my class. My writing is good, but nowhere near as profound as yours, which means my mind isn't as profound. What advice do you have for people who are smart, but not necessarily genius to create

a tribe like you have done? I'm looking for a new perspective on this. I don't know that I'll ever have the profound wisdom you seem to embody, which means my stuff isn't really going to stand out from the crowd. And I'm so bad at the social media game. I can't rely upon that to generate a tribe. I fear I'll be forced into slimy marketing tactics because I don't have the brain it takes to create truly genius content. So, all right, first I need to deconstruct this. My entire life, I have felt like I am the stupid person in the room. And that has probably forced me to work really hard, but not in the early days. So there's some interesting assumptions in what you're sharing. I was a pretty non-remarkable student for the better part of my

life until I hit law school. And I realized that I had squandered a lot of opportunities, and I was capable of more than I thought. And then I worked incredibly hard to actually excel. But until then, I was a solid, probably, C student. And I didn't perform well at all. And my entire life, including to this day, while I've definitely learned a lot and developed a certain amount of smarts, I still look around me and you know i have the i have the relative thing i have the comparison thing you know i look at all these people and i still struggle to this day with this sense of wow they're so much smarter than me and so much more capable than me you know when i go to somewhere social i'm an introvert and i'm more and more comfortable moving into a room full of people i don't know but still it's not my space and I look at people who can move into those spaces and own the rooms. And I'm always in awe and I feel massively incompetent in those spaces. So first, just deconstructing a little bit of from the outside looking in, that's actually not my reality from the inside looking out. And many of the

people that I know that you're probably speaking about in the quote, online space, actually feel the same. Not all of them. I have some friends with very, very healthy intact egos. But for sure, I think very often we compare our outsides to somebody else's insides. And that's not my language, by the way, but I can't remember who first told that to me. And when we do that, we pretty much always lose because we create a perception of perfection in their lives, or perception of they're smarter than me, or better than me, or more accomplished, or more skilled. And very often, that's just, you know, not entirely the case. I want to sort of

speak to the second part of this too, which is that, you know, my writing is good. I'm quoting here again, my writing is good, but nowhere near as profound as yours, which means my mind isn't as profound. And while I struggle with language like this so deeply because, number one, I can see that's just causing a lot of angst and anxiety and pain. And it's so not true. It is absolutely so not true. There's not a human being that I ever met that does not have a profound well of grace and intelligence and love and heart and gifts and talents. So when you talk about writing, if you look back 20 years, I'm pretty sure you would, and you asked me to write something, you would have said I was not a writer that you would have felt worth reading. But I've invested fiercely, fiercely, fiercely in developing my craft, my 10,000 hours plus many, many, many, many, many thousands beyond that. The book that I just finished and handed in the manuscript to my publisher, I had to write three completely different manuscripts before they accepted it to get it right. And that's my third book. So when you look behind the scenes, what you don't find is just this natural, organic sense

of ease and mastery. What you find is struggle, just like everybody else, and time, time in the game. So if you feel like you found your medium, if you feel like you would love to be a fantastic writer or a fantastic interviewer, podcaster on video or artist or illustrator, and you realize, you know, you're just, you're nowhere near that right now, but you really, really feel inside of you that that's the way you want to express yourself, then what I would say is double down on that. Like, make that a massive priority in your life, and reset expectations to allow yourself the gift of time. There was, I'm trying to remember where Derek

Sivers wrote this. I can't remember whether it was actually in one of his books or whether it was in an essay that he wrote a few years ago, but he wrote about when he was in the early days of a band, he always wanted to be a lead singer. And everybody told him, you know, when he stepped up to sing, they're like, dude, you're awful. You can't sing. But he knew in his heart, he's like, but I want to sing. So he literally spent 10 years working on singing, taking classes, practicing constantly, constantly, constantly. And he never gave up. And people would always tell him, man, you're not a singer. You know, go play an instrument. You're not a singer. And then I think it was about 10 years into it, you know, he was on stage and he was singing and somebody came up to him like, man, you're a natural. Like, I wish I had your gift.

You know, he just kind of chuckled because that wasn't it. What he decided was that, you know, a decade earlier, he was maniacally devoted to making that something that he was astonishingly good at. So when you look around at the world and you see people who are more accomplished at something that you would really love to be accomplished at, don't think to yourself that you're not as smart or you don't have the level of intelligence or you don't have, there's something that's just intrinsically you'll never get. The question I always ask and the question I always encourage everyone to ask is, how badly do I want it? How much does this matter to me?

And why does it matter to me? And if I can achieve this outcome, whatever it is to you, how will that change my life? How will that change the things that I'm able to do and what doors will it open? You know, what will the effect be? Like go a couple levels deep into the why. Why do I want this so much? And if you can really get to the root, that will start to unlock a level of intrinsic motivation to get you through the early days where frankly, everybody sucks at everything in the early days with a very rare exception of a couple of genetic freaks who just happen to step into something and be instantly good. You know, don't ever look at those outliers

as the person that you're aspiring to or holding up. You know, the fact is that the vast majority of people who become really, really, really exceptional at almost everything, do it because they're maniacally committed to getting really good at it. So just something to think about is that instead of just assuming that you don't have it, and you're going to have to do it differently, assume that you're capable of getting it, whatever that it is for you. And then ask yourself, how badly do I want it? Why do I want it? And ask, why does that matter five times in a row, every time you have the answer? And then you want to get to the really deeper emotional level because that will start to unlock

the intrinsic motivation to keep you going through the early days when you're so bad at it that it's really not going to be a whole lot of fun and get you to a point where you're like, not only are you doing it because you know what it's going to potentially give you down the road, but you're doing it because you've now become accomplished enough that the activity itself becomes intrinsically enjoyable as well. So then you have this double intrinsic motivation to actually make it happen. And kind of coming full circle with this email, the last part of it was, I don't know if I'll ever have the profound wisdom, and I hope it's crystal clear right now, I still consider myself an absolute beginner in terms of wisdom and all this other stuff. And the last part here was, I fear I'll be forced into slimy marketing tactics because I don't

have the brain it takes to truly, to create truly genius content. That's, it's not what it's about. A, you do have the brains, everybody has the brains. And you have the heart and you have the spirit if you want to and if this matters to you. And if creating genius content is actually the unlock key for you in order to do what you want to do, then if you actually commit to making that happen, it may take months, it may take years, but you will gain that capability. And then question one final assumption here, which is that that's even what it actually needs. That's even what you need to do to succeed. As I'm recording this today, there's a post that there's an essay I just put up on my blog called The Content Delusion, Why Hustling Still Matters. So you might want to actually take a look at that over at jonathanfields.com

because it kind of deconstructs what I call the content myth or the content delusion too. There's a lot of fantasy around, you know, just create great content, and especially in the sort of quote thought leader world. And truth is, with the rare exception of outliers, that's just not enough. So if you want to sort of go deeper into my deconstruction of that, you can check that out as well. So I hope that's helpful. And I think probably the thing I want to leave you with is three words.

And those three words are, you are enough. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you would take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. And you can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there.

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