You're a terrible writer, but if someone put a gun to your head and said,
“you have to have your 100 page thesis done by next Monday or I'll shoot you”,
but I don't care how terrible it is, you would sit down and write it.
And it works like this, as far as I can tell, you know.
When I talk to people about doing the future authoring program,
they often put it off and it's not surprising because it's hard.
But it's more than that, they think, “well, I don't know how to write,
I'm going to do a bad job, I don't really like assignments,
I'm going to have to do it perfectly, I need to wait till I have enough time”.
And like one of those is enough to stop you cold and all five of them,
you're just done. And so I tell people,
do it haphazardly, a tiny bit at a time and badly,
because you can do that. I tell my students when they're
doing their thesis, master's thesis, write a really bad first draft
and then we have a little conversation about that because they don't think I mean that.
Because it sounds like a cliche in some sense, it's not a cliché.
It's not a cliche at all, it means, you're a terrible writer but
if someone put a gun to your head and said,
“you have to have your 100 page thesis done by next Monday or I'll shoot you”,
but I don't care how terrible it is, you would sit down and write it.
And the thing is, then you have it, then you have something and then you can fix it,
you can iterate and fix it, that bad first draft, that's the most valuable thing
and so that's what you need, you need a bad first draft of yourself.
The satirical and the ironic and the and the troublemaker, the comedian,
the fool, the fool is the precursor to the savior, why?
Because you're a fool when you start something new.
And so if you're not willing to be a fool, then you'll never start anything new,
and if you never start anything new, then you won't develop.
And so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation.
And that's the same as humility, and so if you're going to write
your destiny, you can do a bad first job, you're going to get smarter as you move forward.
That's the thing,
Is that so something beckons to you, that's what happens here.
Maybe the star that you wished on was the wrong damn star,
but at least it was a star, at least it was in the sky,
at least it moved him forward. And so you say in your life when something
grips you an fills you with interest and you think, “well should I do that?”
And the answer is, if not that, then something.
What if it's a mistake? It's a mistake, rest assured, what do you know?
You're going to stumble around right and what's going to happen is this,
you're going to move, you're going to not stay in stasis,
you're not going to wander around in circles, and I see people like that.
They said, “well, I never knew what to do and now I'm 40”.
It's like, that's not so good, that's not so good. And you might say,
well and there is a literature to that suggest that people are a lot more
unhappy when they look back on their lives about the things they didn't do
than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things.
And so that's really worth thinking about, too, because
there's redemptive mistakes, and a redemptive mistake would be a mistake
that you make when you go out and try to do something,
you actually you think, “ok, I'm going to try to do this”.
But you're not good at it, you make a bunch of mistakes,
it's like, what's the consequence? If you pay attention is that you're
not quite so stupid anymore. That's the thing, you've been informed
by your by the results of your errors, and so what happens is
you follow the beacon, you follow the light and you're blind so you don't know
where the light is, it's dimly apprehended
only and you're afraid to follow it, but you decide to take some stumbling
steps towards it. And as you take stumbling steps towards it,
you become illuminated and enlightened and informed
because of the nature of your experience, because you're pushing yourself
beyond where you are and you're going into the country
that you have not yet been in and you learn something.
And so what happens then is the star moves, you move 10 feet towards it and you think,
“no, that's not right, I didn't get it right, it isn't there, it's actually there”.
And so then you see it somewhere else and you shift yourself slightly
and you move forward and that's what happens is that,
and so you move towards it and you grow, and then the next time you open your eyes,
you see a little bit more clearly. And that's what happens is that just
happens over and over. It keeps moving.
But the thing that's so cool is that all those zigs and zags you say, and each of
those zags and ziggs is a catastrophe. “I hit a wall, my God,
and then I had to die a little bit and I barely got back up”,
It's a phoenix transformation at each turn, and it's painful,
but the thing is, is that even though you've traveled 20 miles,
let's say, on that road and you've only moved 3 miles forward,
you've moved 3 miles forward instead of falling backwards,
because that's the thing, too. Is that if you stand still, you fall backwards.
You cannot stand still because the world
moves away from you if you stand still and there's no stasis, there's only backwards.
And so if you're not moving forward, then you're moving backwards.
And it's a warning. Do not stay in one place.
And if you're good enough, it's difficult to say how
much of an impact on things you could have. You know, Dostoyevsky, who is a very crazy person,
partly because of his epilepsy, he said, “a man is not only responsible
for everything he does, but for everything that everyone else does”.
In some manner, you're at fault for everything that's terrible with the world,
but there's actually truth in that and there's actually redemptive truth in that,
is that things wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so far from what you could be.
And that's terribly pessimistic because it's all on you, man.
But it's terribly optimistic because, God, there's a lot of things that you could do.
And if you're crying out for something to do, then that's the best news you could possibly have,
it's like things aren't so good, but neither are you,
so if you stop doing the things that you knew to be destructive,
which is the right place to start,
you know, if you're going to clean up your room, what do you do first?
Well, you just get rid of the mess. And you know it, no one has to come
in and tell you hopefully what's the worst mess,
it just it announces itself to you and you can certainly know yourself.
And this is a very easy, meditative exercise to sit down and think,
“ok, I'm doing one thing really stupidly that I should stop doing”.
It's like, how long is it going to take you to figure out what that is?
It's about two seconds, right? You've known it forever.
And you could even make it less demanding, you could say,
“there are some stupid things that I'm doing that I know are stupid and wrong
that I could stop doing, that I would stop doing”.
And then you can just start with that. And you can just do that and maybe it's
just a little thing, although it's not because it's a it's a step forward on
the proper voyage, it's not a small thing. And you think, “well, what would happen?”
You could say, “let's do this for a year or even a month”.
Just try not to do things you know to be stupid and wrong for a month.
And that means not to say things you know to be stupid and wrong as well,
maybe that's the most important thing, just do it as an experiment.
See what happens, and it's so fun because I have people writing to me from all over the
world who are saying they're doing that, they're saying,
“well, you know, I cleaned up my room and then I stopped saying the stupid things and,
my God, it's like things are way better, it's like, who would have guessed it”.
And so it's low hanging fruit, man,
because that's the other thing, if there's a lot of things wrong with you,
then it's really easy to start fixing it you know, you've got so much territory that you can inhabit.
As you stumble forward, you illuminate and inform yourself,
and perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information,
and if you encounter it and tangle with it, then it informs you
and then you become informed and then you are information
and then you're ready.