Happy Memorial Day!
I hope you get the chance to do something fun and important and day-offish today.
To my grandfather, my friends in the service and all the troops, thank you for serving our country!
I’ll have a new post up this Wednesday!
Get Out. Get Moving. Start.
Action always beats intention.
A dream you don’t have to fight for isn’t a dream—it’s a nap. One changes your afternoon. The other changes your world. Keep fighting.
The worst parade of all.
My wife hates how fast I can fall asleep. I don’t want to exaggerate, but it’s a gift. I can go from wide awake, Jack Bauer like intensity to dead asleep in about 2.2 seconds or approximately 1.2 sentences from Jenny. I am not one of those husbands that is great at reviewing the day in bed at night. Working through issues as you both lay there under the same roof, and really the same stars, going through life together.
I fall asleep fast. Except when I was writing Quitter.
Big new mountains & big new fear.
You may never climb a mountain in Yosemite.
You may never scale 800 feet without the support of a rope or a harness.
You may never trust an inch wide gap in a granite cliff as the only thing saving you from instant death.
But, if all works out according to plan, you will do things you are not ready for.
How to get your spouse to support your dream.
The last place you want to put a spouse is on the opposite of your dream. The harder you lean into the dream the further you push them away. You start to say things like, “Why don’t you want my dream to happen? Why aren’t you supporting the thing I feel called to?” Things get real gross, real quick.
So what’s one simple way to get your spouse to support your dream?
VIDEO: My favorite way to make decisions.
My wife and I recently bought a house in Franklin, Tennessee.
There were other houses that were available that were bigger.
There were other houses available that were newer.
But we chose a smaller, older house. Why?
1 question I am wrestling with.
A few months ago I had the opportunity to have a few conversations with a guy named Bob Goff. Donald Miller wrote about him in his latest book and he spoke at Catalyst in LA so you might be familiar with him. He’s an amazing guy and I’ll probably mention him a billion times in the months ahead on this blog.
One of the things we talked about was the challenge of balancing your family and your job and your dreams. The question I walked away from that particular conversation is simple but powerful:
We only need 1 Tim Ferriss
In the months before my new book Quitter
But eventually, studying other people became a little toxic. Instead of just picking out certain ideas I wanted to copy, I started to internally think, “If I don’t do everything Tim Ferriss did when he released his book, Quitter will fail. If I’m not like Tim Ferriss, I won’t have success like Tim Ferriss.” I felt a great pressure to copy the things other authors did. I felt a great tension to emulate them and completely change the things I was doing based on what had worked for other people. And I think that’s something a lot of us struggle with.
3 ways to pace your dream.
Turns out, I’m a liar.
Despite promising that I would throw up when I ran the Nashville Half Marathon two weeks ago, I didn’t deliver. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t almost die. In fact, I felt great.
Why? Because I paced myself. Unlike the first one I ran two years ago, I set a pace that set me up for success. I cut 23 minutes off my personal record and had a lot of energy left for the last two miles. And the secret was the pace.
Which is funny to me, because “pace” is something chasing your dream requires too. Only we tend to hate that word when it’s applied to dreaming. We want to “go all in” and “go for broke!” Pace feels like punishment, restraint like something “real dreamers” don’t do. But the truth is, if you want your dream to last, to be bigger than one generation and change the world, you have to set the right pace. Here are three things you need to do as a dreamer:
A blogging secret from Michael Scott and the Office.
This is a spoiler alert.
If you haven’t seen the episode of the Office where Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) leaves the show, you’re about to learn the ending. But, there was a tremendous blogging tip hidden in that episode that I don’t want any of us to miss.
Is it OK to be a talented jerk?
People don’t like working with jerks.
Deep, right? You’ll probably want to stop reading this blog down right now and tweet that line to all your friends and family members.
Everyone knows that people don’t like working with jerks. That is not surprising. But here’s the thing, we often think that talent changes that rule.