When my daughter and
I were traveling across country, we
stopped at a little restaurant in New Mexico
where the waitress loved us up so much we
were practically throwing tips at her.
While I remember that waitress, and I know we tipped
her abundantly, I don’t remember the
food. (Unlike the Easter dinner we had at the Anasazi
Restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico where we had the best dinner of our lives so far. There Content
was King.)
#Marie Foleo, whose
B-school course I am taking, admonishes
her students not to offer discounts or place their items on sale. Customers who
are always looking for the lowest prices, and the best deals, will abandon you
when times get tough. They will go to someone with
a lower price. However, she says, give away a lot of stuff,
information, or service/love, such as our waitress in New Mexico gave to us. We remember her to this day, and that was over 10 years ago.
You will be
contributing.
Yes, we want/need
money to live on, but above that, we want
to make a difference.
You might have noticed that the sites you are apt to sign
up for have already given you tons of good advice or information.
I think back to Tony
Robbins—everybody knows him, right? I have gone
to events that were not his; he was simply one of the speakers, yet he gives so
much of himself on stage that you are apt to go into overload. The first time I
heard him speak live was in Portland Oregon over twenty years ago. I was so
jazzed when I came out of that auditorium that I didn’t feel the ground beneath
my feet.
Online Tony’s
abundance of free information is there for the taking. When I saw the free Netflix documentary, #“I am
Not Your Guru,” I was sold.
After more than
twenty years of knowing who he was, and being awed by his knowledge, and
ability to move people, I plunked down my money and bought a plane ticket—and got
lost.
But not permanently
lost.
What kept me from his
events for so long?
Fear.
I was afraid of
getting busted. I was afraid of walking
on fire. It was too expensive, all those, but it was my life on the line, as is
yours.
Sometimes you just have to grab your own running shoes and get going.
Anyone attempting to
expand their horizons, whether it be a
new artistic endeavor, a new business, or changing one’s life pattern, runs
into fear.
Steven Pressfield, in his book, The War of
Art, calls it “Resistance.”
Resistance doesn’t
want us to do this. It doesn’t want us to do that. Instead of doing the work we
were born to do, we procrastinate, we watch television, we play with our cell
phone, have a new love affair, drink too much, take drugs, or tell ourselves
we couldn’t do it anyway, who are we? You know all those things that keep us
from our true calling.
Why do we sharpen so
many pencils (figuratively speaking) before sitting down to the keyboard, or
the design table?
