Life Lessons from The Queen of the Skies

 I recently watched a documentary on the history of the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, and I was struck by how insane, stressful, and virtually impossible the challenges were that the engineers faced, betting the entire company on a plane that may never take off. It ended up revolutionizing air travel, putting more people in the skies than anyone ever imagined. It was a contentious, seemingly unwinnable battle from start to finish to put that plane is the sky --- yet all we see and experience is the joy of flying in a world-changing airplane.

I'd have to say my #1 takeaway from the past year or so from personal experience, reading books, and watching documentaries like that, has been that my expectations for how easy accomplishing anything would be --- how much time and work it would take --- have been all grossly, stupidly out of touch with reality. Good things take time, work, and persistence, and great things take an unimaginable amount of them. Period. And even then, with all of that, success isn't guaranteed one bit. That is precisely why great things are so uncommon in the first place.

Even though we all already know there's no such thing as overnight success, I think most stories of success we read about still fail to do justice to the amount of sacrifice and persistence required to achieve anything. So now the task is to have your work ethic and stomach for enduring false starts and failure catch up with your sky-high ambitions. Not easy, but if you believe you're born to fly, you don't have a choice.

Overnight Success is a Total Myth

For today, I'm sharing a great interview with one of my big heroes on the Internet, Chase Jarvis, via the Sara Dietschy's YouTube channel. They get into a lot of relevant and practical wisdom on how to make it as a creative, and the bit near the end about "overnight success" is fantastic. Here's what Chase says:

"Overnight success is a total myth. Even the people who you think it happened, I'll take Macklemore, who's also our friend, he was making music in his parent's basement for ten years before you'd ever heard of him. And I think people, like, 'Oh my God, overnight success! This guy has, you know, 15x platinum!' But what you really find out if you look even just one inch below the surface is that there is this, they always say the struggle is real... But 100% of the people have had that experience where they toiled what seemed like an eternity where there was ten viewers... Brandon [Stanton, of Human of New York] today talked about.... his first post... it had... no likes and one comment. And you know, now, I think his has the highest average number of comments and the highest number of views on Facebook everyday.

The gap between where you think you are and where you want to be is always closer than you think... People can talk about tipping points, there was no one event ever, and any time people got some event... where you think you've made it, they were quickly fed a piece of humble pie, and realized that it's a series of making-its over and over and over that actually makes it possible to do what you love."

A timely reminder at the start of another work week: you never know which one of your hits is gonna be a home run, so don't let the yawning uncertainty of The Gap defeat you. Make sure to watch the rest of the interview as it's full of useful bits of wisdom and inspiration. Have a great week everyone!

Monday Motivation: Born to Do This

Note: I consume a lot of articles and podcasts for artists and entrepreneurs, and I mostly share them on my private, personal Facebook page. However I realize that there are those of you out there who could find these helpful too, and so I'm placing them on my blog as well so they can be more widely available. Hope you enjoy the first installment of Monday Motivation!

“The most defeatist thing I hear is, “I’m going to give it a couple of years.” You can’t set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not [an artist]. You should want it so badly that you don’t have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There’s no shame in being a starving artist.”

— Matthew Weiner

I recently re-read this excerpt from Getting There: A Book of Mentors written by Matthew Weiner, creator of the critically acclaimed TV series "Mad Men." It struck a deep chord in me, given the choice I've made to give up commercial work to focus on being an artist. Whether it's working at a job you hate to pay the bills, or having to tighten your belt indefinitely while bootstrapping your creative business, not to mention constant uncertainty and the self-doubt it tends to breed, deciding to get on the road to becoming a full-time artist entails major sacrifices. I know that it can sometimes feel overwhelming, which is why Weiner's story is so compelling because, as he describes it, he found himself in a hole that to anyone can seem impossible to climb out of:

“Upon graduation, I set up meetings everywhere in the hopes of getting a job. In three months I got nothing....

So for the next three years I stayed home and wrote spec scripts. My friends had day jobs, but I didn’t. My wife, Linda, worked hard as an architect and supported us. I attempted to shop my material around, but nothing sold. I got very bitter, seeing people I didn’t think deserved it succeed. It was a dark time. Show business looked so impenetrable that I eventually stopped writing. I began watching TV all day and lying about it.... I felt like the most useless, worthless person in the world.”

So for those of you who feel like it's never going to work, or are struggling to keep afloat long enough to get a breakthrough, I hope you take heart in Weiner's example. As Weiner concludes: "I do believe that if you are truly talented, get your material out there, put up with the rejection, and don’t set a time limit for yourself, someone will notice you."

How do you find the strength to persist? If you ask me, if you genuinely feel that you are born to do this, you don't actually have a choice. You persist until you get noticed. If you don't, you continue anyway. Because it was never about the money or the recognition, was it?

Have a great week everyone!

Aspiring traveler? This 15-minute read is all you need to get started.

In this age of rampant ogling at everyone else's happier-than-me Instagram travel accounts, the allure of independent travel is stronger than ever. But if you've never traveled outside the confines of the conventional touristy package tour before, the number of things you need to worry about to get started on this road can be intimidating, even discouraging. The Internet is full of resources, but scattered over so many places that it's hard to know where to start.

Enter the good people of Penroads, who recently sent me a link to their wonderful free e-book called Travel Deeply, Do It Cheaply. It's the kind of guide I wish I'd written as a follow-up to what is still my most popular blog post where I talk about my experience with the life-changing impact of "traveling deeply."

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It's beautifully designed, and it covers all your bases from booking cheap flights, budgeting apps, to packing tips, travel insurance, and food safety. And best of all, it's free forever. Read cover to cover, it won't take you half an hour to finish it.

So what are you waiting for? Download a copy for your computer, tablet, or e-reader and get going!

Follow up reads for when you're ready to go deeper into traveling deeply:

The essential "philosophy" of traveling deeply: Vagabonding

The paradigm-shifting read on creating freedom for yourself: The Four-Hour Work Week

Notes:

Penroads is a social travel platform that helps people find travel partners. I am not affiliated with them in any way nor have used their service as yet. They simply e-mailed me this book asking me to share and I loved it, being impressed as much by the design and information as with their sincerity and passion.