Be a Student of You

One afternoon I had lunch at Mellow Mushroom with a pastor. He wanted to write a book and didn’t know where to start. He asked me, “Should I take three months off to write it? Take a sabbatical, get a cabin somewhere and hole up in there until it’s done? Or should I take the opposite route? Write a page a day so that by the end of the year I have over 300 pages done?”

He continued to rattle off options based on a number of different books about writing.

Finally, I asked him, “How old are you?”

“Forty-two,” he replied, to my somewhat unexpected question.

“Then you’ve got 42 years of research. You’ve got 42 years of evidence indicating how you best accomplish things. You need to be a student of you. What do you do best?” I asked. 

“Well, I love sharing stories in my sermons. I’m a storyteller. That’s my favorite thing to do and for the last 12 years that’s what I’ve been doing every Sunday morning when I preach.”

“Well then, get your sermons transcribed. You can have someone transcribe them for $3 an hour. You’ve probably already got a great start down the path of writing a book.”

He was flabbergasted at how smart I am. Or maybe at how obvious that solution was. No one ever thinks that one element of his or her life can inform another. We think we have to start from scratch each time. But we don’t.

You need to be a student of you. Don’t try to do something awesome as if you’ve never been awesome before. You have. You’ve succeeded at something. Something came naturally. Something worked. How can you apply that to this?

If you were able to stick to a diet for six months, how did you do it? What about that experience overlaps with your new road to awesome? If you’ve had success at work, even if you don’t love your job, what are the things that you can learn from that experience? What skills came out shining?

We usually don’t take enough time to study ourselves. Subsequently, we learn the same things over and over again. Or worse than that, we discount everything we’ve learned for the latest technique espoused in a book.

That’s one of the greatest presumptions of many business and self-help books. They tend to have a one-size-fits-all approach. There’s often that section or specific chapter about goal setting that involves an incredibly complicated, detailed list and a system of checks and balances that exceeds that of the U.S. Treasury. Of course the approach worked perfectly for the author, because she’s an incredibly detailed, organized person. But maybe that’s the absolute worst approach for you. Maybe you’re a painter not a mathematician. But because the book says “In order to set goals you have to set them this way,” you give it a try. Everything about your previous 30 years on the planet indicates that you will not do well with a complicated checklist approach, but the book says this is the only way.

You try it for a day or a week or a month and it doesn’t take. You then assume you’re lousy at goal setting and quit.

But maybe you’re a bird reading a book about how to be a fish. You can discipline yourself all you want, gather as much will power that’s available to you, but it’s not going to matter. You’ve got wings, not fins.

The solution to this problem is to share principles that are true of everyone and applications that are flexible. We might all have the same destination in mind, to live with purpose, but we won’t all get there the same way. 

The method through which you travel from one destination to the next will be determined by your own experience—what you’re made of, what you desire, and what you’ve done to this point.

That’s why I loved that this fall’s Catalyst is about being KNOWN. They understand the value of teaching leaders to be students of themselves so that they can be all the better equipped to actually change the world.

Measure each principle you learn against what you know to be true of yourself. Be a student of you, and then choose your own means of travel. I can only describe their existence and then offer suggestions on traversing from one to the next that have worked for me and other travelers I’ve met along the way. The point is not the specific ways you work on your life and serve the people around you. The point is that you do it, as efficiently and effectively as possible, customized to what you know of yourself.

Do this and you will be able to make progress. Continue doing this, and you will reach your goal, regardless of what it is you’re aiming for in life.