Circumstances can be joyous or heartbreaking, happy or devastating. Whether or not an experience is fortunate or unfortunate is largely a matter of my perspective and choice.
Inspired: Fortune is a Choice
Category: Second Step
Inspired: The Long Road Toward The Wolf of Wall Street
I thought Leonardo DiCaprio had some sort of magic Hollywood wand that makes everything he touches turn to gold. I was completely wrong. Even with his passion and commitment, it took Leo 7 years to get The Wolf of Wall Street made. Like Matthew McConaughey and Dallas Buyers Club (who incidentally is also in The Wolf of Wall Street), Leo refused to give up on the film and chipped away at Hollywood until he lined up the right partners and the right funding. In our own creative pursuits, we sometimes struggle to get something to go in the direction we want it to take. We grease the skids of our own imaginations over and over again without much movement. It’s often akin to getting a car parked on ice to move. Don’t let the hard work and slow progress deter you. Keep at it knowing you’re in good company. Eventually, the ice relents (or melts) and we’re on our way.
Inspired: Carolina Herrera Took A Big Bold Step at Age 40
Carolina Herrera, designer to the stars, took a big risk at 40. Prior to then, he was a housewife in Venezuela. When she turned 40, her children were grown and she told her husband she wanted to move to New York to start a new career as a fashion designer. She had plenty of connections and access to funds so that helped though without her drive, ambition, and impeccable taste, connections and capital wouldn’t have meant much.
She could have easily laughed off the idea, and stayed right where she was – comfortable, settled, and bored. Instead, she went for it and reinvented herself. Today, she’s still reinventing herself and her fashion line at age 74. She admits that she’s every bit as scared now as she was 34 years ago and she said that every year it’s harder, not easier, to do her work. However, she loves it so she keeps going.
We place so much emphasis on youth in our society that we forget that every day, at every age, we have the opportunity to reinvent who we are and what we do. We can shift gears and try new things. We can be daring and courageous. Reinvention is a choice and Carolina shows us where it can lead if we give ourselves the chance.
Inspired: Can You Spare a Decade?
A lot of people tell me their ideas for businesses and projects and ask me if I think it will be successful. I answer with this question: “Are you willing to work on it for a decade with little to no success?” Some people look at me with a confused expression and others are completely horrified.
My Decade Rule has grown out of my own experience. I’ve found it takes 10 years (at least) to really get something to work. And I don’t mean a decade of casual work here and there. I mean a solid decade of effort, energy, and passion.
Maybe it’ll take you less time, but I think we have to go into new projects with the decade lens so that we make the best use of our time. I use this concept for all of my new ideas and it helps me decide what is and isn’t worth doing. If an idea can hold my attention for 10 years, then I know it’s worth my time. If not, I move on.
Making some decisions about ideas you’ve got? Put it through the decade test and let me know what you find.
Inspired: Live Like a Lotus
A lotus can’t grow in clear pristine water. It needs the nutrients from the mud to bloom and thrive. Our lives are like that, too. Life is messy. People and tasks compete for our time and attention. We wrestle with the tension between what we think we have to do and what we want to do. Choosing how to spend our time is the toughest thing we will ever do and the answer won’t always be clear.
And that’s okay. We need the obstacles, the adversity, the challenges to show us what matters most to us, to help us build skills, to make us strong and resilient. Everything that is happening to us now, everything, is preparing us for the road that lies ahead. Embrace it and don’t give up.
Inspired: How We Almost Lost Arthur Miller to Failure
Arthur Miller gave up the theater after his play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, flopped horribly on Broadway. It ran for only 4 performances in 1944. He attempted to write novels after that, and they flopped too. So he went back to the theater and several years later finished the Tony Award-winning play All My Sons, one of the most beloved, heart-wrenching, and successful in theater history. It took him 5 years to write it and was his first successful production. At the time of its debut, it was panned critically save for Brooks Atkinson’s review in the New York Times. Mr. Atkinson is often credited with rescuing the piece from failure. 2 years later, Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 6 weeks and it won the Pulitzer.
Miller said this about watching All My Sons for the first time with an audience:
“The success of a play, especially one’s first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened from the other side. One may fall on one’s face or not, but certainly a new room is opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more. The audience sat in silence before the unwinding of All My Sons and gasped when they should have, and I tasted that power which is reserved, I imagine, for playwrights, which is to know that by one’s invention a mass of strangers has been publicly transfixed.”
It would have been very easy for Mr. Miller to give up writing after his early string of failures. At that point, there was no reason to believe he would ever be successful. And yet, he kept going. He kept trying as he worked menial jobs to make ends meet while remaining passionate about his craft. All he had was raw determination.
Maybe you’ve tried to do something and it wasn’t as successful as you wanted it to be even though you gave it everything you had. Maybe you’re thinking about throwing in the towel and getting a new dream. You’re in good company. At many points, Miller considered giving up. How could he not? But he didn’t. He started again. He took the second step, and it’s that step that made all the difference, for him, for us, and for the American theater. Follow that lead.
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Inspired: I’m Glad It Didn’t Work Out
Whenever something doesn’t work out in my favor, I don’t think of it as an opportunity lost but as a bullet dodged. This philosophy has never failed me, and over time it’s always proved to be true. I repeat this statement to myself: “The world has something better in mind for you. Be patient. Live. Have faith. Keep going.”
Inspired: It is not enough to leap. You must also build.
“There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.” Anyone can leap and make a change. What no one tells us is that deciding to leap and then actually doing it is only the beginning. The real work that gets us to where we want to be comes after the leap and it requires a lot of energy, time, and effort. We have to become builders. Sometimes we regret our leap because we weren’t prepared for all of the work ahead and because we didn’t know how much work we had to do before the leap. This is why I’m working on my book, Your Second Step: What to Do After You Leap. I made lots of mistakes and I did a lot of things right. I want to share all of that experience with anyone in the midst of the same kind of pursuit.
And here’s another tidbit that I hope makes you feel better if you’re feeling a bit stuck: you don’t jump from a full room into another full room when you strike out on your own, no matter how much pre-work you’ve done. You jump from a full room into empty space. For some of us that empty space, the blank page, is exhilarating. For some, it’s a terrifying nightmare. For me, it’s a bit of both. Building is difficult work. It’s also difficult to design what you plan to build. I hope my work can help people through this process. I hate seeing people give up on their dreams, especially when they have worked very hard to make them happen. I hope I can offer them enough encouragement to keep going.
Beautiful: To Stay Young, Believe in Possibility
I sat behind a boy on the train as we rolled by empty lots between Newark airport and New York City that are littered with trash, surrounded by graffiti laden buildings, and completely devoid of life.
“They could build an arena here. Make it better,” he said to his father.
Kids see potential in a way that most adults don’t. They see possibility, hope, and the opportunity for reclamation. They remind me that despair is something we create, something we’re taught, not something that we innately know. We are programmed for wonder, to seize opportunity. The trick is to hang on to that even as the world attempts to change us. If we can stay focused on what’s possible rather than what is, we can create what we seek.
Beautiful: Thankful for Unknown Blessings
“Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.” ~ Native American Proverb
Every day I wake up with two thoughts – “Thank you” and “Today something amazing is going to happen.” I’m thankful that I get to wake up at all, that I’m healthy, and that I spend my time doing things I love. I’m a news junkie and one of the wonderful / awful side effects of my news addiction is that I hear a lot of stories of hardship and struggle. This keeps me from taking anything for granted and it motivates me do things to help make this world a better place.
I recently added the “today something amazing is going to happen” bit to my morning meditation. I believe in the power of intention and I’ve seen that the more often I intently look for blessings, the more likely I am to find them, create them, and recognize them when they cross my path. This belief restores my faith every day in our ability to attract wonder and absorb magic so that we can pass it on to others in our words and actions.
Every day behind the scenes, the Universe is working on blessings to send our way. So long as those blessings find us deeply engaged in work we love, we have the opportunity to hitch our work to the shooting star that races across the sky of our lives. This is the thought that keeps me going and will keep me saying thank you every morning that I have.
Christa Avampato 