Good morning,

A few months back, I saw an HBO miniseries I’d strongly recommend to anyone interested in creating anything: The Defiant Ones. The four-part series tells the story of music producers and entrepreneurs Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine (the latter of whom got his start producing for John Lennon, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks, among others).

The last of the four episodes is particularly powerful because it contains a bunch of one-liners about creativity, from a bunch of creative geniuses.

Like this one, which I love so much: “Genius can come from anywhere.”

But the one I want us to sit with for today’s prompt came from Iovine himself. He said, of creating anything from music to business endeavors, that the name of the game is to avoid paying attention to anything but your creative vision. He elaborated, explaining that’s why they put blinders on horses, in racing. Otherwise, the horses would look at the horses around them, get distracted and make the wrong step. He spoke this example over footage of a racehorse making a misstep, taking a tumble, getting completely run over by the horse behind him, who then all also tumbled over each other into a hot mess of horses and jockeys.

The parallels between this horse in blinders analogy and your own vision of creating something —anything—in life are fairly easy to see, as are the lessons.

Get distracted by looking at the wrong things, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to others’, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to the life you thought you were going to live, make the wrong step.

Get distracted comparing your life to what somebody else thinks you “should” do, or what culture says you should do, or what your family has taught that you can and cannot do, or with your own past and. . .well, you get the drill.

In reflection, though, I feel like the distraction point is in some ways way less important than the real principle deeply present in the example of a horse in blinders: the principle of focus.

Focus on your now, make the right step.

Focus on what feels resonant, what feels expansive, move toward that. Make the right step.

Focus on what feels expansive, and that grows. Make the right step.

Focus on what feels purposeful, meaningful, solid and also fun or joyous, make the right step.

Focus on moving into and through the past of least resistance, make the right steps.

Focus on what is noble and right, which you know because it feels that way, make the right step

Focus on growing your capacity, for productivity but also for love and joy and fun, step rightly.

Focus on using your words to bless instead of curse, others and yourself, make steps that result in more blessings, more life and more love. For you and for them.

Prompt of the Day [POD]: Horse in blinders

How does it feel, the idea that you get to be the boss of what you focus on?

Do you give yourself permission to ignore what doesn’t serve you? Do you give yourself permission to focus on what does?

What comes up for you when you think of blinders as a metaphor for your internal guidance system, in that it both steers your focus away and towards the right direction for your steps?

Head up + heart out

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Note: I told this story onstage last week at the Hustle’s 2X storytelling conference in San Francisco. It was ????. Here’s the audio recording of my talk (15 min.) if you want to listen!

If you’d rather read, carry on!

By now, you might know that I consider myself an amateur doctor. You need surgery? Well, if I can find a YouTube video of it, I’VE GOT YOU.

Anyhow. A little while back I had to see a head and neck doctor for something or other. And while he was in there, I remembered something weird I’d seen during my own DIY doctor stints in the mirror.

I asked him to please look at these weird little bumps I’d seen growing in my throat. I’d asked my own GP about them, and he had no idea what they were but said they looked like “healthy” tissue so not to mind them.

This specialist took one look, stepped back and asked: “When did you have your tonsils out?”

“About 30 years ago,” I replied.

“Well, what you have here is a pretty rare case of tonsillar regrowth,” he diagnosed. Tonsillar regrowth, I would learn, is a completely harmless but completely bizarre phenomenon in which one’s tonsils can make little efforts to grow back after you’ve had them out. Physicians think this only happens when the original tonsil tissue was not completely removed.

They don’t grow back all the way to full size; in fact, we’ve been calling my tonsil spots “tonsil buds” or “tonsil nubbins.”

But catch this principle: something that was natural and innate in my body was cut out (with good reason, at the time). And that thing so insistently demanded to have its rightful spot in my body that it is growing back, fresh and healthy, over three decades later.

Takeaway #1: Your body is a miracle. It is marvelous. An actual wonder. We focus so often on our aches and pains and cellulite. But ever since that day last year, I cannot stop thinking of my body as this marvelous contraption that is so self-correcting in the direction of its own well-being and healing that it will try to grow back what’s been cut out.

Takeaway #2: What is inborn in you, the innate gifts, talents, callings and destiny with which you came here, can never be totally cut out. Never. Not by failures, not by age, not by even discouragement, or doubt or fear, unless you allow that to happen. Not by a bad childhood. You might think you are too old or too traumatized or too something to do the dream that’s in your heart, but I invite you to try on the belief that these things have all been preparation.

They have honed you, burnished you and thicken your skin. They have tenderized your heart, but also strengthened it. They have helped you get clear on what you don’t want and what you do want. They have helped you become more wise. More loving. More you.

You’ve been prepared.

And now the world needs you. You feel it. I know you do, or you wouldn’t be here. People like you, people who seek out inspiration—which means to breathe in, take spirit in—they tend to be uplifters, too. Just like me.

Prompt Of the Day (POD): Tonsillar regrowth

Do you have a dream or a calling that has been dormant, or has just not been an area of focus, for any reason?

What is it?

Name it. Detail it.

What do you need to be or do or release in order to let it regrow, to breathe fresh life IN to your dreams?

Friends:

I learned something recently about bullfighting that I found fascinating and relevant for you transformational leaders and people who just care about creating a more beautiful world.

This thing came to my mind time and time again this weekend as I witnessed the transformational leadership of the children at the various Marches for Our Lives:

>> The leadership of Emma Gonzales, who has been truth-telling like a wise old woman and mightily holding power to account for weeks now, since Parkland.

>> The leadership of MLK’s little 9-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, who declared her own dream that “enough is enough.”

>> The skin-tingling clarity and leadership of Naomi Wadler, who spoke up for black women victims of gun violence: the single most likely demographic group to be shot and killed in this nation—TWICE as likely as any other group, according to the CDC. This ELEVEN-year-old called out the sordid truth that “it’s subconsciously embedded into peoples’ minds that somebody with a darker complexion is worth less and their life isn’t as valuable as a white girl or man’s.”

She also stood for her generation, in their power with total and complete lucidity: “My friends and I might still be 11 and we might still be in elementary school, but we know. We know life isn’t equal for everyone and we know what is right and wrong. We also know that we stand in the shadow of the Capitol, and we know that we have seven short years until, we too, have the right to vote.”

But back to this thing I learned. In bullfighting, there’s a concept called querencia, from the infinitive querer: to desire. As you can imagine, when a bull goes out to fight, he’s 100% on the defensive: he’s reacting to his circumstances and entrapment, he’s reacting to the matador’s provocations, he’s just constantly reacting out of his own fear and rage.

As powerful as every bull seems (and is), it is actually at its least powerful when all of its actions are reactions.

But during any given bullfight, there’s a place in the arena where the bull can find a momentary home: a place of safety where he can take a moment, stop reacting out of rage and reclaim his natural strength and power.

This spot in the ring and in the bull’s mind is called his querencia. It is both geographic and metaphysical. And it is no joke.

The bullfighters say that once a bull takes the opportunity to pause, recalibrate, stop reacting and tap into its true power, an incredible transformation takes place, just that fast. Allow a bull to stop and find its querencia, and it becomes unstoppable.

Ernest Hemingway even observed and wrote about this:

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

I believe that’s what we witnessed, if we were paying attention, this weekend. These children have been in the fight. Virtually all of them were born after Columbine, in a world where school safety has always been a more or less oxymoronic phrase.

But in their brains and hearts and spirits, they’ve found their querencia. They are no longer simply reacting to this shooting or that allegation. Sure, they are on a mission to uproot some of what’s broken in our nation. But they are solidly claiming their power to proactively create the world they know is possible; a world in which children can really be the heroes that create a world that works better for everyone.

They are in their querencia, and they are unstoppable. The world will have to expand and adjust to them, not the other way around. It already is. See, for example, today’s NYT piece from Justice Stevens encouraging these young ladies and gentlemen to keep it up and consider casting their eyes on a much bigger prize: the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Catch this principle: when you stop reacting and get clear on who you really are and why you’re really here, when you stand in your querencia, everyone and everything must take notice and either get on board or get out of the way.

It doesn’t matter whether the change you are here on this planet to help make is in the lives of a hundred million constituents, a hundred customers, the 40 kids in your classroom or the two in your own home. It’s all worthy of life force. The truth is that you came here on a mission, and judging that mission is a repressive endeavor. Endeavoring to get clearer and clearer on what it is, on the other hand, is extremely worthwhile.

That’s what transformational leaders know, and that’s what they learn how to do. We are creators, not reactors.

Head up + heart out,

Friend-o-mine:

I’m generally good about not getting sucked into internet rabbit holes, but occasionally I indulge my word nerd-dom and just go there. In this week’s installment, I became curious about the phrase “pull out all the stops”.

The visual associated with that phrase in my mind’s eye was very clear. It involved a steep, San Francisco hill with a car parked just a micron downhill from the peak, just the way I’ve parked mine a million times: gear shift in ‘P’, parking brake engaged, wheels turned into the curb (just in case).

But then some unknown person, for some unknown reason, releases the parking brake.

No big deal.

Until said unknown person also slides the shifter back a couple notches, from P to N.

Hm. Okaaaaaay.

So it’s getting dicey here. But the wheels are still pointed toward the curb. Until they’re not.

You can probably guess what’s next. This curiously motivated hypothetical individual decides to turn the steering wheel as hard as they can in the other direction, creating a situation in which, you guessed it:

ALL THE STOPS HAVE BEEN PULLED OUT.

And once they have, the car that started this story at the top of the hill isn’t there for long. The laws of gravity and inertia take the stage, and an automotive freefall ensues, continuing until the car is stopped by some external force or obstacle or comes to rest on a flat road.

But that’s just what pulling out the stops looks like in my mind. I was curious as to what the phrase actually meant, so I consulted the Interwebs.

Organ-ic origins

“Pulling out all the stops”, as a phrase, originated with organs (the musical ones, not the physical ones). In Old English, “stoppes” were music notes or keys. As time went on and pipe organs became a thing, people started calling the knobs that controlled a given pipe organ’s capacity to play, “stops.”

Pushing in a stop limited the volume and range of said organ; pulling a stop out allowed it to play a wider range of notes and to play louder.

When you pulled out all the stops, you allowed the organ to play at its maximum capacity of both tones and volume.

Forcing vs. allowing

The reason we’re even talking about this is that I’d wanted to use the phrase “pull out all the stops” in something I was writing. So I checked its meaning in the Oxford Dictionary, which said it means “to apply great force”.

But that wasn’t quite the meaning I’d had in mind, so I went back to the very beginning.

You heard me right. I’m calling the Oxford Dictionary out. To “pull out all the stops” is NOT to apply great force. Pulling out all the stops just releases the deep down resistance that someone built into the organ, so you can receive the full benefit of its innate internal capacity.

See where I’m going with this? If you need a more exhilarating example, think about the car scenario: you don’t even have to turn the key in the ignition for that car to go from the top of the hill to the bottom. You just pull out all the stops and let the car and the laws of the universe do what they do.

And same goes for us. For our lives, the things we want to create. For your personal calling.

Here’s the deal: each of us was built with creative power coursing through our veins. Over a lifetime, our families, our society, our culture, even crises and traumas, they wire us with “stops”. We’re not born with them. When was the last time you saw a self-conscious newborn? Exactly. Never.

We are not born with stops. We acquire them.

Resistance (not the good kind)

Steven Pressfield buckets all these stops under the villainous header of Resistance. To be clear, we’re not talking about the good kind of resistance, the political kind. We’re talking about the internal force that derails us anytime we attempt to create something or level up closer to our highest selves.

It’s the force that creates all addictions, including addictions to drama and crises. It’s the force that powers perfectionism and procrastination. It’s the force that gives birth to fear, victim stories, self-medication and self-doubt.

I’ve come to believe that all Resistance has its roots in the deep down dread that haunts most people here in the West, and definitely most leaders and professionals: the acquired feeling that they are fundamentally flawed or that the world is, or both. The feeling that there’s maybe just a little something wrong with them, no matter how much they’ve achieved. Or that, when things are going really well, the chances are good that something bad is about to happen.

This goes back to the phrase I mentioned last week: the trance of unworthiness. My personal nickname for the trance of unworthiness is, in fact, The Big Stop.

Guys, my career has been a heckuva ride through almost every industry you can imagine that sells any form of personal growth and transformation. I’ve worked for some of the biggest and brightest, most transformational companies on this planet. No joke. I’ve had the blessing of leading nearly 8,000 people through my 30 Day Writing Challenges, which started as a passion project and are now part of my business. I’ve seen both their pain and their progress, intimately.

Here’s what I’ve learned: whether you’re trying to learn to mediate or setting a goal in your business or doing a Whole 30, if you are still in the haze of the trance of unworthiness, Resistance will be your enemy.

You know what to do. All of health and fitness media and personal growth literature exists to tell you how to do it. But the issue is not even the logistical how. It’s the spiritual and emotional how. It’s the truth that Resistance will rise up and rear its ugly head.

The more sophisticated transformational programs will call it out, like Pressfield does. And they will cheerlead you to power through it. Overcome it. Resist your internal Resistance.

But it’s so hard. It’s a Battle Royale. Sometimes, you can win it, achieving your goal or getting the thing done you were trying to do. But it’s such a struggle, and it’s hard to struggle like that for long or in different areas of your life. It’s exhausting. More importantly, it’s a battle you can never fully, finally win.

Because there’s always more to do. Always another battle to fight. That’s why some of the most successful people on this planet, by all appearances, still feel so empty. So worried about when they’ll ever get “there” so they can relax, finally.

Good news is, you can deactivate resistance entirely if you go deep enough, and wake up from the trance. You can learn to sit with the discomfort of radically accepting everything about yourself and your world, eliminating all that internal turbulence, judgment and Resistance. I don’t mean to be ok with injustice or to accept bad behavior from others. I mean to practice acknowledging what is true and embracing reality instead of emotionally flailing against it. And I mean from there, pouring the energy you used to invest in the struggle into everything you ever want to create and do and be.

That’s what MLK did. And Malala. Gandhi, too. And Michelle “when they go low, we go high” Obama.

It’s what peaceful revolutionaries do.

Next week, I’m doing a private, beta launch of a new program called the School of Upliftment. It will be a year-round collective focused on activating personal growth, creative power and spiritual wellbeing in every area of members’ lives. The objective is to transform the way members manage their everyday routines, bodies, emotions, careers and relationships for the better, helping them turn more of their thoughts into things without the struggle.

In the School of Upliftment, we will cover some foundations of wellbeing, including this revolutionary radical self-acceptance. Then we’ll systematically focus on every area of our lives through the lens of spiritual practice (like meditation and writing), transformational teachings and modern life skills. And we’ll do it all together.

It’s an inner revolution, powered by soul.

Head up + heart out,

Friends:

I’m thinking a lot these days on our purpose and essential nature as human beings. We are in these bodies, on this planet for a brief moment in universal time. It strikes me that, while we are here, we have a unique ability to turn our thoughts and inspirations into things.

In other words, we are creators.

We create companies, cultures, books and music. We create families and relationships and tangible, physical things, products. We also create experiences and lives, sometimes intentionally and other times, accidentally. We create joy and connection.

And sometimes we create fear and drama, disconnection, for ourselves and for others.

I’m playing a game right now where I try to see every interaction with someone as an opportunity to create a deeper connection than was there before. It has caused me to insert many a pause before I speak and be very deliberate about how what I say to my son, my mother, my business partners and my sweetheart, even in seemingly mundane, everyday conversations.

This is related to the First Agreement of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements. (I see these Agreements as responsible for a big chunk of the freedom and energy with which I live my life.) The First is to be impeccable with your word, which means to understand the profound power of our words to bless or curse and to commit to use your word in favor of love and life.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: we can create life with our words. Have you ever seen how your child or employee or even friend or a person on the street unfurls to life when you connect eye to eye, and speak even 3 words of life on them?

I was walking in New York the other day, and a gentleman with a cardboard sign, dirty face and tattered clothes was screaming vitriol at the flood of humanity that was coming out of the subway station. His rage was so pure it was almost visible. And he was just flooding it, washing it over every person who passed by.

I sort of steeled myself to walk past him. But a few paces before I reached him, I met his gaze and silently shot him a blessing.

IT WAS LIKE HE HEARD ME. He pointed at me, and screamed YOOOOOOOU!

I raised an eyebrow. I cocked my head a bit.

And—I kid you not—his next words came out calmly, clearly and in his indoor voice. They were: “have great energy.”

“YOOOOOOU have great energy,” this man said to me. I closed my eyes, smiled and nodded and walked on. He went back to his regularly scheduled program.

We create. We create connections and things and ideas and life. And we do this, first, with our minds and souls. Then we put our souls on deck, in the form of the things and relationships and businesses and communities we create.

I spend a lot of my time working with leaders and entrepreneurs and creators, helping them get unstuck. What I see many times in people who are stuck on a project or in an area of their life is this: they want to be or do or have or create one thing, but they are at a spiritual standstill because their actions, beliefs, words and energy are in total opposition to what they want, for various reasons.

We can talk about why this happens later, but for now, let’s understand the energy of creation and the other energies that are in opposition, in the interest of releasing any spiritual standstills.

Creating is about bringing to life. It’s about transformation. It’s about receiving inspiration, which is always trying to flow to and through us, and then marrying inspiration with action, immediately.

Creating is not just proactive, yang, domination, force energy. It is also about stillness, receptivity and trust that everything is always working out for you, which allows you to make bold moves and steps toward your creation without fear, which closes off, corrodes and shrinks the inspiration pipeline.

Creating is not about passive consumption. You cannot create while you are reacting. This is why outrage is so distracting, why the headlines and Facebook and Twitter pull so many people off their life’s course. That’s why it’s worthwhile to cultivate the ability to stay calm while everyone else around you loses their head (e.g., when the stock market does what it’s doing right now).

Click to watch on Instagram: What creators do when the stock market dives

And you cannot create while you are judging. This is true whether your judgment is being leveled at politicians, the system, the folks who voted for somebody, rich people, poor people, your mother or even yourself.

See, creating is what you do when you love someone or something enough to collaborate toward the end of their well-being, growth and expansion.

Creating is an energy of love. Judgment is an energy of disdain, of dislike, or worse: hate. Judgment creates turbulence in your system, regardless of who you are judging. It interrupts your ability to receive inspiration and turn it into inspired action. Creation and judgment do not coexist. They just can’t.

You are a creator. Not a consumer. Not a reactor. And not a judge.

Head up + heart out,