You Are Your Own Boss. And Your Boss Sucks!
Do you leave your job at 10:15 a.m. to have a quick nap just because you’re hungover? Do you take off for three and a half hours to have lunch with your buddies and discuss the last night’s Super Bowl game? Do you take a cigarette and coffee break every fifteen minutes? Or set out on a designer shoe hunt Tuesday morning? No, you don’t do these things, unless your boss is… well, you.
This is why most artists, freelancers, and entrepreneurs fail almost at the get-go. The terrifying sight of a vast arctic whiteness of a blank sheet of paper that scared the pants off of Ernest Hemingway. The eerie blank canvas of nothingness that gazes into you, sending chills down your spine and setting you off running for your life. Then demons—disguised as friends—start coming for the “rescue”, bringing the gifts of a cozy couch, exceptional TV programming, pleasant brunch with your “long-lost” friend you’ve seen at a dinner party just last night. And then you’re convinced that “the easiest thing to do on earth is not write” (William Goldman), or paint, or compose music, direct a film, play professional basketball, build a pyramid, whatever else your passion has been up to that moment. But if that really is the case, then you shouldn’t. Moreover, it shouldn’t even bother you that you don’t.
By far the best career advice I’ve ever heard for artists is what the great theater director Mikhail Tumanishvili used to say to his students: “If you can go on with your lives [without it], do yourselves a huge favor and quit now.”
I follow this advice, very effectively, for many things: I don’t really care that I’ll never set my foot on the top of the Mount Everest, although there are many who die for the opportunity of it. I’ll never see how mother Earth looks from space. It’d be breathtaking if I did, but there’s no chance I’m ever going to even think about risking my life for it. Then again, there is a number of already distinguished pilots and scientists who put themselves through the hell of rigorous training for a shot at becoming astronauts and, quite possibly, never coming back alive to this beautiful planet of ours. It doesn’t ruin my sleep to know that I will never win an Olympic gold medal. However, Michael Phelps lives almost an amphibious life for it and doesn’t seem to welcome the idea of a silver medal all that much.
There’s nothing wrong in following someone else’s lead. The world’s greatest civilizations have been built by people who accept their role (not fate) of, maybe invisible, yet integral part of the universe. After all, we are all one with it no matter what position we hold. Take any one of us out and the system crumbles.
I actually have a tremendous respect for those everyday heroes pulling up their chairs in their claustrophobically tight little cubicles every morning; squeezing their coffee mugs into the desktop piles of office crap; powering up their old, cheap, piece–of–yesterday’s–worthless–history computers; grabbing their phones and going against the most vicious enemy mankind has ever known—time—so that they can bring bread to their families’ tables at the end of the day. These people define professionalism, pulling through life despite the shitstorm the universe brings down on them. Try not to feel respect for a single mom who waits tables all day in the world where an average waitress sees more assholes a day then a proctologist throughout his career.
So, go ahead. Follow. Become another proud brick in the wall. If no one else does, I promise, I will respect you for the rest of your life, or mine—whichever ends first.
But if every once in a while you find yourself overwhelmed by an urge to pack your carry-on bag, toss your cell phone into a puddle, change your email and Facebook account passwords to something you’ve already forgotten, assume a new identity, and fly out to the part of the world on the map where your blind-folded dart has fallen so you can start your life all over, then you, my friend, are toast. You’re left with no choice. No freedom. You’ve been branded by the gods at birth. There’s no running away from this curse. Like Captain James Hook’s ticking crocodile, it’ll never cease chasing you. Like a river, it’ll never get tired of pushing you until it bears you down and drags you along the stream you once refused to flow with. When, one day, it washes up your bruised up sole inside your bathroom mirror, it won't be a pretty sight.
So why fight it? Why twist and scream?
“Three things prevent people from achieving their goals: fear, laziness, and hope.”
Fear of failure, pain, and suffering. The security of laziness, the comfort of the accustomed evil. Hope that you will someday soon hit the lottery jackpot. These three demons control your life and your fate. They make you do anything they want. They play Good Cop, Bad Cop on you. They terrorize and comfort you. They are masters of deception. They are your Masters. Steven Pressfield, in his brilliantly crafted The War of Art, aptly calls these demons Resistance.
Resistance is relentless. It never sleeps, lurking around you like a dark shadow, always ready to pounce. But it is at its best before you get started. It’ll do all it takes to prevent you from taking that first step. It knows, if you escape its reins, it’ll be much harder for it to get you back in. It’ll change skins. It’ll present itself as the devil (that it is), or a guardian angel, whatever suits better. It’ll sedate you, promise you all the riches of this world and all the bliss of the other. But it has no flash of its own. No form, or shape, hence no real powers. You are its embodiment, its incarnation. It possesses you and feasts on you from the inside out. It uses your own strengths and weaknesses against you. You are its own magician’s hat, the unlimited source of tricks. You are its only accomplice in the destruction of your spirit. And you’re too blind to see that it’s just been you all along.
Now you want to wait it out. Your work seems all too daunting and perilous. You feel overloaded and weary. You poor little thing! What’s the rush, anyway? You have all the time in the world to do it later. Why not settle with your dreary life for now? Only until you have enough money set aside, until your kids are older and independent, until the time is right, until you… just don't give a rat’s ass about it any more.
Time is never right to quit your day job and follow your childhood dream, unless you are a child and have no job, or you are Paris Hilton and have no childhood dream. Professionals don’t wait for the right time.
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready. The show goes on because it’s 11:30.”
If your work means monkey business to you, if it’s too hard, if you are too weak, or you simply don’t care, why don’t you just quit already? Same, if you believe that you are above your work and it should serve you, rather than the other way around, because that’s what Resistance whispered in your ear.
Web-search videos for Diego Maradona and you will see that he (perhaps the greatest soccer player ever born) never considered himself as anything more than a devoted servant, a mere offering to the gods of soccer.
“We have a right to our labor, but not to the fruits of our labor.”
That is probably why Cristiano Ronaldo—the prince of soccer—never steps up to the level of Lionel Messi—the monk.
Professionalism is self-imposed slavery. Every individual is allowed to be a tyrant to one and only person in the world—himself. Nothing great has ever come along without total self-sacrifice. Leonardo da Vinci used to starve himself so as to keep working without a break. When he steps into the ring, for Manny Pacquiao “protecting himself at all times” merely means an efficient strategy for defeating his opponent, rather than one for keeping himself out of harm’s way.
This is all a game. One shouldn't, however, confuse it with a play. It's more of ruthless chess of politics. You have to know the rules, but you never truly know the game itself. It is an eternal learning curve; a spiral, if you will. You don’t even get to play it. It plays you. You are just sitting in for a ride. You “are not so much swinging as being swung” (Craig Lambert).
The downfall of every player starts with a grain of belief that he knows. That he’s in control. That’s exactly when a card sharp starts losing his hand, a huntsman gets mauled by a bear, a captain crashes his ship into a rogue iceberg.
It is preposterous to assume you have control over anything when you are traveling 67,000 mi/h on a cosmic grain of sand around a dwarf fireball of a galactic fart.
So, if you can't get out, dive all the way in. As Steven Pressfield suggests, start by showing up for work every morning.
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
If Resistance has succeeded in scaring a hell out of you (and it probably has), if you dread that excruciating first step, follow Gretchen Rubin’s amazing resolution to Suffer for Fifteen Minutes. Set that as your goal. You don’t even have to go into the sixteenth minute. Come on! Women pass babies and men—kidney stones, and that usually takes many agonizing hours. You can take fifteen minutes of beating from Resistance. In return, you’ll be blissfully amazed at how much Resistance ass you can kick in those fifteen minutes and how far ahead you can get.
“O snailClimb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!”
Turn a deaf ear to the criticism that Resistance is passing through the mouths of the people trying to bring you down. Embrace hardship. Nothing else teaches you with such an accuracy who’s who around you. Because once you make it, they will all love you.
Wake up! Get to work. Brew that delicious mugful of coffee. Quit checking your email. Close the Facebook window. Shut off your phones. Stop visiting porn sites. Oh, spare me the crap! We all know you do, if you own a penis. And if you don’t, you’re reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Same difference.
Your work is bursting out of you. It can’t be contained. It can’t help but materialize. All you have to do—all you can do—is channel it out. You are a vessel. Let the good things pass through you. Embrace yourself. Let yourself happen. And, maybe, you'll get to become what the universe intended you to be.