B00CHVIVMY EBOK by Jon Acuff Read Free Book Online Page A

a $900,000 recording deal with Atlantic, starred in a movie called Country Strong , played at the Country Music Awards, and planned her debut album.
    Years later, the album is nowhere to be seen, Country Strong was a box-office failure, and Gwyneth isn’t doing much singing. Why?
    She’s not yet a Master when it comes to music. Despite her money, despite her fame, despite her marriage to the front man of one of the most celebrated bands in the last twenty years, she didn’t get to skip the lands of Learning and Editing. Whether your name is Gwyneth Paltrow or something that is considerably easier to spell, guess what? You’ve got to go through the Learning years of being a musician. You’ve got to go through the Editing years, too, if you really want to one day enter the lands of Mastering, Harvesting, and Guiding and be successful there.
    Gwyneth Paltrow can’t skip destinations on the map to awesome. You can’t either. (And don’t throw Bo Jackson at me. He played football and baseball his entire life. Those were parallel passions, not him deciding at 31 that he wanted to start a new one. And I will crush you with Bo in Tecmo Bowl.)
    So if you’ve spent the last eight years being an accountant and having success at that and then you decide to be a writer, give yourself some grace. You may have been a great accountant, but if you want to be a writer, it’s time to be 20 again.
    The truth is, if you want to reach the land of Harvesting, if you want to be more awesome, more often, you have to go through the lands of Learning, Editing, and Mastering each time you pursue something new, whether it’s a major pursuit or a minor one. You have to work hard and sacrifice and lean into your particular brand of awesome with energy and enthusiasm. Anytime you use the word sacrifice in a book, you should immediately offset it with something encouraging so people don’t throw your book down and go play Wii Fit.
    So here it is: You can’t skip stages, but as I said earlier, you can accelerate them. There are four ways to shorten the amount of time you spend in each.
    1. Start earlier.
    In his best-selling book Outliers , Malcolm Gladwell references a study that Dr. K. Anders Ericsson conducted. Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and is recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of expertise. Gladwell wrote about the “10,000-hour rule,” an idea that Ericsson put forth that states that expertise takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve (roughly twenty hours a week for ten years). 2 So then why, as Gladwell profiled, did Bill Gates become Bill Gates or Tiger Woods become Tiger Woods? In part because they started earlier than other people. Tiger had a golf club in his hand when he was a toddler. Gates started programming computers at the age of 13. By the time he was 6, Mozart had practiced an estimated 3,500 hours. 3 Turns out the shortcut to greatness isn’t a shortcut at all. You just start earlier than everybody else. As a result, you are able to reach Editing, Mastering, and Harvesting much sooner in life. It was no fluke that Woods won The Masters by a preposterous twelve strokes when he was only 21 years old. He’d been Learning, Editing, and Mastering golf for eighteen years by then.
    2. Stand on the shoulders of giants.
    I’m more comfortable onstage as a public speaker than I should be based on the limited amount of experience I’ve had, and that’s because of my dad. He’s a pastor, and I spent eighteen years watching him preach. For almost two decades, he showed me how fun and normal it was to stand up in front of hundreds of people and share ideas with them. I didn’t teach myself how to be calm onstage—my dad taught me that, and I’m standing on his shoulders.
    If your dad was a professional baseball player and raised you in the locker room, you’ll have a head start on a baseball career if that’s the path you want to take. You’ll grow up