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How To Be Here
Rob Bell
‘New York Times’ bestselling author Rob Bell shows us how to discover the greatness we were born for, successfully pursue our dreams, find our path, and live confident, fulfilled lives.Rob Bell believes that each of us has a path, a calling—whether it’s writing a novel, starting a business, joining a band, or simply becoming a volunteer. But many people are afraid to start on that path. Who are we to do that? Bell counters, Why not you? We need to learn to turn off the internal and external critics and leap. The universe is alive to help us. And we can only discover passion and joy after we take off.Interweaving engaging stories; lessons from Biblical figures; science, art, and business; honest personal experience; and practical advice, he offers invaluable insight on how to silence our critics, move from idea to action, take the first step, find joy in the work, persevere through hard times, and surrender the outcome. Combining the practical inspiration of Stephen Pressfield’s ‘The War of Art’ and the warm instructional insight of Annie Lamott’s ‘Bird By Bird’, ‘Yes, You’ encourages us to leave boring behind and embrace the fulfilling lives we are meant to have.







Copyright (#ulink_851a8a52-0e7b-5bba-a634-b31810cebc51)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook edition first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
First published in the United States in 2016 by HarperOne
Copyright © WORB, Inc., 2016
Rob Bell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Baas Creative
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007591343
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007591336
Version: 2017-03-07
Contents
Cover (#u971f11e0-696b-5c03-93c6-7604f624f73a)
Title Page (#u70c3b858-fd1e-542d-8bd2-19d7bf720a1b)
Copyright (#u02a72c22-892d-54e4-9c15-edc90fb198a0)
PART 1: The Blinking Line (#u4f747148-847e-5249-92ee-316bd54fa0c9)
An Unfinished World (#ub6514552-ba97-5e13-ab1f-8492742b1039)
Ex Nihilo-ness (#u6828faaf-c7b4-56fe-a029-a0c43aedb766)
Accountants and Moms (#uc611896c-998b-5a43-a438-d71f30b245cd)
Suffering (#u9258f455-b271-52fc-97cd-d926866ad45c)
Breath (#u2328ea18-3207-5400-9665-0b11d921a395)
Alert and Awake (#ue2629bf6-b2b3-53b2-be98-d5c7edc7cc5d)
Bored (#u1e1f1ba2-2331-520e-9c4d-ac46d125306d)
PART 2: The Blank Page (#u903e5818-7def-590a-bad0-0dedc6ac3f83)
Out of Your Head (#uaa508234-42d5-58fa-8390-fe644d8dd153)
Comparisons (#ubf464b63-2aef-557b-9647-6aa1c03bf638)
The You Experiment (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 3: The Japanese Have a Word for It (#litres_trial_promo)
Figuring It Out (#litres_trial_promo)
Someone Should (#litres_trial_promo)
Step (#litres_trial_promo)
Courage (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bus Route (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 4: The Thing About Craft (#litres_trial_promo)
The Corvette (#litres_trial_promo)
Honor and Privilege (#litres_trial_promo)
Reconnected (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 5: The First Number (#litres_trial_promo)
Step 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Overthinking (#litres_trial_promo)
Suspend Judgment (#litres_trial_promo)
Nerves (#litres_trial_promo)
What You Don’t Know (#litres_trial_promo)
The Ramp (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 6: The Dickie Factor (#litres_trial_promo)
Deep Waters (#litres_trial_promo)
Failure (#litres_trial_promo)
Alive (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 7: The Two Things You Always Do (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mail Room (#litres_trial_promo)
Original (#litres_trial_promo)
Rejection (#litres_trial_promo)
Surrender (#litres_trial_promo)
This Is Where I Start (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 8: The Power of the Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Rhythm and Sabbath (#litres_trial_promo)
Your Groove (#litres_trial_promo)
We Have This Morning (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 9: The Exploding Burrito (#litres_trial_promo)
Presence (#litres_trial_promo)
Seeing the Ocean (#litres_trial_promo)
Endnotes, Riffs, References, and Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Rob Bell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PART 1 (#ulink_30bba326-474e-5ebe-9f97-caa923ea9b5a)
The Blinking Line (#ulink_30bba326-474e-5ebe-9f97-caa923ea9b5a)
You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
—Alan Watts

I once had an idea for a book.
I’d never written a book.
I was a pastor at the time and I’d been giving sermons week after week and I noticed that certain ideas and stories seemed to connect with people in a unique way. I began to see themes and threads and wondered whether I could bring them together to make something people would read and pass along to their friends. I already had a job, so I figured the only way to write a book was to hire a stenographer—the person who sits in a courtroom and records everything that is said during a trial—and speak the book out loud in one sitting while he typed what I said.
So that’s what I did. I stood there in a room and I spoke the book out loud while KevinTheStenographer typed away. It took an entire day.
And it was awful. Seriously—it was so bad.
There was a moment in the middle of the afternoon when I was talking and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t even listening to what I was saying. I had somehow managed to stop paying attention to myself.
A few days later Kevin sent me the typed manuscript of what I’d said and I started reading it, but it was like a mild form of torture. It just didn’t work.
It was my words, but it wasn’t me, if that makes sense.
All of which led me to the shocking realization that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to actually write a book. (#litres_trial_promo)
Which sounds obvious, but at the time it was a revelation.
I remember sitting down at my desk, opening up a new word-processing document, and staring at that blank page with that blinking line in the upper left-hand corner. I wasn’t prepared for how intimidating it would be. Other people are writers—actual, you know, authors. And there are lots of them, many who have been doing it for years.
I thought about Christopher Moore’s book (#litres_trial_promo) about Biff the thirteenth disciple
and Annie Dillard’s (#litres_trial_promo) line about physics labs
and everything Nick Hornby has ever written
and Dorothy Sayers’s words about Trinitarian creativity (#litres_trial_promo)
and anything by Dave Eggers (#litres_trial_promo) …
I was now going to try and do that? The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me.
There’s a reason it’s called a cursor.
We all have a blinking line.
Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.
It’s the book
or day
or job
or business
or family
or mission
or class
or plan
or cause
or meeting
or task
or project
or challenge
or phone call
or life that is waiting for you to bring it into being.

An Unfinished World (#ulink_e6ca568b-19c6-51d7-ad60-381e9610ce6d)
Do you see your life as something you create?
Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?
The blinking line raises a compelling question: What are we here for?
For many people, the world is already created.
It’s a fixed, static reality—set in place, previously established, done. Or to say it another way: finished.
Which usually leads to the question: What’s the point of any of this?
But when we’re facing the blinking line and we talk about bringing something new into existence, we’re expressing a different view of the world, one in which the world is unfinished.
There’s an ancient poem about this unfinished world we call home. In this poem there are stars and fish and earth and birds and animals and oceans, and they’re all in the endless process of becoming. It’s not just a tree, it’s a tree that produces fruit that contains seeds that will eventually grow new trees that will produce new fruit that contains more seeds to make more new trees. It’s a world exploding with life and beauty and complexity and diversity, all of it making more, becoming and evolving in such a way that tomorrow will be different from today because it’s all headed somewhere. Nothing is set in stone or static here; the whole thing is in motion, flush with vitality and pulsing with creative energy. (This poem, by the way, is the first chapter of the Bible (#litres_trial_promo), in case any of this is starting to sound familiar.)
And then, right there in the middle of all of this unfinished creation, the poet tells us about a man and a woman. The man’s name is Adam, which means The Human in the original Hebrew language. It’s not a common name like you and I have, it’s more like a generic description. Same with the woman, whose name is Eve, which means Source of Life or Mother of the Living.
They find themselves in the midst of this big, beautiful, exotic, heartbreaking, mysterious, endlessly becoming, unfinished world and they’re essentially told,
Do something with it!
Make something!
Take it somewhere!
Enjoy it!
The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world. To turn this story into a debate about whether or not Adam and Eve were real people or to read this poem as a science textbook is to miss the provocative, pointed, loaded questions that the poem asks:
What will Adam and Eve do with this extraordinary opportunity?
What kind of world will they help make?
Where will they take it?
What will they do with all this creative power they’ve been given?
It’s a poem about them, but it asks questions about all of us:
What will we make of our lives?
What will we do with our energies?
What kind of world will we create?
Which leads to the penetrating question for every one of us—including you:
What will you do with your blinking line?

Ex Nihilo-ness (#ulink_776b7a5f-98ec-5601-adf7-66710ff8f9dd)
You create your life.
You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something. And you have way more power to do this than you realize.
What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.
All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.
There’s a great Latin phrase that helps me make sense of the wonder and weirdness of creating a life. Ex nihilo means out of nothing. I love this phrase because you didn’t used to be here. And I wasn’t here either. We didn’t used to be here. And then we were here. We were conceived, we were birthed, we arrived.
Out of nothing came … us.
You.
Me.
All of us.
All of it.
There is an ex nihilo-ness to everything, and that includes each of us.
Who of us can make sense of our own existence?
Have you ever heard an answer to the question How did we get here? that even remotely satisfied your curiosity? (Is this why kids shudder when they think of their parents having sex? Because we get here through some very mysterious and unpredictable biological phenomena involving swimming and winning? … Our very origins are shrouded in strangeness. You and I are here, but we were almost not here.)
My friend Carlton (#litres_trial_promo) writes and produces television shows and sometimes I watch his shows and I’ll say to him, How did you come up with that? Where did that come from? We’ll be laughing and I’ll say, What is going on inside your head that you can make this stuff up?
Have you ever encountered something that another human being made and thought, How did she do that? Where did that come from?
When I was in high school my neighbor Tad, the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience) gave me two ceramic heads that he had made. One head is green and has a smiling face, and the other head is brown and has a frowning face. They are very odd sculptures. But at the time he gave them to me I was mesmerized.
You can do that?
You can take a pile of clay and break it in two and then mold it and work with it and make that?
As a seventeen-year-old I was flabbergasted with the ex nihilo-ness of what Tad had made.
He just sat down and came up with that?
(By the way, he gave them to me in 1988. I still have them; they’re on the wall next to the desk where I’m writing this book. Twenty-eight years later.)
The ex nihilo-ness of art and design and music and odd sculptures and bizarre television shows reminds us of the ex nihilo-ness of our lives—we come out of nothing. And we’re here. And we get to make something with what we’ve been given.
Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us:
What kind of world are we making?
Which always leads to the pressing personal question:
What kind of life am I creating?

Accountants and Moms (#ulink_35d2dd39-5ba0-5863-9eb0-d82be5fac983)
Now for some of us, the moment we hear the word create, our first thought is,
But you don’t understand, I’m not the creative type
or
That’s fine for some people, but I’m an accountant and it’s just not that exciting
or
What does any of this have to do with being a mom?
About ten years ago I was speaking at a conference and I decided to sit in the audience and listen to the speaker who spoke before me. He began his talk by saying that there are two types of people in the world: numbers people and art people. He explained that some people are born with creativity in their blood and so they do creative work and some people aren’t—they’re the numbers people—and that’s fine because they can do other things.
I sat there listening, thinking, That’s total rubbish.
Take accountants, for example.
Accountants work with numbers and columns and facts and figures and spreadsheets. Their job is to keep track of what’s being made and where it’s going and how much is available to make more. That structure is absolutely necessary for whatever is being done to move forward. It is a fundamentally creative act to make sure things have the shape and form and internal coherence they need.
Obviously, bureaucracies and institutions and governments and finance departments can be huge obstacles to doing compelling work, but ideally—in spirit—the person who gives things their much needed structure and order is playing a vital role in the ongoing creation of the world, helping things move forward. (Which is an excellent litmus test for whether the work you’re doing is work that the world needs: Does it move things forward? Because some work doesn’t. Some work takes things in the wrong direction. Some things people give their energies to prevent other people from thriving. Some tasks dehumanize and degrade the people involved. Perhaps you’re in one of those jobs, the kind that sucks the life out of your soul and you can’t see the good in it. Stop. Leave. Life is too short to help make a world you don’t want to live in.)
And then there are moms. I’ve met moms who say I’m just a mom …
Just a mom?
What!?
Could anything be more connected to the ongoing creation of the world than literally, physically bringing new human beings into existence and then nurturing that new life as it’s shaped and formed?
All work is creative work because all work is participating in the ongoing creation of the world.

Suffering (#ulink_0cc5b3a5-ab26-58f1-91bf-b8b13c753ebf)
But what about the things that happen to us that we never wanted to happen? What about tragedy and loss and heartbreak and illness and abuse—that list can be long.
What about all of the things that come our way that make us feel powerless and out of control, like our life is being created for us?
When I was growing up, my dad would come into my room every night before I went to bed and tell me that he loved me, and then he would stand in the doorway before he turned out the light and he would say, You’re my pride and joy. He coached my soccer and basketball teams, he took us on vacations, he made my sister and brother and me pancakes on Saturday mornings, he helped us with our homework. When I left home to go to college, he sent me handwritten letters every week, never failing to remind me that he was cheering me on.
I tell you about how present and involved my dad was in my life growing up because when he was eight, his uncle picked him up at his house to take him somewhere. His cousin was in the backseat of the car, and when my dad asked his cousin where they were going, his cousin said, To the funeral home—don’t you know? Your dad died.
That’s how he found out his dad had died: from his cousin in the backseat of a car on the way to the funeral home. His dad, whom he hadn’t known very well because his dad was gone during the war, had cancer and died at age thirty-four.
When my dad was fifteen, his mother became very sick, and he and his brother thought she was going to die. He once told me that while his mother was in the hospital, his brother clung to him through the night, repeating over and over with terror in his voice, Are we going to be all alone in the world?
She eventually recovered, but then a year later my dad’s brother, who was his best friend and constant companion, died unexpectedly in an accident.
How does a person bear that kind of pain?
How does a heart ever recover?
How does a young man make his way in the world when he’s experienced that much suffering?
Somewhere in the midst of all that pain and loss, my dad decided that someday he would have a family and he would be the father that he had always wished he had. And so that’s what he did.
How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative act.
Who starts cancer foundations? Usually people who have lost a loved one to cancer.
Who organizes recovery groups? Mostly people who have struggled with addiction.
Who stands up for the rights of the oppressed? Often people who have experienced oppression themselves.
We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good out of even this …
There’s a question that you can ask about the things that have come your way that you didn’t want. It’s a question rooted in a proper understanding of the world, a question we have to ask ourselves continually throughout our lives:
What new and good thing is going to come out of even this?
When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.
Death. Disease. Disaster. Whatever it is, you will have to grieve it. And maybe be angry about it. Or be in shock. Or shake your fists at the heavens for the injustice of it.
That’s normal and healthy and often needed.
But then, as you move through it, as time does its healing work, you begin to look for how even this has potential. Even this is a blinking line.

Breath (#ulink_cdfdf7df-27ef-53b6-bc1f-6a320f1be44c)
I once watched a doctor hold my newborn son upside down by the ankles and give him a shake.
I was shocked.
What? You can do that to a baby?
Because up until that moment I was under the impression that babies were incredibly fragile, like a high-grade combination of porcelain and glass. But the doctor handled him when he first entered the world like he was made of rubber. He did this, I quickly learned, for a very specific reason: He was trying to help my son take his first breath. Because if you don’t take a breath in those first few seconds when you arrive, you have a very serious problem.
And so my boy in all his shiny pink glory hung there, upside down, with strange liquids exiting his various orifices, and then he coughed and gasped and took his first breath.
Remembering that day takes me to another day, this one a decade later. It was a Friday night, August 22, 2008, and my family and I were visiting my grandma Eileen. My grandma and I had been great friends since I was young. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, she and I had lunch together every Friday for a decade. We, as they say, rolled deep.
But when we went to visit her that evening in August, everything was different. She was in her mid-eighties and her health had been declining over the past year and she’d been moved to a different part of the nursing home where she lived. We knew we were getting close to the end, but I still wasn’t expecting what we experienced when we entered her room. She was lying in bed, her eyes closed, taking long, slow breaths, but something about her was absent.
It was like she was in the room, but not in the room. Here, but already gone.
If you’ve ever been in the room with someone who is dying, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a physical body right there in front of you, but something’s missing. Spirit, soul, presence, essence—whatever words you use for it, there’s a startling vacancy you feel in being with someone you’ve been with so many times before and yet that person isn’t there anymore.
I froze in the doorway, watching her lying on the bed, as it began to sink in that she was at the end of her life. You know someone is going to die because you know we’re all going to die—you know it in your brain. But then there’s a moment when that truth drops from your brain to your heart, like an elevator in free fall, and lands with a thud.
My wife Kristen, however, walked right over to the bed, sat down next to Grandma, took Grandma’s hands in her own, and leaned in over her heart and began to speak to her:
Grandma, we’re here with you now. We see that you’re going to be leaving us soon. We love you and we have loved being with you all these years and now we’re letting you go …
It was so moving.
We spent a few hours with Grandma that evening, and then we left and within a few hours she died.
There is a moment when you arrive and you take your first breath, and then there is a moment when you take your last breath and you leave.
For thousands of years humans have been aware that our lives intimately and ultimately depend on our breath, which is a physical reflection of a deeper, unseen reality. It isn’t just breath we’re each given—it’s life itself.
Before anything else can be said about you, you have received a gift. God / the universe / ultimate reality / being itself—whatever word you want to use for source—has given you life.
Are you breathing?
Are you here?
Did you just take a breath?
Are you about to take another?
Do you have a habit of regularly doing this?
Gift.
Gift.
Gift.
Whatever else has happened in your life—failure, pain, heartache, abuse, loss—the first thing that can be said about you is that you have received a gift.
Often you’ll meet people who have long lists of ways they’ve been slighted, reasons the universe has been unfair to them, times they got the short end of the stick or were dealt a bad hand of cards.
While we grieve and feel and lament and express whatever it is that is brewing within us, a truth courses through the veins of all our bumps and bruises, and it is this: We have received.
You’re here,
you’re breathing,
and you have received a gift,
a generous, extraordinary, mysterious, inexplicable gift.

Alert and Awake (#ulink_77285b42-0a4d-54f5-8209-1c7d2ff87cc1)
I once visited a man named John who was dying of cancer. I’d never met him before, but a mutual friend had asked me to see him at his house. He was lying in a hospital bed in his living room when I came in, his body frail and ravaged. And yet his eyes were clear and full of shimmering life. After we shook hands and I sat down, he told me,
People just don’t get it
as he smiled and then repeated,
People just don’t get it.
He said that phrase over and over and over again for the next hour, in between bursts of conversation. When I asked him what he meant by it, he said that people don’t understand how precious and incredible life is. He said he hadn’t understood this truth until he knew that it was being taken from him.
Because that’s how it works, doesn’t it?
Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.
You’re driving down the road arguing with someone you love about something stupid when a car almost runs you off the road—and suddenly your hearts are pounding as you turn to each other and say, That was close! And you aren’t arguing anymore.
You’re frustrated with your kid and then you hear about someone else’s kid being in the hospital, and when you get home you hold your kid extra close.
You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you’re here and this is your life and it’s good and it’s a sacred gift.
Why do we react in these ways? Because deep down we know that all we have is a gift.
Jesus taught his disciples a prayer (#litres_trial_promo) that begins,
Our father, who’s in heaven …
… which is another way of saying,
Begin your prayers—begin your day—by acknowledging that your life is a gift and this gift flows from a source. This source is responsible for the air in your lungs, the blood that courses through your veins, and the vitality that surges through you and everything around you.
… which is another way of saying,
Begin whatever you’re doing by remembering that you are here and you have been given a gift.
The blinking line reminds you that whatever has happened to you, whatever has come your way that you didn’t want, whatever you have been through, you have today, you have this moment, you have a life that you get to create. The universe is unfinished, and God is looking for partners in the ongoing creation of the world.

Bored (#ulink_44dfc606-7bda-5ad4-b87c-1033b42eb062)
Boredom (#litres_trial_promo) is lethal. Boredom says, There’s nothing interesting to make here. Boredom reveals what we believe about the kind of world we’re living in. Boredom is lethal because it reflects a static, fixed view of the world—a world that is finished.
Cynicism is slightly different from boredom, but just as lethal. Cynicism says, There’s nothing new to make here. Often, cynicism presents itself as wisdom, but it usually comes from a wound. Cynicism acts as though it’s seen a lot and knows how the world works, shooting down new ideas and efforts as childish and uninformed. Cynicism points out all the ways something could go wrong, how stupid it is, and what a waste of time it would be. Cynicism holds things at a distance, analyzing and mocking and noting all the possibilities for failure. Often, this is because the cynic did try something new at some point and it went belly up, he was booed off the stage, and that pain causes him to critique and ridicule because there aren’t any risks in doing that. If you hold something at a distance and make fun of it, then it can’t hurt you.
And then there’s despair. While boredom can be fairly subtle and cynicism can appear quite intelligent and even funny, despair is like a dull thud in the heart. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters. Despair reflects a pervasive dread that it’s all pointless and that we are, in the end, simply wasting our time.
Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves—that we are here.
All three distance us from and deaden us to the questions the blinking line asks:
How are you going to respond to this life you have been given?
What are you going to do with it?
What are you going to make here?

PART 2 (#ulink_24f0105b-a0f2-5f52-84ee-b5f777a1ac75)
The Blank Page (#ulink_24f0105b-a0f2-5f52-84ee-b5f777a1ac75)
What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.
—Stephen King

I once had an idea for a book called Fire in the Wine. (#litres_trial_promo)
I had a big black sketchbook on my shelf and I had this insight about the human body and soil and the food we eat and how when we die we’re buried in the earth, which is what we do with seeds that then grow into the food that we consume that sustains our bodies that will be buried when we die … so I made a drawing to represent all of that.
It was just one sketch.
And then a few months later I came across a quote which somehow connected with that drawing that I had copied on the next page of that big black sketchbook.
And then something happened to me that reminded me of that first sketch and that quote which connected to something I’d read in a magazine around that time.
This continued for several years until I could see a book emerging on the pages of that sketchbook, a book I decided to call Fire in the Wine. As I began to organize the content of Fire in the Wine into chapters I realized that I needed to do some reading to give more breadth and depth to the ideas I was working on. So I read. And read. And read. Thousands of pages. And whenever I came across something that spurred a thought or clarified something I’d been thinking about, I underlined it or marked the page. I then went back through those books and took notes on what I’d underlined, copying each idea onto a 3×5 card.
Which took months.
I then laid all those cards out on the floor and looked for patterns and connections and common threads. There were a lot of those cards, and so just out of curiosity I started counting them. I lost track somewhere past six hundred.
Once the cards were organized, I started writing the book, crafting the chapters, creating the introduction, working on the first draft.
Which took months.
I turned in that first draft to my editor, who visited me a few weeks later to talk about the book—the book that, he informed me, didn’t appear to have a clear point.
I then rearranged the entire thing, moving the start to the end and the end to the beginning.
Which took months.
Months in which it became clear that the book wasn’t really about fire in the wine, it was about something else. I kept using a phrase that I didn’t realize I was repeating until my editor pointed it out. That phrase seemed like it should be the title of the book, so I changed the name of the book. Changing the name then shifted some of the central themes, which meant I had to go back through and rearrange the entire book, moving the quantum physics part to the beginning and organizing the rest of the book around seven central themes.
Which took months.
By the fifth draft, I had lost my way. I couldn’t figure out how to take all that content and make it flow. It was like I had all the notes but no melody. I’d sit there and stare at the computer screen for hours, trying to figure out how to make it flow.
Some days I’d write one new sentence.
One.
Other days I’d write one new sentence, and then, at the end of the day, I’d delete that one sentence.
Many, many mornings—by this point well over a year of mornings—I’d get up and make my kids breakfast and take them to school and then I’d sit down at my desk and go through the book AGAIN, looking for even the slightest bit of help to find a way forward.
And that’s when the head games started. You know about head games—those voices in your head, questioning who you are and what you’re doing. Telling you you’re no good.
This was the sixth book I’d written, so you’d think it wouldn’t have been so hard. But it was. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever made. It didn’t matter that I’d done it before. It didn’t matter that I’d done months and months of outlining and arranging. It didn’t matter that I cared deeply about the content.
The blinking line can be brutal.
Because the blinking line doesn’t just taunt you with all the possibilities that are before you, the potential, all that you sense could exist but isn’t yet because you haven’t created it. The blinking line also asks a question:
Who are you to do this?
And that question can be paralyzing. It can prevent us from overcoming inertia. It can cause crippling doubt and stress. It can keep us stuck on the couch while life passes us by.

Out of Your Head (#ulink_c6114515-e56f-5630-beac-928e3b855eaa)
To answer the question, Who are you to do this?,
you first have to get out of your head.
I use this phrase out of your head because that’s where it’s easy to get stuck. Somewhere between our hearts and our minds is an internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we think and feel and believe. It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on “repeat,” (#litres_trial_promo) these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.
To get out of your head, it’s important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one:
Who you aren’t isn’t interesting.
You have a list of all the things you aren’t, the things you can’t do, the things you’ve tried that didn’t go well. Regrets, mistakes that haunt you, moments when you crawled home in humiliation. For many of us, this list is the source of a number of head games, usually involving the words,
Not _________ enough.
Not smart enough,
not talented enough,
not disciplined enough,
not educated enough,
not beautiful, thin, popular, or hardworking enough,
you can fill in the __________.
Here is the truth about those messages:
They aren’t interesting.
What you haven’t done,
where you didn’t go to school,
what you haven’t accomplished,
who you don’t know and what you are scared of
simply aren’t interesting.
I’m not very good at math. If I get too many numbers in front of me I start to space out.
See? Not interesting.
If you focus on who you aren’t, and what you don’t have, or where you haven’t been, or skills or talents or tools or resources you’re convinced aren’t yours, precious energy will slip through your fingers that you could use to do something with that blinking line.
In the same way that who you aren’t isn’t interesting when it comes to getting out of your head,
who “they” are isn’t interesting.
We all have our they—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, superstars who appear to skate by effortlessly while we slog it out. They are the people we fixate on, constantly holding their lives up to our life, using their apparent ease and success as an excuse to hold back from doing our work and pursuing our path in the world.
Siblings who don’t have to study and still get better grades. Brothers-in-law who make more money without appearing to work very hard. Friends who have kids the same age as ours and yet they never seem stressed or tired and always look great.
There’s a moving moment in one of the accounts of Jesus’s life where he’s reunited with one of his disciples, a man named Peter. (I started out as a preacher, and so these stories are in my blood.) Peter is the disciple who had denied that he even knew Jesus earlier in the story, and you can feel his relief when Jesus forgives him, telling him he has work for Peter to do.
And how does Peter respond to this powerful moment of reconciliation?
He points to one of Jesus’s other disciples and asks, What about him?
All Peter can think about is someone else’s path. He’s with Jesus, having a conversation, and yet his mind is over there, wondering about John.
Peter asks,
What about him?
and Jesus responds,
What is that to you? (#litres_trial_promo)

Comparisons (#ulink_467ecc4b-0eaa-56e9-9a2c-a2fbbb94850b)
In the movie Comedian, (#litres_trial_promo) Jerry Seinfeld runs into a young comedian named Orny Adams backstage at a club where they are both performing and Orny says to him,
“You get to a point where you’re like ‘How much longer can I take it?’”
Jerry is utterly perplexed by Orny’s sentiment, asking, “What—is time running out?”
Orny then begins a litany of complaints and excuses—“I’m getting older … I feel like I’ve sacrificed so much of my life.”
Jerry is amazed, “Is there something else you would rather have been doing? Other appointments or places you gotta be?”
Then Orny pulls out a new line of complaints: “I see my friends are making a lot of money … Did you ever stop and compare your life? Okay, I’m twenty-nine and my friends are all married and they all have kids and houses. They have some sort of sense of normality. What do you tell your parents?”
Jerry’s response: “Are you out of your mind? … This has nothing to do with your friends. It’s such a special thing. This has nothing to do with making it.”
I love those lines from Seinfeld:
This has nothing to do with your friends.
It’s such a special thing.
This has nothing to do with making it.
Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else’s life and how it compares with yours.
We each have our own life, our own blinking line, and every path has its own highs and lows, ups and downs, joys, challenges, and difficulties.

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