Hi, it’s Brilliant.
For about four years, I did a podcast where I interviewed authors. Nearly 200 of them in all. These were all people who wrote on something good living-adjacent, and in addition to whatever subject I asked them about, I also made a point to ask how they worked. I wanted to know how they produced finished writing.
I asked about habits, routines, mindsets, tools, and I got a wide variety of answers. Some wrote with music, but many needed silence. Many were early risers. Some outlined everything, needing to know exactly where they were going before they started drafting a single word.
But despite the differences, something showed up repeatedly: for these writers, writing was simply something they couldn’t not do. Many of them did it long before they ever got paid for it. They’d done it before anybody read it. Most of them had been at it since they were kids, in one form or another, and the books were the inevitable expression of the path they were on.
I think that’s true of more than writing.
Some people are healers. Put them in a room with somebody hurting and they will alleviate the pain. Some are teachers, and they cannot watch another struggle with something they understand without sharing what they know. Fixers see what’s broken before anybody else does. Conveners gather people. Connectors, curators, advocates, entrepreneurs, leaders. Our gifts take many different forms.
I’ve noticed that the labels have one thing in common: whatever form it takes, the thing a person can’t not do is, underneath, a way of being useful to others.
It had nothing to do with how disciplined the authors were. A lot of them told me they weren’t particularly disciplined. It was that at some point every one of them had admitted what they were. Not decided it. Admitted it. And then arranged their lives around that.
The thing that you can’t not do doesn’t need to be explained to anybody. You certainly don’t need to apologize to anyone for it. You don’t even have to understand it yourself.
If there is work associated with it, perhaps it’s to admit it, own it and live it as fully and boldly as possible.
From the Commonplace Book
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Words often attributed to Howard Thurman
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
Tyson, the new four-part documentary on Netflix. I watched the first episode this week. Tyson grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and whatever else you want to say about that place, it made him. He was bullied, he was robbing people before he was a teenager, and he spent a good chunk of his youth in juvenile detention. And yet somewhere in all of that there was a part of him that wanted something more.
He learned to box. He found Cus D’Amato, or Cus found him, and Cus believed in him long before Mike believed in himself. What got me was how early he knew, and how specific he was about it. He didn’t want to be a champion. He wanted to be the greatest champion who ever lived. And he went after it with everything he had until he was the youngest heavyweight champion in history, at twenty.
Near the end of the episode, Tyson, who is sixty now, wonders out loud what it was all for. A man that driven, for that long, who got everything he set out to get, and he still ends up asking. I found the episode both inspiring and terrifying.
Wishing you every good thing,
Brilliant