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Start Plot Summary

Introduction

I remember the day I stood frozen at the edge of the cliff, staring down at the crystal blue waters below. My friends had already jumped, their laughter echoing up from the lake. Fear gripped my chest - not just of the height, but of failing, of looking foolish, of not measuring up. In that moment, I realized how often fear had been dictating my choices, keeping me from experiences that could transform my life. This moment of recognition is where many of us find ourselves in life - standing at the edge of potential greatness but paralyzed by fear. What if we fail? What if we're not good enough? What if we've missed our window of opportunity? The author takes us on a journey through these very human questions, revealing how the path to an awesome life isn't about eliminating fear but about moving forward despite it. Through practical wisdom and engaging stories, we discover that an extraordinary life isn't reserved for the special few - it's available to anyone willing to take that first step away from average and toward awesome, punching fear in the face along the way.

Chapter 1: Starting Your Journey: Where Are You Now?

If you ever fly Korean Air, keep your eyes closed as you make your way to coach. The challenge is that you enter from the front of the plane. If your eyes are open, you're immediately thrust into an aeronautical wonderland. First class isn't full of seats; it's full of tiny pods of luxury. They have their own little sleeping cocoons in which to lounge away the sixteen-hour flight. And if you see these pleasure domes as you walk to your seat, you're going to get sad. So that you fully comprehend what's happening as you pass through the seating classes, Korean Air color-codes the seats. The pleasure domes in first class are woven in a periwinkle blue fabric that seems to tickle you lightly and whisper, "Don't you wish this flight were longer?" The next class of seats is light blue, like the color of an apron you'd buy at Williams-Sonoma. The business class is dark blue, serious but still seriously comfortable. Finally, at the end of the color wheel—and back of the plane—you get to coach class, your seat, which is brown, the color of disappointment. After flying sixteen hours from Atlanta to South Korea, we had to fly another six hours from Seoul to Hanoi. We then boarded an overnight train to travel deeper into the country. The shared bathroom was just a metal hole in the floor that dropped straight onto the tracks. After a solid night of rumbling through moonlit mountains, we arrived in Sapa. From there we drove another seven hours on dirt roads overlooking cliffs. Finally, after hours of breathtaking scenery punctuated by moments of sheer panic, we came upon something I'd never expected to see. French motorcyclists. Decked out in apocalyptic-looking safety gear and a week's worth of dirt, they were obviously a long way from home. Lost in the deepest middle of nowhere I'd ever experienced, the bikers were gesturing to some Vietnamese villagers huddled around a map. We pulled over to the side of the road to help them find their next destination. Steve, an American who had lived in Asia for eighteen years, looked out the bus window at the bikers' map. "Wow," he said to Hua, our Vietnamese driver, "that is an amazing map. Look how detailed it is! We should get one of those." Then he paused just before lowering his window and said, "Then again, the best map in the world doesn't matter if you don't know where you are." This principle applies perfectly to our journey through life. Without a point of origin, even the best map is rendered useless. If you opened up the GPS on your phone right now and tried to get directions, the very first thing the phone would need to know is where you are. Yet most of us, when it comes to figuring out where we're headed in life, never stop to ask the simple question, "Where am I?" We just keep marching forward, day after day, cubicle after cubicle, moving faster and faster but not really going anywhere.

Chapter 2: Breaking Through the Wall of Purpose

This book would've been a lot easier to write if I could just outline how I found my purpose. I'd use a bunch of words like life force and destiny. I'd pull out a few of those reverse sentences motivational speakers like me love: "Don't just dare to dream—dream to dare!" I'd get some sort of signature look, maybe a suit coat with a hood inexplicably sewn on the back. And then I'd go on some sort of "power up" tour around the country where I'd offer self-help advice like the back of a shampoo bottle. But I tried to write that book telling you how to find your purpose, and I kept running into one big problem: I didn't find mine. When I went to Vietnam once to build kindergartens with blog readers, I stopped in the driveway and looked at the building. There were six classrooms, a separate kitchen building, and a bathroom. I was in awe that a group of strangers on a blog had helped make this possible. I was content to leave it at that, to just cherish that moment like a Successories poster. But out of nowhere, five words popped into my head: "How did I get here?" The truth is, I didn't know. I could look back on the years leading up to the kindergartens and explain them in 20/20 hindsight, but the overwhelming reality was that I didn't know how I had come to be standing on a mountain in Vietnam. I didn't figure out my purpose and then execute it. I didn't write "Vietnam" on a whiteboard in Atlanta, add "Write three books," then proceed to take deliberate steps to my very crystal clear finish line. Most of us believe these lies about purpose: Everyone but you knows exactly what his is. You'll only have one. You should have it figured out by the time you're 22 years old. It changes everything instantly. You have to know the finish line before you cross the starting line. The result of these lies is that most of us have forgotten something critical: Purpose is not a final destination. One of the worst things you can do is try to find your purpose in life. Nothing cripples you like trying to "find your purpose," or "figure out your dream," or "name your passion." It puts tremendous pressure on you, becomes an idol, and stops you in your tracks. Forget finding a purpose. Live with purpose instead. Living with purpose allows you to start today, start where you are, and start on what matters to you. The door to purpose has been open the whole time - you just need to walk through it.

Chapter 3: The Learning Zone: Experimenting Your Way Forward

Save for the cost of this book, the road to awesome will not cost you any money. Whether you have a nickel to your name or a billion-dollar empire, you can walk this road. But the road is not free. It actually costs you a different currency—in fact, the most expensive currency there is: time. Every land you walk through will require deposits of your time, but instead of waiting for more time to magically appear in your day, you're going to launch a rescue mission of your current days. Recognizing that time was a fuel that moved me down the road, I immediately tried to go from zero to 1,000 mph overnight. That's not really surprising. The second you think seriously about finding more time to work on being more awesome, fear will tell you to make sure every second of your day is perfectly mapped out. I decided that every day, all day, I would make sure my activities fell into one of five categories: Serve, Worship, Order, Rest, Dance (SWORD). I carried a little notebook around with me, constantly checking off my minutes. I was a laser of ridiculousness, regularly asking my wife things like, "Well, I played with the kids outside, which was kind of exercise, so that's Dance; but I was serving them as well, as their dad. Do you think those six minutes count as Dance or Serve?" I gave up on the whole SWORD system after a month and promptly got right back to wasting all my time. I only had two speeds: waste all my time or try to be impossibly perfect with my time. What I learned was that when it comes to time management, change has to be simple. In fact, all we have to do is find thirty minutes in our week. One half hour is all I'm asking you to give at the start. This simple sacrifice was the biggest, most important thing I did to change my career. You're too busy to be awesome right now. But that doesn't mean you can't be selfish at 5:00 a.m. The mornings I get up and write from 5:00 to 5:30, you'd be surprised at how infrequently my wife tells me I've been ignoring her. You can be selfish at 5:00 a.m. Or 11:00 p.m. if your spouse goes to bed early. You can also rescue thirty minutes during lunch. Every land you walk through, from Learning to Guiding, will require deposits of your time. Rescue thirty minutes to walk down your path to awesome. If your dream isn't worth thirty minutes, you've either got the wrong dream or you're just pretending you have one.

Chapter 4: Editing Your Life: Finding What Truly Matters

One morning some bakery owners asked me to help them figure out their path to awesome. They were married and told me their story: "We're sick of Texas. We want seasons again. And hills and trees. We've got a little bakery in town that people love. It's growing and we've started to build up a local following. But now we want to move to Idaho. And we don't know what we should do when we get there. Should we open another bakery? Should we focus on wholesale? Should we do catering? Should we have a little restaurant?" As we talked, it became clear that they had gone through a long list of questions as they journeyed through the land of Editing: What would make the most money? What did the town in Idaho need? What type of business could they grow the fastest? What type of business would have the lowest overhead? They had run through a laundry list of questions but had failed to ask the most important question there is in the land of Editing. So there in the hall, I said to them, "Well, what gives you the most joy?" You would have thought I'd thrown a cat at them. For weeks they'd been debating the move to Idaho. They'd worked hard on the challenge of moving. They'd studied and debated. They were attending an exclusive business event for high-performing entrepreneurs when I met them. They'd looked at the problem from every possible angle, except one: joy. Most of us never get there. We never ask the question, "What gives me the most joy?" I think some of us feel guilty even saying those words out loud. As if perhaps it's a selfish thing to think, What gives me joy? As if perhaps joy is acceptable for rare moments on the weekend or surprising glimpses of sunsets while on vacation, but it has no real purpose in the real world. So instead of asking, "What gives me the most joy?" we ask easier questions, like, "What will make me the most money?" That's not a bad question, but money isn't a calling. It's a consequence. Your awesome is about finding the core of who you are and what lights you up. Once you've discovered that, you can have a million different jobs. Take me, for instance. Once I edited my life and realized that what I really cared about was sharing ideas, suddenly there were a million dream jobs available. I could become a blogger, an author, a podcast host, a public speaker, a radio show host, a counselor, a consultant, or a copywriter. The world of dream jobs opened up when I got to the core of what I love to do.

Chapter 5: Mastering Skills: The Power of Deliberate Practice

In 2008, I decided I wanted to be a public speaker. After writing, it was the second thing I wanted to learn how to master. I had hope, passion, and great gobs of desire to be a public speaker. The only problem was that no one else cared. Nobody would book me to come speak. And that was a good decision on their part. I was horrible. But I was caught in a vicious cycle: You don't have any experience. The only way to get experience is to get a job. But every job for which you apply insists you still need experience. Then I found a loophole in the system. It was in the last place most people would look—rehab. A church near us had a residential rehab program. They had twelve people living in the facility at any given time. They were always looking for speakers because no one aims at the rehab crowd. When you aspire to be a public speaker, you aim for huge crowds with huge stages and huge paychecks. Speaking to twelve people, who are in the throes of one of the worst seasons of their lives, for free, is not exactly a moment you aspire to. So why did I do it? It was awesome. One of my dreams is to share hope with people. Talk about a group who needed some encouragement. Sometimes we get so caught up in waiting for the perfect context—the one we've always had in our heads—in order to begin being awesome. It's a horrible mistake. Awesome starts the moment you do what you love. If you truly love doing it, the environment in which you do it shouldn't matter. People in rehab are learning how to communicate honestly. They won't let you come in and sleepwalk through a speech. I had to dig deep and speak from my heart. That was an invaluable experience. Do you know how many other public speakers asked the rehab center if they could speak there the same month I did? Zero. For someone who was horrible at public speaking, that was the level of competition I was ready to handle. The best way to reach awesome is to do reps. How do you become a master? You do reps. If you want to get better at something, you have to do the reps. Want to be great friends with someone? Do the reps. Go to coffee. Help them move. Stop by on random Tuesday nights. Stack up enough reps until you have the relationship you want. Dreams work the same way. You don't get to pick and choose a life of home-run moments. You get to swing the bat, a lot. Some of them are going to connect; some of them won't. But each one takes you one step closer to awesome.

Chapter 6: Harvesting Success: Dangers and Opportunities

Just inside the border of the land of Harvesting, there is an exit. The path is wide, the road is easy, and you will have barely taken a step into Harvesting before you see it plain as day. And if you take it now, if you explore it at this point, you will undo all the awesome you've set into motion thus far. Want to know the secret to being an awesome public speaker? Want to know how to book more gigs, make more money, and do more repeat business? It's simple. Don't be a jerk. If you want to take a moment and scribble that on a note you hang on the fridge, I'll wait before unpacking it. That gem may not be new knowledge to you, but it was to me. I learned it backstage at dozens of speaking events. I thought the only fuel that drove awesome was talent. But then I started to have conversations with clients who booked me to speak. I'd go speak at the event, step off stage, and end up in quick conversations on the way back to the airport. The host of the event wouldn't talk much about what I said from stage. Instead, they all said the same thing: "Thanks for being so nice!" Turns out, there's a large population of jerk speakers and jerk musicians traveling about the country, making my job incredibly easy. They berate the staff at events, refuse to do Q&A sessions with conference attendees, and hide in their hotels. Sometimes they even refuse to speak until the room is full. What a gift they have given me and every other public speaker on the planet who is not a jerk. You've created such a low bar of kindness that a toddler could jump over it with the greatest of ease. People don't like working with jerks. They don't listen to jerks. People don't do favors for jerks. Because people don't want jerks to win. That's something Terrell Owens discovered the hard way. He's one of the greatest wide receivers in the history of the NFL. But as a GQ profile reported, it's "hard to live down the reputation as a team poison." NFL executives have long memories. "It's not his knee that's the problem; it's his attitude," said one executive. "With T. O., no matter how brilliant he can be on the field, the dark side is always lurking." Whether you're in the NFL or a cubicle, the same truth holds: wild talent and a bad attitude eventually lose to mild talent and a good attitude. Don't chase accomplishments instead of awesome. Fourteen people once came to my breakout session at a conference. It was brutal. Part of the reason I was thrown off was that I could hear the laughter through the wall from the breakout next to mine. There were hundreds of people attending that breakout, and the awesomeness they were all experiencing kept washing over into my sad little room. What was supposed to be a seventy-five-minute speech turned into a forty-five-minute speech. This moment taught me that accomplishments make lousy fuel. Not that they're not fun or worth celebrating, but they can't be your chief motivation. They can't be why you do what you do. Because one day, some situation is going to fall apart. You'll be expecting 100 people to show up for your event, and fourteen will come. And you won't have time to find a new accomplishment to charge you back up. You have to love the act of being awesome - the writing, selling, singing, or running a business. That's what has to fuel you through the land of Harvesting.

Chapter 7: Guiding Others: Your Circle of Influence

A friend once told me that every great story has the same four parts: Innocence, Innocence lost, Coping with the loss, and Resolution. But if you're not careful, if you think fear is done trying to quietly seduce you back to average, you'll get stuck firmly in the land of Guiding. You'll buy the lie that one trip down the road to awesome was enough. You may even think that one harvest was all you are capable of. As I've already mentioned, in November 2009, the readers of my blog helped raise $60,000 to build two kindergartens in Vietnam. My favorite part of that story is how quickly they raised the first $30,000. If you remember, 2009 wasn't the greatest year for our economy. We thought the project would take weeks to complete. Do you know how long it took? Eighteen hours! The entire $30,000 was raised in less than a day. It was a fun moment that made for a great headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 hours." But three years later I had turned that headline into an epitaph on a gravestone in the land of Guiding. I didn't intend to get stuck there, but nobody ever warned me that after "Resolution" comes "Start a new story." So instead of starting again, I got really comfortable in the land of Guiding. I told the story about our fundraiser dozens of times to dozens of audiences. It was a wonderful story, and with each passing week and month and year, it became firmly ingrained into who I thought I was. One night I told my wife that I was ready to start again. I was ready to raise $25,000! When I told her that, it got a little quiet in the living room. After a few seconds, she spoke up. In her succinct style she said to me, "I dare you to lose some face." She had me. I didn't decide to raise $25,000 because that's what I felt called to do. I picked $25,000 because I was afraid I'd fail to raise as much as last time and in the process kill the headline I'd turned into a myth. I was basing this new project to build a hospital in Vietnam on its ability to protect my ego. My friend John Crist is a comedian. He once told me that the best part of comedy was that he didn't have to carry around the failures for that long. "A failure would hurt a lot if I were only performing once a month or once every other month. But with comedy, if I fail during the 7:00 p.m. show, I only have to carry it for an hour until the 8:00 p.m. show. It doesn't have time to define me when I start again so quickly." John learned that if he can shorten his starting cycle, failures don't have the time to define him. No matter your circumstances, if you want to be more awesome, you've got to start again. That begins in the land of Guiding when you start helping others down the paths they're on. It continues when you return to the land of Learning with something new of your own to start. Though it may look large at first, the gap between the land of Guiding and the land of Learning is surprisingly small.

Summary

The path to an awesome life isn't complicated, but it does require a different kind of courage than most of us are used to exercising. It's not the adrenaline-fueled bravery of a single heroic moment, but rather the quiet, consistent courage of showing up day after day, punching fear in the face, and taking the next step forward despite uncertainty. This journey asks us to be brutally honest about our present circumstances while remaining wildly hopeful about our future potential - a delicate balance few master but all can learn. Through the lands of Learning, Editing, Mastering, Harvesting, and Guiding, we discover that awesome isn't reserved for a select few with special talents or advantages. It's available to anyone willing to invest their most precious currency - time. Thirty minutes at 5:00 a.m. Deliberate practice through countless reps. The willingness to find what gives us true joy rather than what simply pays the most. The humility to begin as a beginner, even when we're experienced in other areas. And perhaps most importantly, the wisdom to recognize that the journey never truly ends - that after we guide others, we must start again, constantly returning to learning with the freshness of a beginner and the wisdom of experience. The road to awesome isn't a straight line but a circle, inviting us to travel it again and again, becoming more ourselves with each revolution.

About Author

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Jon Acuff

Jon Acuff is the New York Times Bestselling author of eight books, including Soundtracks, Your New Playlist, and the Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done.When he’s not writing or recording his popular podcast, All It Takes Is a Goal, Acuff can be found on a stage, as one of INC's Top 100 Leadership Speakers. He's spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences, colleges and companies around the world including FedEx, Nissan, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Chick-fil-A, Nokia and Comedy Central. For over 20 years he's also helped some of the biggest brands tell their story, including The Home Depot, Bose, Staples, and the Dave Ramsey Team. Jon lives outside of Nashville, TN with his wife Jenny and two teenage daughters.

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