Quit or Grit?

Maybe what you want isn’t really what you want.

I like to think this guy made it rain by playing that guitar. So magic.

Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, wanted to be a musician. He even went to music school.

He was good. Played guitar. Plenty of people told him he had talent. And he got accepted to his music school, so that’s something.

The thing was, he looked around and noticed that there were musicians in that school who were better than him. Not just better, astoundingly better. People who could play the guitar—his instrument of choice—in a way that could make you weep. And Mark wasn’t making anyone weep. Except himself, sometimes. I assume... he hasn’t said it publicly, that I’ve noticed. But c’mon.

So, Mark did what we are all told to do. The time-honored advice we are all given. When you want to be better at something, when you want to conquer it, when you want to master it...

You practice.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

Practice, practice, practice.

So Mark practiced. Four hours a day. Sometimes more. Even on days when he woke up and his fingers and hands throbbed, his forearms ached, his very soul wanted to rebel, he kept at it. Day, after day, after day.

And then he sat with one of his instructors. He played a piece for him. He played his soul out, leveraged all that practice time, poured himself into it.

That instructor nodded when Mark was done. “You know what your problem is? You don’t practice enough.”

Not long after that, Mark dropped out of music school. And from there he became a writer.

Not a straight line. He took a meandering route along the way. He experimented, he failed, he picked up and tried again.

Or, if you look at it in the right light, he practiced.

Except this time, the practice felt different.

He had days when he woke up and thought, “I really don’t want to write today.” But he’d sit at the keyboard, open that document, and he’d write. He put in the work. Just like he used to do with his guitar. He’d put in the hours.

Except, unlike when he was working his fingers into arthritis on a guitar, this practice didn’t feel like work. At times, Mark might look up to notice he’d been writing for ten hours, and forgot to even get up to have a meal.

All that time paid off. Hours of writing blog posts and articles, and then eventually working on a book—he put in even more time on this thing than he did on what he’d originally thought would be his passion and his career. And unlike those hours of practice at the guitar, these hours rushed by almost unnoticed.

Not without pain. Not without struggle. Not without some dread and anxiety. All of that still happened. This was still work. But it was better work. It was work that moved him forward, instead of holding him back.

There’s a difference between work that is hard and hard work. The first can drain your soul. The latter can energize you.

Effort is necessary. But if it always feels like you’re struggling just to keep going, that’s a sign. Maybe it’s time to reconsider your path.

Start paying attention to what energizes you. Start noticing the parts of your work that you look forward to. There will always be tasks we prefer and tasks we despise. But if the entirety of what you are doing comes down to forcing yourself to do it, every time, then you need to use every spare bit of energy and time you have to figure out an exit strategy.

I write. It’s what I do. I tell stories. It’s who I am. Ask anyone who’s known me for any length of time, they’ll confirm this.

Writing is hard.

There are definitely days when I don’t want to do it. Days when the thought of opening that document and reading what I wrote the day before, diving in to edits and changes, adding to the word count, coming back to it every single day... sometimes it feels like drowning.

But then I start writing. I kick my legs and move my arms. And I rise. I swim. And now, it’s no longer drowning.

It’s a day at the pool.

Every novel adventure was written with you in mind. Click the image to take your journey into intrigue, action, and mystery.

A NOTE AT THE END

They say you’ll know your passion when you find something you’d do, even if no one ever paid you to do it. Writing has always been that for me. Believe me, I’ve written plenty that I was never paid for. Sometimes I had to set aside the writing and go do something else, just to pay the bills. And I did that very poorly—setting aside the writing, not paying the bills.

Ok... I also did “paying the bills” kind of poorly, at times.

But basically, yeah, I kept writing anyway. Scribbling short stories on scraps of paper while sitting in a cubicle. Using a beat up laptop to write while sitting in my car on a lunch break from my retail job. Staying up late or getting up early or both, so I could have some time to tinker with a story on my typewriter. Some of these stories go way back.

So writing, that’s what I’ve always done, and it’s what I will always do, as long as I have the capacity to do it. As long as God lets me. One way or another. One form or another.

I don’t even understand what people mean when they say they don’t know what their passion is. I try. I empathize. But I’ll never understand it.

So I’m blessed in that. I can appreciate that. I feel for you, if you are struggling with it, even if I don’t understand it.

My prayer for everyone is that you find that “thing” for yourself. Because the greatest joy of my life is that regardless of how tough or awful things get, writing is still my thing.

And everyone deserves that.

I know what you’re thinking. “Kev… how is that paper staying dry?” And you’re right. That really is a miracle.