How to Find Purpose and Peace: Why Am I Here?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN : Focus

What could you accomplish if you devoted your life to just one thing? Imagine how crazy good you would get at that one thing! You would be among the best, perhaps the greatest? Right now I'm listening to inspirational music on a playlist on 8tracks.com (the free version of course) and I'm really feeling it! I've been putting off writing all day but forced myself to open up my laptop to take a stab at it again. Before doing anything I decided to do anything however I decided to put on some great music to see where the Muses would take me. Oh mysterious and supernal enigma that is the creative process; how thoughts and ideas are made! It can be incredibly frustrating to transmute the thoughts that you are thinking onto the page in front of you. Keep at it! Like in Gladwell's Outliers people spent like 10,000 hours honing their craft. What is that? Like three years? I'm not great at math. But imagine if you spent your whole life on something! People with PhDs kind of near that point. They become insanely proficient at their passion and soon become an expert in it. I think about all the time I spent binge watching Hulu and flipping through the same apps on my phone and wonder what I could have accomplished if I mushed all that time together and relocated it to something meaningful.

There are people that have talent at certain things, but I think that if they don't put in the effort the ones with mediocre skill but are relentless in their hard work, will soon surpass them. That's good news for most of us! Now I've never really been naturally great at anything (except at failing, and meme knowledge), but I just work really hard. Lol, I studied really hard on the GMAT to get into the MBA program at the University of Denver, and I did just barely good enough to eek on through admissions. I thought I did great initially until I saw my score. I did worse when I took the GMAT a second time. I failed my drivers test the first time. I still don't really know how to swim. I suck at a lot of things, but the point is I stuck with it and through hard work and perseverance things turned out okay.

I marvel at people who've written like thirty books. And they're like real books, real meaty, in terms of not only length but in scope and prose. And they're like real authors who got traditional publishing houses to sell their work. I'm like dang I only self-published two books on Amazon and the second only sold like five copies lol. I also got trolled by some dude from 9gag.com. Special love note to whoever is reading this don't publicize your new book on that site or some angry human will attempt to ruin your life. Someone from 9gag took time out of their limited lifespan on planet earth to follow me over to Amazon, find my book (which they didn't read) and leave a one star review and leave a somewhat amusing but still heartbreaking comment of "literally the worst thing I've ever read it made me regret learning how to read." Oookay dude. Sorry, I'm venting.

Point is that people are the worst so don't listen to them they're dumb. Just do what you like doing, and become the best at it by doing it as much as you can. Before long you'll start seeing fantastic results! When we see successful people it can seem like success came out of nowhere but it's much like an iceberg; the success we see is only the top but below the shallow waters is the gigantic bottom of grueling work and failure. Keep at it amigo, you got this. At this point you're probably doing better than me. Leaving my old safe job and scrambling to get whatever for the time being, this morning I was sitting in a catering van trying not to have an emotional breakdown on how my life is out of control. I might have cried a little. But seriously keep at your dreams!

During this trial I have written most of this book! Good things can still come out of the crap-fest that life hands us. They say life gives you lemons, I say nay. Life gives you live military grade concussion grenades that look lemon-like. Try making lemonade out of that. I say pull the pin and throw it back. Dammit we can overcome anything! Don't be afraid to take an obstacle and totally crush it and be even better than you were before. If I can do it anyone can do it. You're going do great things! Don't make me sad, change the world.

Key Takeaways:

-Focus on becoming super good at one

thing.

-Work hard and you'll see results.

-Success can be a slow process.

-You have my permission to be a total

badass and crush it.