Running Down a Dream
Your Roadmap to Winning Creative Battles
Tim Grahl is one of the world’s leading book-launch marketing gurus. To put it in perspective: At one point, his clients held FIVE spots on the New York Times bestseller lists. (To be clear: That’s REALLY (!!) hard to do. Like, almost impossible.) But get this: That week when he achieved the pinnacle of success? He was miserable. And this book is his inspiring, super-vulnerable story of how he moved through many dark nights of the soul as he ran down his dream—to not only create a business and body of work that he’s proud of but, much more importantly, a LIFE of sustainable meaning and mojo and joy. Big Ideas we cover include: a practice to eliminate the nonessential, the fact that everyone is pretty much always (!) editing their lives, making it all one big experiment, scraping away the plaster to reveal your already-perfect Golden Buddha essence and the true joy of running down your dream!
Big Ideas
- Tool #2: Stop doing everythingStop doing everything.
- Edit edit editIgnore other people. Do you.
- It’s all an experimentThe more the merrier.
- Scraping away the plaster, Golden oneOh, Golden One.
- The joy of runningThere is no finish line.
“This is my story, to the best of my recollection. I’ll start at the beginning—full of dreams but stuck and making no progress—and show you how I’ve reached those dreams… So if you’re like me and you feel broken because no matter how much you want to pursue your dreams, you just can’t ever seem to get there, this is the book for you.
I’ve come to believe two simple principles about achieving success in creative pursuits.
1. Every single problem is fixable.
There is nothing unique about your brokenness. No matter how or why you are broken, there is a way to overcome it.
2. Success is inevitable if you keep moving.
The only thing that matters is that you keep going. The only way to truly fail at a marathon is to stop taking the next step. Sometimes you’re running, sometimes you’re walking, and sometimes you’re crawling. It doesn’t matter. If you’re moving forward, you will succeed. …
For now, your only job is to commit to going on this journey with me and to keep moving forward. I’m going to ask you to do some hard, uncomfortable, and, occasionally, weird things, but if you do them, you can beat Resistance and achieve your dreams.”
~ Tim Grahl from Running Down a Dream
I read this book in the same week that I read Steven Pressfield’s The Artist’s Journey and Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. Steve’s publishing company (Black Irish Entertainment) actually published it—which explains why the cover looks like one of his books.
The iconic image gracing its cover? Running shoes.
Want to run down your dream? Fantastic. Lace up your shoes and get to work.
Our guide for the journey? Tim Grahl. Tim is one of the world’s leading book-launch marketing gurus. He’s worked with some of the best in the world—including Steve, Dan Pink and Charles Duhigg. To put it in perspective: At one point, his clients held FIVE spots on the New York Times bestseller lists. (To be clear: That’s REALLY (!!) hard to do. Like, almost impossible.)
But get this: That week when he achieved the pinnacle of success? He was miserable.
And this book is his inspiring, super-vulnerable story of how he moved through many dark nights of the soul as he ran down his dream—to not only create a business and body of work that he’s proud of but, much more importantly, a LIFE of sustainable meaning and mojo and joy.
If you’ve been looking for a “Road Map to Winning Creative Battles” and appreciate someone being willing to shine a light on the scary stuff, I think you’ll dig it. (Get a copy of the book here.)
It’s written in a similar pithy, micro-chapter style that makes Steve’s books so great. And, of course, it’s packed with Big Ideas and I’m excited to share some of my favorite wisdom we can apply to our lives TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
P.S. The book is named after one of Tom Petty’s classic songs: Running Down a Dream. I was a big Tom Petty fan in high school and I just had fun listening to the song and watching the video on YouTube. Pretty epic hero’s journey with all the requisite ups and downs. Check it out here.
Download MP3
Download PDFI’m running down a dream, That never would come to me Working on a mystery Going wherever it leads Running down a dream
Get the BookTool #2: Stop doing everything
“Admitting to myself how much time I was wasting during the day was enlightening, but not a lot changed. I uninstalled World of Warcraft from my computer so I couldn’t play it during office hours, but I burned that time doing something else. My tiny little tweaks weren’t enough to break the macro habits.
I needed a shock to the system, something that would force me to change my deeply entrenched behavior. I needed to cut all this useless crap out of my life that was keeping me from doing my work. This would force me to sit down and make progress.
So I got a piece of paper and a pen and I wrote down everything I did in a day. Everything. All the tiny minutia like going to the bathroom, driving to work, and making lunch. I included eating dinner with the family, making client calls, and watching TV before bed. It all went down on one giant list.
Then I went straight down the page and started crossing stuff off.
Here is the criteria/value structure I used to whittle my life down to its core: If I didn’t need it to survive or keep my family’s life going, it got crossed off.
So using the bathroom didn’t get crossed off. Eating dinner with my family, picking up groceries, making a client phone call… that all stayed. But watching TV, reading the news, checking my favorite websites, listening to music in the car, getting coffee with Dan… that all got crossed off.
Then I rewrote the list. I only kept the stuff that was important to the survival of my family.
I lived like that for one week.”
Tim’s story begins with his life a mess. He left his safe job, followed his dreams and started out on his own. Then he ran out of money and couldn’t pay the bills.
All of which happens, of course, even when you’re doing your best; but Tim wasn’t doing his best. His wife asked him what he was doing all day while he was at work and his answer (to himself) wasn’t a good one. He was wasting time playing video games and doing other unproductive stuff. Not OK.
So… To get his life in order he made a list of every single thing he did in a day. Then he whittled it down to the absolutely (!) essential and then ONLY did that stuff for a week.
-> “Somewhere in that week, I snapped. I finally understood how much all this useless stuff was crowding my life. And not just my life, but my mind.”
The book has twenty “Tools” that Tim recommends we consider using to successfully run down our dreams. The above exercise? That’s Tool #2.
If you feel like you’re wasting more time than you like and you feel so inspired, take an inventory of your life. What are you currently doing? What’s absolutely essential? What’s not?
Then eliminate EVERYTHING that isn’t absolutely essential for a week and see how you feel. :)
You’ll be in good company.
This was the first recommendation of renowned management guru Peter Drucker. In The Effective Executivehe tells us that our TIME is our most important asset and that, although most people start by planning their time, we’d be better off if we started by TRACKING our time.
As he says, there’s no bigger waste of time than doing efficiently that which should never have been done in the first place.
Then we have Eknath Easwaran. In Take Your Time, the great spiritual teacher tells us that when he first started his spiritual practices he had to make a list of all his activities then take a “red pencil” to all the nonessential: “The red-pencil exercise may seem painful, but very quickly you will find it liberating. You will find you have more time to do the things that are important to you, more time for family and friends, more time for everything that makes life worthwhile.”
(btw: He was so intense and ALL IN on his commitment to service that he literally dedicated EVERY MOMENT of his life to his practice. It’s a standard I find inspiring. In Conquest of Mind he tells us: “Today, everything I do from morning meditation on—eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation—is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.”)
Back to you: What are YOU doing these days? What needs to go? Here’s your red pencil…
When you stop doing the nonessential stuff, you realize that you’ve got a world of time on your hands. That time is yours to reconfigure to move you forward toward your aspiration. You will never truly understand how much time is yours until you strip away the nonessential.
I have since come to believe that the true definition of ‘procrastination’ is ‘assuming I will be less stupid and lazy tomorrow than I am today.
Edit edit edit
“I didn’t get angry about it. I didn’t believe it was lying in a malevolent sort of way. It was just an editing job.
When I read that business book by that successful entrepreneur, besides the opening story about how everything was falling apart, the rest of the book was all of the principles she learned to run, grow, and sell a successful business for a bajillion dollars without any of the hell she went through to learn them.
When I went to the conference and heard the amazing songwriter tell her story, the only real failures she shared were the ones that led directly to her next success not the horrific ones that made her want to pack up and quit the race.
I realized that every successful person has a trail of failures behind them. And not small, ‘oh that didn’t work, but then I found the thing that did’ failures. No. They have soul-crushing, years wasted, I-will-never-recover failures.”
That’s Tool #14: “Everyone Is Lying to You.”
Context: As we discussed, Tim works with some of the top self-help authors. One time, he was nearing a book launch and his client stopped returning his emails and phone calls. As it turns out, he was in rehab. AGAIN. But no one ever heard about it.
Then there was the author who never mentioned his painful divorce. The other one who had this issue. That one with that issue. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Editing. Editing. Editing. All day every day.
EVERYONE is constantly editing their lives and putting their idealized faces forward on social media and everywhere else. Comparing ourselves to that unreal standard is, of course, toxic.
Tim also stress the fact that NO ONE’s path to awesome is straight up and to the right. It’s ALWAYS ZIG-ZAGGY and filled with a ton of super (!) painful failures along the way. When we ignore that (and “successful” people gloss over it), we miss the opportunity to see the common humanity inherent to the struggle and think something’s wrong with US when we face our own inevitable challenges and mega-failures.
Tim is SUPER candid (almost painfully so! lol) about his own struggles and shortcomings. On one occasion, he fell behind on paying his taxes and the IRS sent a sheriff to his house to let him know that he owed them $20,000. He was terrified. Like mortified about the whole thing. Then he pulled it together and crushed it.
As I read that story, I winced and literally laughed out loud as I thought of some of my own jumbo failures. Let’s talk about a recent one, shall we? :)
As I’ve shared before, I raised money to build a different version of our business that didn’t quite come to fruition the way I wanted. Now, in addition to investing YEARS of my life into that venture, you know how much I raised? Well, take Tim’s $20,000 and add a couple zeroes. (Laughing.) $2,000,000. Ouch. That hurt. (Hah!)
But, you know what? I think I’m actually most frustrated by the fact that I haven’t taken MORE risks sooner and raised MORE money to bring that big vision to life. Elon Musk and his heroic courage comes to mind. Did you know that Tesla has $10 billion in outstanding debt and was, according to him, within weeks of failing when they hit recent challenges in production?
Think about the scale of risk he’s assumed to literally change the world. Crazy inspiring. And remember just how easy it is to forget all the zigs and zags and painful mis-takes heroes make as we pursue noble ambitions.
So… Let’s ignore everyone else’s edited perfection as we embrace our own imperfections and the (ouch!) failures inherent to any hero’s journey in which we truly dare greatly. Then, let’s capitalize those mistakes, wear our scars like medals and do what we’re here to do!!
So what if I started doing the work for the work’s sake instead of doing the work to get something? What if my job wasn’t to toil for reward but to toil for the love of the toiling? This forced me to start reconsidering what my work was.
Another way of looking at a system is it allows you to make one decision today that removes a lot of future decisions, therefore saving that concentration and focus for something else later on.
It’s all an experiment
“I started constantly reminding myself that what I was working on was an experiment. If it failed, that didn’t make me a failure, it made the experiment a failure.
What surprised me the most was how each thing I worked on started having an emotional detachment that I had never experienced before. Instead of my work being this thing inside of me and intertwined with my soul, it allowed me to pull it out and set it out on a metaphorical table so I could consider it without tying my self-worth to its success or failure.”
Welcome to Tool #15: “Everything Is an Experiment.” Throw on your lab coat. Put on your protective goggles. Grab your clipboard. It’s time to make EVERYTHING an experiment.
Tim tells us that he started approaching life like he was in his high school chemistry class. He ran everything through a super-simple experimental protocol: 1. Make observations + 2. Form a hypothesis + 3. Make a prediction + 4. Perform an experiment + 5. Analyze the results + 6. Draw a conclusion + 7. Report your results + 8. Go back to step 1.
What do you get when you do that? Well, if we do it right, we experience what Ray Dalio calls a “mistake-learner’s high.”
As per his genius 5-step process we discuss in that +1 I just linked to plus our Notes on Principles, we KNOW that when we set audacious goals we will FAIL. Then we collect the data, Optimize and set even more audacious goals. Again, KNOWING WE WILL FAIL, using the data to catalyze us through the next phase of our evolution.
With that growth mindset, we don’t AVOID mistakes and failures. We want to accelerate the rate with which we make those mistakes (obviously making sure no one mistake is so big that it knocks us out of the game!) so we can get better and better and better. And, in Dalio’s world, make ourselves and our investors billions and billions of dollars. One experiment after another.
So… How’re YOUR experiments coming along? As Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments the better.”
Scraping away the plaster, Golden one
“Instead of ‘I am broken and in need of fixing,’ I could start believing ‘I have a valuable, powerful, perfect force within, and I have everything I need to release it. There are just some layers on top of the gold that I need to scrape away.’ …
So taking the experimental mindset, I decided to test out a new theory.
First, I would start assuming I was good and had my heart in the right place, instead of a rickety monster that had to be held in check and put on a tight leash.
Second, anything I did that was bad or wrong or unhealthy, I would just tell myself it was a layer of plaster on top.
That wasn’t really me. Therefore, changing the behavior wasn’t so threatening.
Third, I would only worry about scraping away layers. I was done trying to be a good father, writer, husband, friend, or businessman all at the same time.
If I stuck to my single-minded pursuit, all of that stuff would take care of itself. I never felt good enough anyway even when I thought I was under control.
Instead I would just worry about this one thing… scraping away the plaster.”
Remember that Golden Buddha we talked about in this +1? You know, the one about which Alan Cohen kicked off Finding Joe?
Well, I always thought it was just a great metaphor.
Once upon a time, there was a Golden Buddha. It was beautiful. But an invading army was coming so the monks covered it with mud so they wouldn’t see its value and just ignore it. The trick worked. But it worked TOO well. Time passed. People forgot that the statue wasn’t made of mud but gold! Until one day a crack appeared in the mud that revealed the gold underneath. They chipped away and lo’ and behold, discovered that it was PURE GOLD!
Well, get this: That Golden Buddha is not only a fantastic metaphorical story, it’s an historical REALITY! (Laughing.)
Tim does a great job of telling the story. So does Wikipedia.
It’s kinda crazy. That Golden Buddha? It was originally made in the 13th or 14th century. 10-feet tall. 5.5 TONS of nearly pure gold. It’s worth something like $250 million today. (Wowzers!)
Yet, for a couple hundred years, it was covered in stucco and relegated to insignificant temples. Until that day when the crack appeared and gold shined through.
For our purposes, let’s focus on Tim’s BRILLIANT practice of KNOWING that we are *already* perfect. All those less-than-awesome things we do? No big deal. Just a little plaster. Calmly use your “Needs work!” mantra and then simply continue scraping away at the layers on top.
THAT’s how to roll, my Golden friend.
Focusing on helping just one person helped me break through my fear of putting work out into the world. I realized that if I was waiting until I created something that would help everyone, I would never be able to do it. Instead, I just wanted to help one person.
The joy of running
“I realized, in that moment, I’d given Resistance a hell of a fight so far. While he was in no way down for the count, he was hurting and covering up.
The strangest thing was that if you followed me around and watched my life, nothing was all that different. I still had all the same responsibilities. I still struggled to get my work done. I still had to rely on systems to accomplish things. I still had to wrestle to keep fear’s hands off the wheel. I still struggled to finish my writing projects. I still relied on mentors and my board of directors. I still have to make worry lists when I get overwhelmed.
But I no longer had that wild-eyed desperation of the last guy stumbling through a marathon hoping that I would eventually cross a finish line that would make me whole. I started with the assumption that at the end of running down my dream I would find my prize. I would find success. I would be fixed. I would be happy.
What I realize now was when I first laced up my shoes, I already had all of those things. The running wasn’t about the race or the finish line. It was about the joy of the gift of having something to run after.
I realized the Truth.
There is no finish line. There is no success or failure. There is nothing to fix. There is only the perfect me, my dream and the joy of running it down.”
That description of running down a dream reminds me of Seth Godin’s idea of “kamiwaza” from The Icarus Deception.
He says: “The Japanese term kamiwaza, like most great words for which we have no equivalent, is difficult to translate. The shortest version is ‘godlike.’
When we strip away self-doubt and artifice, when we embrace initiative and art, we are left with kamiwaza. The purity of doing it properly but without self-consciousness. The runner who competes with kamiwaza is running with purity, running properly, running as the gods would run.”
Yep. That’s about it, eh?
So… Ultimately, there is no finish line. There’s no success or failure. Nothing to fix. Just you in all your perfection, your dream and the sheer joy of running it down.
High fives from your running partner. (<- That’s me.)
Love and let’s do this!
You are the golden Buddha. When you do things that are healthy and good, that is you. When you do things that are unhealthy and bad, that’s just the layers on top. It’s not you. Hold on to that. Trust yourself. You’ll find your way.
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