You Are Special

Ah… Just reading that soothes my soul.

It also reminds me of Martin Luther King’s beautiful wisdom: “Whatever your life work is, do it well. Do it so well that no one else could do it better. If it falls on your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper.’”

(Get your soul stirred listening to MLK preach that here.)

And, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about these Ferrari pit crew guys and their epic poetry in motion. In particular, this guy has really caught my attention.

His “ONLY” job?

Yank off the front right tire. That’s “it.”

But look at the way he approaches his job!!!

He’s all lined up and ready like he’s about to run a route for a game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.

I’m kinda at a loss for words as I think about the humbly heroic power of his demonstration of playing our roles well.

Reminds me of that poem above. Let’s revisit it one more time as we celebrate the roles we’ve been chosen to play and re-commit to playing them as well as we can…

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill,
Be a scrub in the valley, but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill,
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail.
If you can’t be a sun, be a star.
It isn’t by size that you win or you fail.
Be the best at whatever you are.”

We all have a lot of jobs with a little “j.”

But, according to Mister Rogers, we all have one Job with a big “J.”

It’s our job in life to help people realize just how awesome they are. “It’s our job to ENCOURAGE each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

As we discuss in this +1, the word encourage is one of my new favorites.

It means “to inspire with hope, courage and confidence.”

Etymologically, it LITERALLY means to “give” someone courage.

As in, to inject them with it kinda thing.

Think about that for a moment…

Then let’s remember that “It’s our job to ENCOURAGE each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

How can you do that a little more Today?

P.S. Remember that we can’t GIVE something to someone else that we don’t already have in our possession. As Leo Buscaglia says in Love: “To love others you must love yourself… You can only give to others what you have yourself.”

Same goes with encouragement.

One could say: “To encourage others you must encourage yourself… You can only give to others what you have yourself.”

So… Go look in the mirror and encourage that beautiful soul looking back at you. And bring that love with you out in the world. TODAY.

One of the books we got in our little Mister Rogers wisdom-binge was a recently published, beautifully illustrated book of Mister Rogers’ poetry.

It’s called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers.

It currently sits on our kitchen table. I’ve been opening it up and reading the poems to Emerson.

You should see the way he lights up when I read-sing him “I Like You As You Are.” (And: “It’s You I Like.”) (I get tears in my eyes as I type that.)

P.S.: Here’s Mister Rogers rocking the song in his first rendition of it in 1968.

P.P.S. I like YOU just the way you are. :)

That’s from Chapter 5 on “Discipline.”

Reminds me of Angela Duckworth’s wisdom on parenting from her great book Grit.

She tells us: “Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: ‘Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

I’m also reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s genius line: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Here’s to being the living example of what we’d like to see more of in our families and world.

P.S. Here’s another gem from that chapter on Discipline: “When I asked one of my colleagues, ‘What is discipline?’ she replied, ‘Discipline is the gift of responsible love.’ I think it’s hard to improve on that description.”

That’s from a chapter called “Creativity and Play.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from that documentary I loved so much.

I actually did a +1 on it called Mr. Rogers’ Creative Neighborhood – Won’t You Be a Creator?

We’ll make it snappy, but it’s worth quickly exploring again here.

Short story.

Mister Rogers created 900 (!) episodes over three decades. Once upon a time, after taking a little break, he wrote this memo to himself (technically, he typed it on yellow legal paper—check out the image in that +1 above):

Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. If I don’t get down to it I’ll never really know. Why can’t I trust myself? Really that’s what it’s all about… that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create.?. Oh, well, the hour cometh and now IS when I’ve got to do it. GET TO IT, FRED. GET TO IT… But don’t let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn’t.

-> “Tortures of the damned”?!

-> “AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER”?!

-> “Agony of creation”?!

Is that the warm and sweater-wearing cuddly Mister Rogers talking?

Yes.

Creating isn’t easy.

Thank goodness Fred moved through his despair and gave us what he got.

And thank goodness you’re doing the same.

P.S. I’m also reminded of some parallel wisdom from Ira Glass, host and producer of NPR’s This American Life. He tells us: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Yep. That’s sounds right.

btw: Adam Grant references Ira Glass and his wisdom in Originals.

He tells us: “If you want to be an original, ‘the most important possible thing you could do,’ says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, ‘is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.’”

Perfection.

It doesn’t exist.

Those ideals we have?

They are GUIDING STARS not distant shores.

In other words, one more time: We’re never going to arrive at Perfectville.

As Carl Rogers tells us (via our Notes on Tal Ben Shahar’s must re-read The Pursuit of Perfect), ‘The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”

This is also a good time to remind ourselves of Abraham Maslow’s wisdom.

Yes, he said “‘What one can be, one must be.”

But, important note: He NEVER (!!!) said “One can be and you must be perfect.”

In fact, he said quite the opposite. In Motivation and Personality he put it this way: “There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers… even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.”

He also put it this way: Self-actualizers “show many of the lesser human failings. They too are equipped with silly, wasteful, or thoughtless habits. They can be boring, stubborn, irritating. They are by no means free from a rather superficial vanity, pride, partiality to their own productions, family, friends, and children. Temper outbursts are not rare.”

So… There ya go. One more time: THERE ARE NO PERFECT HUMAN BEINGS.

By extension, there are no perfect parents. And there are no perfect children.

And… One more time: You and I and our kids won’t be the first. :)

We want to REALLY get this. Because when we fail to accept the common humanity reality of the fact that neither we nor our children are or ever will be perfect, we amplify our suffering.

It’s kinda like that second arrow that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about in No Mud, No Lotus and the Suffering = Pain x Resistance equation Kristin Neff describes in Self-Compassion.

As Thich puts it: “Every life has its trials and tribulations. We can navigate them more skillfully when we don’t waste time and energy shooting ourselves with a second arrow—such as dwelling on how much greener the grass in our neighbor’s yards looks, compared to ours.”

Kristin says: “He said that the key to happiness was understanding that suffering is caused by resisting pain. We can’t avoid pain in life, he said, but we don’t necessarily have to suffer because of that pain… he chose to express these words of wisdom with an equation: ‘Suffering = Pain x Resistance.’ He then added, ‘Actually, it’s an exponential rather than a multiplicative relationship.’ His point was that we can distinguish between the normal pain of life—difficult emotions, physical discomfort, and so on—and actual suffering, which is the mental anguish caused by fighting against the fact that life is sometimes painful.”

Back to Mister Rogers. He says: “If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as they are, then, I believe, we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what ‘good’ parenting means.”

Art. Science. Creativity. And… Gaps. As Mister Rogers tells us: They go together.

And then there’s our ULTIMATE creative project: Creating our own lives.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi comes to mind. In Creativity, he tells us: “Indeed, it could be said that the most obvious achievement of these people is that they created their own lives. And how they achieved that is something worth knowing, because it can be applied to all our lives.”

You know that gap between who you are and who you know you could be?

Well…

I’m smiling as I type this but that gap (and the creative tension-pain we feel as we acknowledge it) is the very source of our creativity.

How will YOU bridge that gap a little more today?