In which Wolf explains how he's learning to get out of his own way, and gives a golden piece of advice to teens.
In which Wolf explains how he's learning to get out of his own way, and gives a golden piece of advice to teens.
Released April 6, 2021
You are a victim. You didn't ask to be born. You didn't choose your parents. You live in a tiny oasis floating in an inhospitable vastness. A lot of people were dealt a better hand in life than you. And what's worse, none of your fellow travelers on this rock truly understand what it's like to be you.
Depressed yet? Well, let me throw this on the pile: you are also your own worst enemy.
Prejudice, ideology, bias, distortion, mindlessness: bad thinking is everywhere. The world needs heroes to lead the way to better, higher, more valuable ways of thinking. These ways are timeless, and never more needed than right now. Some claim that these timeless ways of thinking are now dangerous. To them I reply: BEWARE OF WOLF.
Everything under the sun has limits. Even the sun has its limits and will die in... 4 billion years or so. It's important that we recognize our human limitations. The fact that most of us do this automatically is why most of us don't jump off a cliff pretending we can fly. People also have differing physical limitations due to genetics and innate aptitudes. And many of the advantages and limitations we face are due to the family and society in which we grow up. All of these factors are largely out of our control.
But here's a huge irony: the factors that matter the most to our success in life— our physical and mental well-being, our relationships, our work and material success— are actually within our control, and yet... many of us don't know it. If we can become aware of what we really control, we can turn our lives towards fulfillment.
When I meet people and start to get to know them, it's never long before I ask them "the passion question." I always want to know what gets them out of bed in the morning, what drives them forward. When I encounter a truly passionate person, I feel like I've found a kindred spirit; a new member of my tribe; that I've come home.
Unfortunately, a lot of the conversations I have go something like this:
"So you want to be a film director. Very cool! How many films have you directed?"
"Well, none yet. I'm still in high school. I want to go to film school after I graduate."
"Why aren't you making films right now? Everyone's carrying around a film studio in their pocket these days."
"Well, I know that, but I really don't know how to use the all the tools. Besides, to make films you need a script, and actors, and lights..."
"You don't need as much of that as you think. Stories are everywhere, you don't even need to be original. People will act for you if you ask them nicely. The world is flooded with light."
"Well, I wouldn't be proud of the result."
"That's not the point! The point is to get experience; to practice carrying something— anything— from conception to completion. Are you at least watching how-to videos online? Watching documentaries about filmmaking or famous film directors?"
"Some. Well, not much. School keeps me pretty busy right now. And I hang out with my friends a lot. And my dad wants me to become a dentist like him... it's probably a safer thing to do with my life."
And on and on; a litany of excuses. I can only conclude that a young man like this doesn't really want to be a film director. Or more precisely: that he has fantasies about becoming a film director, and not actual ambitions.
Spike Lee made his first films at age 20. Francis Ford Coppola started doing puppet shoes at age 9 and soon after that started making 8mm films. Stanley Kubrick taught himself film production and directing just after graduating high school. Alfred Hitchcock started in the film industry at age 20 as a title card designer.
The people I meet who actually turn their ambitions into reality are bound and determined. They are dogged. Young or old, they know what they want, and they're going to make it happen using whatever they have at hand. They've rejected the fantasy for living the actual life. And they've made the bargain that they're willing to pay the price to have that life, because there's always a price to pay. And, Fortune being what it is, they know that even if they don't end up achieving their wildest dreams, they won't end the story of their life with the regret of never having really fought for them.
At the end of this episode I'm going to give one of the most valuable pieces of advice I have for young people. But first, I want to say a few more things about the ways we get in our own way; the ways we are often our own worst enemy.
There are three pervasive self-limiting beliefs that are some of the chief reasons that smart, talented people fail to succeed. I don't think it's worth much time talking about how these beliefs originate. What matters is that we expose them in ourselves and make an actual decision to overcome them. So let's look at these three self-limiting beliefs, and at some ways of dealing with them.
The first is victim mentality. This is the belief that says, "Due to events beyond my control, I am inherently disadvantaged. That is the explanation for why I can never succeed [be happy, be wealthy, make an impact]." Let me be clear here: you may well be disadvantaged. You may have been dealt a relatively bad hand. You may have suffered unjustly. But just as privilege doesn't guarantee happiness (look at all the unhappy celebrities out there) privation and disadvantage don't guarantee failure. In fact, overcoming one or more disadvantages, as most self-made people have, actually makes their eventual success more solid because it is clearly earned. The world loves and remembers stories of people who came from backgrounds ranging from humble to horrific. Why? Because they're real and they're inspiring. Did you know that billionaires like Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Lauren, and J.K. Rowling started life dirt poor? True, life never guarantees success. But letting your identity become established as "the eternal victim" will guarantee failure. You can waste a lot of energy shouting at the wind and accusing it of unfairness, but you'll never change its direction.
The second self-limiting belief I want to expose is unworthiness. This is the belief that says, "If people I care about aren't approving of what I'm doing, then I'm unworthy." The hard truth is: we earn our worth in our own eyes first, and then in the eyes of others. Unless we're considering those who are already encouraging, coaching, or teaching us, we should never spend our energy caring about what others think about our endeavors, especially not our peers. The people we hang out with for fun, particularly those we grow up around, are rarely the people who will help us succeed in life. More likely, they are the ones who will pressure you to hang out more when you know you have limited time and energy every day to work on your dreams. They are the ones who will tell you to not, as they say in the American South, "get above your raisin'." The story is told of the bucket of crabs caught by a fisherman: when one crab tries to climb out of the bucket, another crab reaches up and pulls it back in. This is frequently a function of our current peer group: they are our "bucket of crabs." The solution to this is to spend more time around people who actually support and encourage you; people whose accomplishments you actually admire. Go as far as you need to find such people. Find groups of them on the Internet. And, find your role models in inspiring true stories in books and documentaries. Also, realize that no one starts out worthy of high praise. Everyone who studies martial arts starts as a white belt. Be willing to be humble, to be the one who knows nothing and knows they know nothing; the one who is willing to put in the effort and make all sorts of mistakes on the path to learning. Worthiness emerges as the result of time and practice.
The third self-limiting belief is the one to which I have personally fallen prey: unjustified optimism. I have a generally optimistic outlook on life. I truly want to believe the best about myself and others. But some optimism is more justified than others. The mistake I made when launching my product, Flying Logic, was tacitly believing the old adage, "If you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door." No, actually, they won't... because unless you make sure the world hears about it, they won't even know it exists. My belief that I had created something new and very useful was (and still is) true, but my self-limiting belief that the world would somehow do the job of marketing my product for me was... to put it nicely to my younger self, a Pollyanna way of looking at things. People like me who make things are very often not good at marketing and selling what we've made, unless we make the decision to get good at it.
Another manifestation of unjustified optimism that I frequently see, especially in young people, is the attitude of "There's no hurry, I've got all the time in the world." Actually, you don't. You have all the time you have, and nobody knows how long that's going to be for you. "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," as the saying goes. If you want to be positive about your future, that's great. But you're still going to have to work hard right now to make that future happen.
Now I want to give some advice specifically to my younger listeners. If you're older it still applies, but I want to show you why, if you're in the, say, 12-18 year old range, you are in a golden time of your life. You have a once in a lifetime opportunity that I'd hate to see you waste.
When I was 13 or 14, as an experiment my school offered the opportunity for students to sign up to build our own personal "intensive" curriculum for two weeks at the end of the school semester. At that time I was deeply interested in special effects for movies and television. Unlike today, nothing was done with computer graphics: space battles were all created with hand-built miniature models shot by actual cameras. My favorite television show at that time was the science fiction adventure Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which was shot at Universal Studios.
I wrote a letter (and yes, this was long before email) to one of the producers of the show, David J. O'Connell, and asked him: could I and a schoolmate spend a couple weeks of our school semester on the set of Buck Rogers, studying how the show was made? To my delight, I received a letter back from him inviting me and my friend to meet with him in his office at Universal Studios. At the end of our interview, he granted us unrestricted backlot passes to observe the filming, camera passes so we could take photos of anything we liked, and he arranged time to interview the cast and crew, including the practical effects crew responsible for on-set pyrotechnics, and a day to visit the special effects shop where the miniature models were made and shot, and an afternoon sitting with the film editor, where we got to watch him cut together the episode we had watched being filmed. My father, a photographer, made sure I had one of his nice cameras to document my experience. For those two weeks my parents dropped me and my school buddy off at the Universal Studios private entrance and we just walked in with our passes. Several times we stayed late into the evening if that day's shoot ran late.
For a kid my age, it was literally a dream come true. And how did this happen? ...I asked!
Well, not just that. In my one meeting with Mr. O'Connell I demonstrated that I was passionate, intelligent, and had done my homework. And he said yes! But why would he? And herein lies the secret: older adults with a good deal of life experience remember when they were passionate young kids. They remember how it felt to be you at that age, and they remember the breaks they got as they developed themselves and their careers. They remember getting a hand up from those ahead of them, and they receive their own joy and satisfaction from giving a bright youngster a hand up in turn.
In one way or another I had this sort of experience several times in my youth. I decided I was interested in something, I found and approached an adult who was already doing what I wanted to learn more about, and I presented myself as someone ready to learn what they were also passionate about, and then I took the opportunities to learn what I was offered. Not every approach I took worked out as well, but I learned this lesson young: If you're passionate about something, don't wait for people to recognize and approach you. Find the doors to knock on and make the approach yourself.
Life may try to hold you back. But never, never hold yourself back.
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