Digging Deep- How to help a friend get better at getting better
How to help a friend do hard things.
In last week’s post, I talked about finding your “Where.” I was talking with a friend after the post came and confided in him that I feel that, after almost two and a half years and 130 Thursday morning newsletters, I should have more subscribers than I do.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very thankful for the roughly seventeen hundred people who read my writing, but I would obviously like that number to grow.
My friend looked at me and said, “You write about doing hard things. Most people aren’t willing to do hard things.”
There is absolute truth in that. I would rather help seventeen hundred people interested in getting better at getting better than have a newsletter read by ten thousand people who use it for metaphorical birdcage lining.
Or as Col Charlie Beckwith said:
"I’d rather go down the river with seven studs than a hundred shitheads.”
But rather than write off all but you seventeen hundred rugged souls, I thought about ways to show the value of hard work aimed at self-improvement.
Then I remembered the quote by Mark Twain:
“If you love what you are doing, you never work a day in your life.”
In last week’s post, there was a video of an old man working out. He could forget about the pain and the cold of each workout because he had a destination he was trying to reach.
It’s a lot like going on an archaeological dig.
No one sets out to become an archeologist because they love digging.
They become archeologists because they want to find buried artifacts and treasures.
Digging is the price of admission. It is tedious but necessary.
But, once you find an artifact buried deep in the ground, you start to uncover the possibilities.
You realize there is more down there than you have ever imagined.
You recognize that it just takes continued work to pull it out.
The digging ceases to be a burden.
It becomes an adventure.
It’s the same with us.
We just need to decide on an artifact worth digging for.
We just need to dig until we find the first fossil fragment.
That discovery energizes us to keep digging.
Digging deeper, working harder, and trying longer.
But now it’s not work. It is an act of self-discovery. With each artifact unearthed, we begin to reconstruct who we were meant to be all along.
So, share this with someone who needs to start digging.
Until next week, Keep Walking Point
John