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Don’t think about what you’re getting paid when you decide how much effort to put into any task. Just put in what it takes. When you have a chore to do and you’re putting in a lackluster effort ask yourself this: If it paid ten thousand dollars, would I step up my game? If the answer is yes, then do it. Because putting in the effort is the reward in and of itself.
Whether it’s restoring a car, rebuilding a house or writing a book it’s all about the process. Let’s go with restoring a car first. You look at that thing and think, “It’s covered in rust, who knows if we can even salvage it. I really want a shiny red convertible, but I don’t want the part where I’m covered in grease and my hands are banged up from rebuilding the engine.”
The same comes with remodeling a house. My first house was a disaster. It was a termite-infested death trap. All I could think about was how nice it would be if it had central air and a new kitchen. For people like my mom, that journey would have been devastating. She’d never even start because the task seemed too difficult.
I dreaded writing this book. I’ve dreaded writing all of my books. It’s a long process. The words that are being typed right now will not be read for a year. There will be months of scrutinizing them and rearranging them. It’s not a quick, smooth journey.
No matter what the task is, remember, it ain’t going to be nonstop fun. It’s about embracing the journey, not about enjoying the journey. No one looks forward to taking a scraper and removing undercoating from the bottom side of a fender, tearing out an old lathe and plaster ceiling or agonizing over the exact right words to best describe how much it sucks writing a book (wait, I just did). But just one person could read this book, and I’d still be satisfied with how it turned out. Would I be happier if it were read by millions? Yes, of course. But my feeling of satisfaction is in the final product and the process of creating it. I mean that.
So with all things, have a goal and have a plan, but throw yourself fully into each step along the way and before you know it, you’ll be at your destination. If you can embrace the journey, rather than the outcome, you win.
And gratitude is the key to happiness, plain and simple. Are you happy to be alive? Just being amongst the healthy and living? Your alarm going off, you waking up, getting out of bed and having another day on the planet is enough to be grateful for. A lot of people didn’t live to see their twentieth birthdays. A lot of people saw their eightieth, but that was two hundred years ago and they’re in the cold ground right now. When you look at the age of the earth and the universe the amount of time we exist and can enjoy life is limited. So soak it all up.
I’m reminded of my dearly departed friend, Philip Wellford, a.k.a. Philip the Juggler. Philip died in December 2012 of early onset dementia. He just fell apart. It was devastating. He was a virile guy. When we were younger, he would be on a unicycle juggling butcher knives. He hiked the John Muir Trail with his father. But in May 2012, I had him onstage with me one last time in Kansas City. He had to wear a helmet and was using a walker. And he was dead seven months later. So if that’s not enough of a message about embracing life while you’ve still got it, I don’t know what is.
But just to double down on the gratitude point, here’s another Philip story. Around 1999, when Loveline was in full bloom and The Man Show was taking off, we had a conversation about our careers. He was telling me that he lamented not making it in Hollywood and achieving the success he dreamt of, like a sitcom. He was impressed with where I was in my career and called himself “just a juggler.” He had a standing gig opening for Andy Williams in Branson and would do that five nights a week for years. He’d do twenty minutes before Andy came out. This was in a ten-thousand-seat room. Every night. I told him, “Philip, you have not had a job, a real job, for twenty-five years. You don’t understand the odds that you beat just being a performer, just having a regular gig. You’re not waiting tables right now. You’re working. You do twenty minutes a night, then play golf during the day and hang out with your wife in your beautiful home.” He was standing on the ninety-ninth step of a pyramid and thinking, “Damn, I didn’t make it to the top.” So make sure, kids, to look back at those other steps and see how far you’ve come. Look back at all those people struggling on step one and think, “I’m grateful to be where I’m at.”
You’ve got to grab those moments of gratitude where you can. One afternoon a few years ago, I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard to do an interview at People magazine and going straight from there to do a live spot on The O’Reilly Factor.
As I was driving, I realized I was about to pass a Pier 1 Imports that I had built many years back during my construction days. One of my worst days, a watershed low point in my construction misery, was building that store. I was working in the lot behind that place and there was a mound of dirt about the size of a Humvee. It was on one end of the parking lot and there was a dumpster on the other. I showed up on a Friday morning at the crack of butt and was handed a shovel and a wheelbarrow and told to go to town. (I remember it was a Friday because at that point, just like Loverboy said, I was working for the weekend.) There was a narrow plank leading up to the doors of the dumpster so I could wheel the barrow into it and dump it out. The foreman told me, “If you hustle, you can get that whole mound moved into the dumpster before you knock off tonight.” This was mule work. If it was two hundred years ago and I was black, this would be slave labor.
It felt like something you would do if you were trying to torture someone. It brings to mind two great scenes, from two great movies. It was a hell of a lot like the “What’s your dirt doin’ in his ditch?” scene from Cool Hand Luke. Just mental agony. But it was also like The Great Escape, when Steve McQueen’s character is in the cooler counting the number of times he can bounce the baseball off the wall just to keep himself sane. I was counting the number of steps between the dirt pile and the dumpster, just to keep my mind from eating itself.
The dumpster was full by five, and I knocked off having made just enough money for a six-pack and the gas that it took me to get to the site.
So even though I was ru
Taking time out to feel that gratitude for where you’ve come to in your journey of life is so crucial. Because of our cultural messages, people treat their lives like there’s a party going on and they’re not invited. Your life isn’t “out there.” Maybe it’s right under your nose. There’s a fantastic John Hiatt song called “You May Already Be A Wi
He’s satisfied, happy and grateful with what he has. I wish that for you, So