Greatness Within Our Grasp

A few days ago, I witnessed a talented, young artist get discouraged to the point of sulking because one element of the project he was working on didn’t turn out the way he had hoped.

It was interesting to witness.

“I suck,” he said. “I’m terrible.” This, after a quick experimentation he had spent a short time on didn’t work—or didn’t work in the way he wanted it to.

He’s barely out of his teens, has only relatively recently grown serious about his art, had worked on this particular part of his project for a very short time, and was quite dispirited because it wasn’t an instant success.

The disappointment and depressing condition the young man experienced were temporary, and he’s back at work on his craft—and probably was later the same day—but it reminded me of just how much hard work, discipline, dedication, patience, practice, time, blood, sweat, tears, failure, and investment becoming truly proficient at something requires.

I can’t know for sure, but the young artist, like nearly all young artists, seemed to expect to be able to accomplish what he wanted to because he wanted to, because he has talent, but what he lacks, what prevents him from being able to achieve what he’s striving for isn’t talent. It’s something else—something that makes talent the smallest component of the equation in any endeavor.

One of the most dangerous mentalities we can have is the easy, lazy belief that “you either have it, or you don’t.”

I work with creatives all the time, mostly writers, who want to—no, check that—who expect to be good, even genius early in their development (notice I didn’t say career) and in early attempts or first drafts.

Only people who don’t know any better think they can be good at something from the jump—which describes most novices and people trying to do something new. We don’t know because we’re new, and either we think that what we do is good or we’re so overwhelmed by its failure, we abandon it. Both cause us to give up—the first, on truly becoming good, the second, for good.

Both tragic responses fail to perceive the truth—being great at something is not a birthright, but the result of busting our asses.

I’m not saying we’re not born with talents, not given certain innate gifts and natural abilities, that we don’t have specific interests and internal proclivities that point to potential, just that they are little more than a place to start.

Talent is a seed. Full of potential—not much more.

I know a lot of talented people. The world is full of them. Hell, prison is full of them. During my time as a prison chaplain, I was amazed at the staggering amount of talent languishing behind the chain link and razor wire.

Talent inside prison is like talent anywhere. It’s all the same. Just potential. Just possibility.

What we do with our gifts and talents, how we develop them, what we invest in them, that’s what determines outcome, that’s what makes the difference between success and failure.

And it’s no small investment that’s required to become truly great.

Experts agree that to truly excel at something, to be world class, requires ten years or ten thousand hours of a certain type of the right kind of practice.

Two inspiring and encouraging and wise books that make a convincing case for this are “Talent Is Overrated: What really separates world-class performers from everybody else” by Geoff Colvin and “Outliers: The story of success” by Malcolm Gladwell.”

If the frustrated young artist who says he sucks after failing in certain ways at his new craft and you and I want to become masters, we must invest a decade of our lives to deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, according to Colvin, is “designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, and it isn’t much fun.”

Notice that last one. Amateurs have fun—both in practice and in performance. The proficient (notice I didn’t say professionals) do not. It’s all about approach. Do you want to have a good time or do you want to become good at what you’re doing?

The latter approach is about always improving—pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do. It avoids automaticity and actually changes our bodies and brains.

I can say unequivocally and experientially that I have found this to be the case. I became serious about writing fiction in the summer of 1994. It was then that I began to write daily, seek and receive feedback, study great writing—reading books about writing and reading lots of great novels—and though I witnessed improvement all along, it was after I crested the ten thousand hour and one million word mark that I experienced a quantum leap into a level of proficiency that was, to me and trusted others, apparent and recognizable.

Want to be great at something? Whether or not we are is far more in our control than most of us realize.

Here’s a challenge for you. Find someone who is consistently proficient, who is great at what they do, and examine what enabled them to reach their current level of performance. I guarantee, whether you find evidence of natural abilities or not, you will certainly find someone who is reaping the reward of years of investing, of working harder and longer and more intentionally and deliberately than anyone else.

There are no shortcuts.

The belief in genius, in prodigies, in “you have it, or you don’t” amounts to little more than an excuse for laziness.

You, me, and the sullen young man who inspired this piece, have an opportunity to be world-class, but are we willing to pay the price, put in the work, sacrifice a big chunk of our lives to achieve it?

Dedication to a decade of deliberate practice is the beginning. What are you waiting for? Get Colvin and Gladwell’s books and get busy.

The Sacred Journey

I went to see “Eat, Pray, Love,” not because I expected it to be a great movie, but because its subject—namely how to live optimally—has been a lifelong pursuit of mine.

I’m so very grateful for the gift of my life, and sincerely attempt to put the most into it and get the most out of it. Toward that end, I continually ask myself the following questions.

(I’m not saying Liz Gilbert, the protagonist of “Eat, Pray, Love,” asks the same questions, just that her quest may have led her to some of the same answers.)

Am I practicing love and kindness?

How do I obtain enlightenment?

What is the meaning of my life?

How do I truly savor every drop of juice from the sweet fruit of the tree of life?

Am I being mindful?

How awake am I? How aware? How alive?

Am I blindly following the culture I was born into or questioning everything in search of the truth?

Am I living justly and compassionately?

Am I making the world a better place by living unselfishly, extending myself for others, giving my gifts with joyous generosity?

I’m not saying I’ve figured out the best way to live—not even close—just that I’ve devoted myself to finding out the best way for me to live my life.

Liz Gilbert dedicated a year of her life to a similar pursuit. Here’s how the studio describes the film:

“Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) had everything a modern woman is supposed to dream of having — a husband, a house, a successful career — yet like so many others, she found herself lost, confused, and searching for what she really wanted in life. Newly divorced and at a crossroads, Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery. In her travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali. Based upon the bestselling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love proves that there really is more than one way to let yourself go and see the world.”

“Eat, Pray, Love” is better than I expected it to be, and, as usual, Julia Roberts is resplendent. The writing and directing are good—save for the way too much of the film is lit with a soft, ethereal quality from above and behind its actors, the overblown rim light putting a halo-like aura around Julia that I found extremely distracting. And it follows her not matter where she is—in a theater, a darkened room, even walking down an unlit street at night in Italy.

Liz’s journey toward enlightenment, toward love, began because she’s lost her appetite for food and life and wanted to go some place where she could marvel at something.

She’s in a crisis—recently divorced, floundering, trapped on a treadmill of meaningless, unintentional existence.

Like so many of us, it takes a crisis to move and motivate her. But we don’t have to wait for crises to force us toward meaningful lives any more than we have to travel the world to find some place to marvel at something.

Right now people from all over the world are traveling to Italy, India, and Bali attempting to eat, pray, and love their way to happiness and fulfillment, but the problem isn’t our zip code. It’s us.

Liz traveled around the world to find that the kingdom of God was within her all along. To walk the path, the way (of enlightenment, fulfillment, and love) doesn’t require outward travel, but inward.

There’s nothing wrong with travel, with an outward journey that symbolizes our inner one, but it’s the smallest aspect, shortest distance, least important part of the true journey.

In the same way the best thing an education can do is to teach us how to be students for life, the best and only hope Liz has of a continuous life filled with meaningful eating, praying, and loving is if her journey caused her to be able to have the same experiences when she returned. If we can’t find something to marvel at every single day, the problem isn’t with the world or where we live, but with us and how we perceive.

And we don’t have to devote ourselves to a guru to become our best selves. Or, if we do, it needn’t be for long and we don’t need to have just one. And no matter how helpful or inspiring or transformational we find certain leaders, we must inevitably shoot our gurus and sprinkle ashes on our Buddhas.

Like inspiration that becomes doctrine and eventually dogma, teachers, counselors, gurus too soon become gods and our attachment to them ultimately leads to spiritual dependency and death.

Liz found what worked for her. You and I have to find what works for us. There are no rules. There is no one path, no one way to walk The Way.

Want to know the best approach to life? Ask anyone with a terminal disease. They’ll tell you. Cast aside what really doesn’t matter. Spend your few rare, precious, priceless moments on meaningful things of lasting value.

Liz tried new ways of living in an attempt to change her life—going to extremes and traveling the world. And it seems to have worked. But true, lasting change is about integration, about how we live every single day. It lasts because we’re making lifestyle changes that lead us back to our best, most original selves. Diets don’t work because they are faddish and temporary and don’t constitute a true change in the way we live. The same is true of spiritual fads or programs or the latest greatest teaching of the most popular guru or book or Oprah guest.

Lasting change is about integrating what really matters most into our lives.

Here’s what I attempt to (and fail to) do every day and what I recommend to you:

Be. Savor every second. Breathe deeply. Empty. Open heart and mind and belt to the wonderful, terrible grace-filled catastrophe of life. Live with abandon. Love with passion and without reservation. Search for God—within and without. Be kind. Be still. Be silent. Be with supportive, nurturing friends. Be alone. Give. Give. Give. Ask. Seek. Knock. Sing. Dance. Make every meal a celebration. Make every day an adventure. Think. Create. Have lots of sex. Dream. Play. Protect the weak and vulnerable. Speak the truth. Fight for justice. Stand up for the oppressed. Be creative. To mine own individual, idiosyncratic self be true.

Only when these things become a way of life—something we live every day, not only on certainly holy days or in certain exotic places—only when eating is praying and everything is love, will we be our best, deepest, most actualized selves and live our best, richest, most meaningful lives.

Perchance to Dream

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.


For all we know—or think we do—we know very little about dreams. Of course, the truth is, we know very little about much of anything, but some things are harder to fake than others.

Dreams can be defined as a succession of images, sounds, or emotions the mind experiences during sleep, but that doesn’t even begin it.

Dreams are mystical and spiritual, ineffable and inexplicable, which is why I take issue with Freud’s claim in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” that he can “demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.”

Dreams are mysteries. Any interpretation is at best only partially correct.

Dreams can be instructive and inspiring, but in the way all mysterious things (God, the universe, art, life, death) are—In subtle, lyrical, non-literal, largely metaphorical ways.

Dreams are also rich material for story. Fiction, whether on page or screen, is like a dream. My experience with writing fiction—particularly the novel—is that it is very much like entering a kind of dream state, and, I to varying degrees, remain in it until the novel is born.

In thinking about this column, it occurred to me that dreams play significant roles in three out of four of my most recent novels.

Dreams are the subject and the setting for acclaimed filmmaker, Christopher Nolan’s new movie, “Inception”—an original sci-fi actioner that travels around the globe and into the intimate and infinite world of dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved.

Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible—inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move—an enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming.

Though one of the most well-made and entertaining films of this disappointing summer at the cineplex, “Inception” was not as good as I wanted it to be.

Sure, it’s demonstrates a brilliant filmmaker at work. It’s as well constructed a movie as you’re likely to see. It’s interesting and exciting and intense, but it has no soul.

It’s visually stunning, intellectually engaging, but emotionally unfulfilling. A puzzle, a logicians labyrinth. Clever. Cold. Cerebral. I wanted to care for the characters—enjoy the movie on more than an intellectual level—but there was no heart, no warmth, no spirit.

And I wish “Inception” had been more dreamlike, more random and hazy and nonlinear. For all its talk about and delving into dreams, there’s very little in it that feels like anyone is actually dreaming. I felt it could really have used the hypnotic touch of a director like David Lynch. “Mulholland Drive” has far more of the dewy residue of dream state than does “Inception.”

Both times I watched “Inception,” I thought of another dream-like movie, “What Dreams May Come”—and though it’s more about the dreams that come when we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, it makes a quite convincing case that those dreams are more like the ones we have in our beds at night or in our heads during the day than we realize.

Though I’ve seen “What Dreams May Come” several times, I decided to watch it again while writing this, and I discovered that it’s even better than I remembered. A lot better.

I had also forgotten how beautiful and extraordinary Annabella Sciorra is and what a tour de force her amazing performance is in this film. Watching her served to heighten how weak the poorly cast Ellen Page is in “Inception.”

Watch any scene in “What Dreams May Come” and you’ll find more true, convincing human emotion than in all of “Inception.”

“What Dreams May Come” is a gorgeous film, a work of art, filled with and about art. It’s magical and mystical and beautiful. In short, it’s a dream. It’s a stunning work of imagination about life and death, but most of all it’s about love and loss. It’s profound and says some interesting things about the world to come—something like “As below, so above,” we create our lives in the afterlife in the same way we do in this present life, that if something is true in our minds, it is true. As the person who wrote the phrase “what dreams may come” says, “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“What Dreams May Come” is about things dreams are made of—twins, soul mates, second chances, not giving up, winning when you lose and losing when you win. It’s filled with the things that fill dreams. It’s inspiring and inspiriting—and everything that “Inception” is not.
It’s not that “Inception” is bad. It’s not. It’s quite good, and as for well-crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking entertainment in theaters right now, it nears the top of the list of limited choices. In fact, I recommend it.

I recommend both movies, but for very different reasons. If you want to see a high-quality timepiece at work, go see the Swiss watch-like “Inception.” Its precision and brilliance are beautiful to behold. But if you want to spend time with something truly timeless watch “What Dreams May Come,” and as you do, open your mind and heart and embrace the dream of life taking place in the mind of God.