“Vision is the most important thing,” claims Arnold Schwarzenegger in his book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. “A clear vision gives you a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad… based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go.”
I’ve been thinking a lot in recent months about how to change the direction of my life. I suppose that’s inspired by three things: the fact that I became a father six months ago, the fact that I’m in my 40s (ie, this may be a mid-life crisis), and the fact that I am really (really) tired of always being in a depression loop.
That last one is just exhausting. Tedious. I mean, for the love of Pete, it’s a seemingly annual affair – peaking in the winter then ebbing enough in the spring that I want to step outside of myself, grab myself by the lapels and say: “OK, I get it. Yes, mental health is real; I see you, I hear you, I acknowledge your truth. But, really, man, can you please just shut the hell up and go forward?”
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I saw a comic strip recently in which person A says: “I feel the world would be better if I’d never been born.”
“Aw, that’s not true,” says person B. “It’d be exactly the same. You’re not important.”
When I look objectively at the incredible amount of time and energy I have put into being miserable over the years, I can’t help but ask: “Why am I doing this? Who is all this for?”
It’s like a tractor pull with no one watching. Ever seen a tractor pulling event? If you grew up in the American South you won’t have been able to escape them.
For reasons that I’ve never fully understood, people spend thousands of dollars and thousands of work hours building colossal engines that they stuff into tractors or pickup trucks, all for the sole purpose of pulling a large sled that becomes progressively heavier or immobile. I don’t really understand the physics of the sled; I’ve never cared enough to ask someone who knows. It doesn’t matter. The whole purpose is just to make noise.
A lot of noise. A tractor pull is a cacophony of engine sound: blatting and growling and spitting as the tractor/truck lines up to be hitched to the sled. There’s always an announcer on the PA, shouting about horsepower and encouraging you to whoop, as if your applause could have any influence on a machine’s ability to haul something. Then an ear-splitting, screaming, delightfully hellish roar as the vehicle’s engine battles the weight. There is smoke and mud and, often, when the engine blows up, fire and people running around in determined panic. It is a completely pointless event, the skills for which have very little real-world application, but it is amusing to watch.
So, imagine doing it completely on your own. It’s just you – and only you – in your big, stupid, smoke-belching truck that you’ve worked on for months, maybe years. You’re out in some nowhere field and there is not a single soul around – not even within earshot. You jam down the accelerator, your ears bleed with the noise, your truck shakes and squirrels from left to right, then your engine blows up. And when you look back on it all, you see you’ve progressed maybe 20 yards. In front of no one. For no one’s amusement. For no one’s benefit. For no damned reason at all.
That’s the energy expenditure of depression.
I would rather be putting all that into being a dad and being good at… well, something within the nebulous sphere of career/professional ambition. I would rather be putting this energy into being a better man.
LIFE ADVICE FROM THE KINDERGARTEN COP
When I say that I want to be a better man, the immediate problem I encounter is this: I don’t really know what I mean by that. I feel that I am capable of being “better” and I know, or, at least, I feel very intensely, that I want to be “better.” So, by extension, my brain tells me I need to figure out how to become “better.” But I am frustrated in this effort by the fact that I do not actually know what “better” is.
I can imagine outcomes of being better but those things aren’t actual betterness.
Here’s what I mean: think about what it would be like to be a billionaire. Almost certainly in doing so you have imagined outcomes – products of your wealth. Things you have bought. You’ve imagined a bigger house, nicer motorcycles, more exotic vacation destinations, etc. But that’s just stuff that you might choose to buy if you were insanely wealthy. That stuff does not answer the question of what it’s actually like to be a billionaire. What would go on in your head each morning? What would you do each day that would make you a billionaire? In what ways would you be fundamentally different from the person that you are now? What would be important to you? What would motivate you?
Probably you don’t have the answers to these questions. Being a billionaire is actually incomprehensible to you (in the same way that being you is probably incomprehensible to a billionaire).
So, it has occurred to me in recent months that when I say that I want to be a better man – and, more broadly, that I want to be happy – I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. I’m able to imagine outcomes – eg, I want to not randomly start crying for no reason; I want to be promoted at work (and thereby make more money); I want to be a source of strength and encouragement to my daughter and wife; I want to hike the Appalachian Trail; I want to be able to play blistering solos on trombone; and so on – but I’m not really able to imagine what’s delivering those outcomes.
“We can fix that,” promises Arnie. “Everything good, all great change, starts with a clear vision.”
A lot of celebrities and self-help folks and professional coaches stress the importance of having a vision: a strong idea of what you’re trying to achieve. That makes sense; it’s difficult to plan a journey to a place if you don’t know what that place is. Or, as Matthew McConaughey puts it in his book Greenlights: “Choreograph, then dance.”
(Yeah, I’m bringing out the philosophical big guns)
To figure out what your vision is, Schwarzenegger says, it can help to “start broad and zoom in.”
“Having a broad vision gives you an easy, more accessible place to start from,” he explains.
So, in his case, his vision for himself began with the very broad concept of America. That soon became a desire to live in America, which then became visions of what he wanted his life in America to be like, which then informed his decisions about how to achieve that. He didn’t start out thinking, “I want to be a globally recognized celebrity and politician who talks to donkeys.” That stuff came later. And, indeed, he would argue that starting with thoughts of that stuff would be distracting and limiting.
If you start by focusing on the outcomes – the house and motorcycles and such – you lose a lot of the what and the why. Which are things that you need to push you through to success. You need the vision, the thing you’re striving toward, the thing that exists independent of the outcomes.
“Your obsessions are a clue to your earliest vision of yourself,” says Schwarzenegger – suggesting that if you are struggling to develop any sort of genuine, inspiring vision, you should start at an earlier point in life – childhood perhaps – and identify what you used to really care about.
I’ve been trying to think about all that and how it applies to me. My parents say that when I was in my preschool years I would often run up to their friends at church and shout, “Hey, know what?” before unloading whatever thought or joke or observation might be present in my mind at the time. I liked talking. I liked attention. I liked knowing stuff. More comprehensively, I liked being a storyteller.
There are all kinds of things that I really like doing: riding motorcycles (this site used to be called The Motorcycle Obsession, after all), playing trombone, hiking, traveling, etc. And there are all kinds of things that I’ve told myself I wanted to be: a stand-up comic, a TV show host, an actor, a radio presenter, a novelist, a journalist, and so on. I guess that the through line in it all has been storytelling.
So, I suppose that’s my vision: I want to be a storyteller.
And if I were to keep things broad, I could declare “mission accomplished” on the ‘vision’ front. I’ve written a book that no one’s read (or published) and a book you probably can’t read and a whole bunch of stuff on the internet. I am a storyteller.
Not so many years ago, Alun Davies, founder of Adventure Bike Rider, had me come up to ABR headquarters to interview for a gig working on the magazine. In quizzing me and lightly softening me up for a pay offer that was unfortunately incompatible with my financial needs (to this day I regret not being able to say yes to that job) he asked me a question that has stuck with me ever since: “In your current job you make content. But what are you gonna do with the rest of your life, Chris? Make content?”
Alun was trying to suggest that implicit in his offer was the opportunity to go in different career directions. But I remember that in my head, my answer to his question was: “Well, yeah.”
I do want to make content for the rest of my life – content being stories. I do want to be a storyteller. And in the context of a career, I find it difficult to be particularly interested in anything else. But, as I say: if storytelling’s all I want to do, I’m doing it. Yet I find myself unhappy, wishing for “better,” and wondering how to achieve it.
So, zooming in just a tiny bit, I think I’ve decided that my vision is storytelling in a way that delivers a self-determined and sustainable income. I don’t particularly like working for other people – primarily because I don’t like other people having the ability to take my job away. I’ve never liked it. But now, within the context of The Most Important Thing In My Life – being a father – I really hate the idea of someone else being able to drop the floor from under me. It keeps me up at night. Fear of such a thing gets so intense at times that I get physically sick.
So, very broadly, there’s the what and the why. God knows about the how (or the when), but I suppose it’s a good place to stop for now. I’ll come back to this stuff at some point in the future. But I think we’ll get back to daydreaming about motorcycles next time.
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