I was told from a young age that I was special. That I would grow up to do great things in the world.
I started reading at 3 (thanks, Mom) and took to school easily. My teachers quickly identified both my high IQ (or talent at taking IQ tests) and my eagerness to please.
I remember when a handwriting analyst (that used to be a thing) told me, in front of my fourth grade class, that I was destined for great things, and might even become president someday.
I’m not sure that I believed that, but I took it on as a personal burden. Whatever I did wasn’t good enough, because I was special, and it was my duty not to waste that.
I got straight A’s through high school, was the first generation in my family to graduate from college (with highest honors, of course), and the first of anyone in my family to graduate from law school (and it was, of course, a top law school). I measured myself based on my professional achievements—whether I was on the partner track at my law firm, how quickly I became a partner in my consulting firm—and my compensation and bonuses.
I took great pride in better and faster. If someone told me that it would take six months to get something done I would, without even thinking about it, assume that I could do it in three months. Often, I could.
And I was a mess.
Being “special,” began to take its toll. I was here to do great things, after all, and that meant that over and over again I had to top myself. It was exhausting, and it was one hundred percent internally generated.
I remember my dad telling me at one point, “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” I used that mantra to create a bizarre sort of perfectionism, where I either totally absorbed myself in something or ignored it completely.
I suffered from social anxiety and panic attacks during my late teens and most of my twenties, which I learned to get through by self-medicating and later, more productively, through meditation.
I was harder on myself than on other people but I still wasn’t the easiest person to be around or to be married to. Under the veneer of carefully cultivated Midwestern niceness was someone who could be downright cruel and intolerant of himself and those close to him.
I’m not proud of that.
I remember a moment driving to work when I was 30 and had just moved from a law firm to a consulting firm. I was listening to a book on (actual) tape of Harry Truman, because of course every moment had to be productive, even during your commute. In a moment of existential despair, it hit me that try as I might there would always be someone better than me—smarter, more accomplished, making more money, better looking, whatever metric you wanted. And it had not occurred to me at that point that my value could be measured by anything other than what I had achieved in life.
The burden of being special had at last begun to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity.
Another Path to Achievement
If I was destined to not be special enough on the corporate path, what was left for me?
Good enough, you have to understand, was never good enough.
After a great deal of research and thought on the matter, I decided to become enlightened. If anyone was special, it was someone who was enlightened, who had become one with the universe.
I decided to separate from my wife to be with a woman who made me feel more special (she later left me—special can be really needy). My divorce gave me more time to learn with spiritual teachers, to devote myself to the enlightenment path, to the selfish pursuit of the selfless.
Along the way, paradoxically, I started doing better at work as I cared less at being the “best” at work. I started being more present with people. I started connecting.
I created a healthier way of being and got married again.
And I had a long way to go. I still do.
It All Falls Away
Turns out “enlightenment” is just another made up concept, like special. Meaningless except as a tool for self-congratulation, or in my case, self-flagellation.
As the absurdity of the “enlightenment” effort began to sink in, I fell into yet another funk. Yet in this funk something became abundantly clear.
There is no “there.”
There is no place to get to that we are not making up in our minds. The man behind the curtain creating it all (pardon me, I just saw Wicked) is us.
This is just here, just now, and what is emerging through us in that now.
And that something can emerge with ease and joy or by creating goals and pressure and stress.
What will you choose?
The Gift of Extra Ordinary
The irony of my tagline is not lost on me, and it has always pointed to something much deeper when I allow myself a moment to look.
Extraordinary is a word that I hear coaches use all the time. If you’re not after an extraordinary life, an extraordinary future, why even bother? (Echoes of my father here—a life worth doing right.)
Extraordinary is something I have long craved, as do the founders and CEOs who work with me.
When I want “Extraordinary,” I puff up and create impossible goals and berate myself (and others) for not meeting them. Or even having them.
But occasionally, I am able to step back and see what I really want. The special moments of ordinariness in which, when I am truly able to inhabit them, I can see that everything is already perfect and that nothing is ever missing.
In these moments, I see that I am perfect as I am and that I will never stop learning and creating.
This, to me, is extra ordinary. Not ordinary with something extra. Just deeply, deeply present with exactly what is, while simultaneously watching my deepest desires manifest in the world, whatever those happen to be.
In these moments nothing is missing and everything is possible.
Will you join me here?