How to Pull Yourself Up

Step One: Take an Audit

I watched a TikTok video the other night that kept me up. It was basically just a woman looking into the camera and reminding me that I design my life.

Silly. Right?

But there was something about it that got caught in my head. I design my life? Yes. I believe that. But also, man do I struggle with it. It’s so, so easy to get stuck in a place of good enough. Or—I don’t know—what’s the stuck equivalent of nose blindness?

Photo by Mike Burke on Unsplash

You get so used to being where you are, that you don’t even see anymore that you’re not living the life you want to. You can become blind to the things that aren’t working for you.

Anyway, that video somehow sent me down a little inspirational rabbit hole.

I watched a movie last night called A Million Miles Away.

It was a biopic about a migrant farmer named José Hernández who decided when he was a boy that he wanted to be an astronaut. It took him more than thirty years, but he did it.

Like, real life, he became an engineer. And then he applied a dozen times to the NASA program—learned to fly a plane, learned to SCUBA dive, became an athlete, so that each application was better—and he eventually got in.

And went to space.

In the movie, Kalpana Chawla (an astronaut who was killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003), told Hernández that ‘tenacity is a superpower.’

Which reminded me of one of my favorite quotes of all time.

Octavia Butler said that “even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilet than do the writing.”

Whoa boy, does that ever resemble me sometimes.

So, to recap:

1. We design our own lives.

2. We can become blind to complacency.

3. Tenacity is a super power.

4. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilets than do the writing.

What does that all mean, when you put it together?

I’m not going to sit here and say that you get to live exactly the life you want to live. How in the world could I know that? I don’t even know if I get to live the lie I want to live. There are so many variables.

We don’t all start in the same place. We don’t all have the same resources or privileges or skills or natural gifts.

And besides all that—how can any of us actually know the life we want to have, before we get there. Honestly. There’s just stuff you can’t know until it happens. So, no. I’m not going to tell you that you will get to have the exact life you’re wishing for right now.

But every single one of us gets to start where we are.

And tenacity is free. It mostly involved finding the gumption to ask for what you want. And to keep asking. What struck me about Hernández is that he didn’t just keep applying to NASA. He kept working at improving his odds.

Horizontal growth is great. That’s the whole ‘just keep swimming’ thing, right?

But vertical growth? That’s some powerful stuff. That’s ‘just keep swimming, but work at getting a little better at it every day.’

I’m going to write a little series for subscribers about how to pull yourself out of that complacency blindness.

It all starts with an audit.