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30 Day Street Performing Challenge Days 20-22

Posted in Brit's thoughts on Mar 23, 2008

So the signs are all around me. As I woke up today and took a little morning walk, I saw 2 guys going through the trash, pulling out all of the recyclables from each trash bin. When I came back, they were still there, working hard. Yesterday, I had some errands to run and I passed a guy my age, looked kind of like me, asking for change. A few hours later, I was out again and there he was, still there, still asking for change. Working hard.

I wrote a friend last year that the universe was trying to tell him to work hard. Ever since I wrote that letter, I always had this weird feeling about it. Like maybe I had sent it to the wrong person. Like maybe the actual intended recipient was me.

Yesterday was a tough day. I spent much of the day thinking about the past and mostly about the future, where my life is headed, uncertain, confused, head awash with ideas. I worked on the Ordinary Miracles website with V V and she showed me some other websites as reference for what she was looking for. I told her, very defensively, that these websites were beyond what I knew how to do and that she was asking too much. After this conversation, I spent more time looking at these websites and had a bit of a revelation.

My whole life, especially my adult life, from one perspective has been about me thinking that I am so good, so talented, so capable. So entitled that I didn’t have to work hard. And it dawned on me suddenly that no matter how talented I am, even if i am Einstein incarnate, my talent is not ever going to be able to compete with the hard work of others.

Realistically, honestly, I probably work on average 5 to 10 hours per week. And there is just no way that this is going to compare to the work of someone who works 5 to 10 hours per day. I have justified this by spending much of my time looking for shortcuts–ways to do things faster, ways to cut corners, ways to modify other people’s work so that I don’t have to do as much.

But the whole thing is rotten at the core. To live the life I want to live, to provide real value to other people, to earn a good living, all requires hard work. And I have been so averse to hard work that I have quit just about everything I have tried when the going got tough. Sports, mathematics, video editing, street performing. It really runs the gamut.

And so I’m really grateful for this lesson and this realization because up until now I was truly blind to it. If I spend a day working for eight hours, I congratulate myself for a month and take it easy. I can only imagine what is possible if this were to just be the norm, working hard everyday out of habit if nothing else.

On top of that, I realize that so much of my confusion, so much of my money worries, so much of the time I spend living in the past and future is little more than a way to avoid the present, where there are many things on my plate, all of which require hard work to actually achieve. And the time I spend worrying and confused and uncertain is time spent in my own unique way of procrastination, avoiding the work in front of me.

Now, I say all of this with no judgment on myself. I was truly blind to this aspect of myself and of reality. And now it is a brand new moment and a brand new chance to do things differently. My dream is to be a performer and this is yet another thing that requires incredibly hard work. I realized that I spend much of the time complaining about my genetic defects and lack of flexibility and strength. But as I look back, those few times where I have really put in the work to stretch and exercise, I have gotten great results. The problem was that I only kept up the work for about a week at a time.

I street performed for about a half-hour yesterday. I went out on Saturday at 10 AM. There were very few people around and those that were there seemed completely disinterested. I got very discouraged by this and quit. I read a story yesterday about a professional violinist, a guy who had played in the New York Philharmonic, the largest stages in the world. He decided to take a year off and street perform around the world, financing his trip solely by street performing. He succeeded, and said that on an average day, he began performing at 6AM and worked until midnight. I truly, at this point in the development of my belief systems, can not even fathom working 18 hours a day. It doesn’t even compute. But these are the people who are living the dream I want to live. This is what it seems like they all do. What they all have in common is a lot of hard work. Work that sucks as well as work that is gratifying.

I am scared that if I really work hard on this website that it won’t be that good. That people will finally see what I am capable of and they won’t be very impressed. And I think that this is the fear that underlies them all. The fear that my self-image of being so talented and competent will shatter in the face of reality. So why give it a chance? Just coast through life and say you haven’t seen what I’m really capable of, yet.

So I commit myself today to working hard and doing my best, whether the work sucks or feels great. Because sensations change, things feel good and then things feel bad, but there is always chop wood, carry water.