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EXCUSE 7:

IT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE

It’s one of those things we all do, right? We look at her life or her work or her Instagram, and we let her success talk us out of chasing anything for ourselves. We stop ourselves from writing that book, opening that business, building that app, starting that nonprofit, because someone else has already done it.

It’s been done before.

Well, of course it has. But, sister, everything has been done before. Kissing, dating, getting married, winged eyeliner, white jeans, bangs . . . honestly, everything that sounds interesting or cool or like something you might want to try? It’s already been done! So why is it that we don’t let that deter us in any other scenario except pursuing something big?

Because we need an excuse.

Please note, I didn’t call this section of the book “Legitimate Obstacles to Get Around.” I called it “Excuses to Let Go Of.” The fact that someone has already done the thing you’re dreaming of shouldn’t be a deterrent; it should be a sign that you’re on to something.

Dang, look at Suzy already making rainbow doilies on Etsy—just proves that it’s fulfilling and fun to make and sell crafts online.

What’s that? Your cousin Emily is already killing it in that direct-sales jewelry company? Oh, I guess that means it really is an incredible place to build community and a side income!

But instead of seeing other people’s success or creativity as a good thing, as a sign that pursuing something more for your life has value, you decide that it’s a competition and you’d rather not try at all in case you’re not as good as she is. Sure, this is partly about feeling like you’re not enough, but it’s also about the unhealthy game of comparison.

One of the messages I get all the time from women is, “I loved your book and I’d love to be an author, but I could never write like you do.” Or, “I’ve always wanted to do public speaking, but I’m not as good as you are.” Girls, stop comparing your beginning with my middle! Or anyone else’s for that matter. What you are reading right now is my eighth book, and I’m not saying it’s Pulitzer material, but it’s light-years away from my first in terms of skill. Have you ever looked at my Instagram feed and thought it was pretty? Scroll back a couple of years—just for funsies—and see what it looked like when I was just figuring out my personal style or how to not look like a robot in photos. Go look at the blog too; some of those original posts are doozies. You think I’m a good public speaker? Please go peep on my old YouTube videos where I’m speaking at MOPS groups and at the local senior citizen home (I kid you not!). I intentionally keep the older content in my feeds and on my website because, if you ever fall down an internet rabbit hole some night and find some of my original work, I want you to see the progress. I did not wake up like this. And that person you’re comparing yourself to? Neither did they. You stop yourself from trying because you think it’s already been done. Well, of course it has. But it hasn’t been done by you.

There’s a great Chinese proverb that says, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.” You can keep talking yourself out of the thing you’re hoping for, or you can decide that your dream is more powerful than your excuse.

This isn’t a question of whether you can do something well, because nearly anything can be learned; this is a question of whether you’re humble enough to suck for as long as it takes you to become better. The ability to write well or speak well or do photography or dance or any old thing at all—those are learned and improved over time. But you’re never going to get to the place where you become good or better or best if you won’t even put your shoes on the starting blocks. We don’t know whether you can speak like me or write like Brené Brown or take pictures like Jenna Kutcher. Sister, we can’t determine when you’ll cross the finish line, because you won’t even let yourself show up for the race!

You are talking yourself out of something you haven’t even attempted, because you think you can’t measure up to how someone else has done it. But this particular excuse is not about your skill. This excuse is about your fear. There are all sorts of different ways this type of fear manifests, so please feel free to identify with the one that describes you best and allow me to drop some truth bombs up in here.

You’re afraid that you’ll suck because . . . you’ve never done it before. Let me relieve you of this fear right now. You are going to suck. All beginners do. Because if you were secretly a prodigy at pursuing the dreams of your heart, some long-suffering yet dedicated teacher would have seen it in you long ago. We all saw Dangerous Minds. If Michelle Pfeiffer didn’t see potential in you by now, you’re not going to be perfect right out of the gate. Huzzah! There’s zero pressure to be perfect now, so you can just have fun and get better. Your potential for improvement is exponential.

You’re afraid that you’ll suck because . . . you fail at everything, so why should this be any different? God’s almighty nightgown! Is this really how you speak to yourself? Like, really? Number one, knock it off! You are beautiful and worthy of good things, and if you don’t believe that, nobody will. Number two, go get my last book and read about the lies that are hurting you. This kind of belief is crushing and untrue. You have to begin with the way you speak to yourself and the things you believe you deserve before you attempt a new goal. First learn to love yourself well and give yourself credit; then reach for more.

You’re afraid that you suck . . . and at least if you never try, no one—especially you—will be able to confirm that. Spoiler alert: this kind of thought doesn’t come from an underachiever who’s not good at anything. This kind of thought comes from a perfectionist. And, truthfully, it’s lame. There is so much incredible potential inside of you, but you’re going to squander it because trying may or may not confirm that you’re not as good as you thought you were. Stop being so hard on yourself! It’s like that time on Saved by the Bell when Jessie succumbed to the pressures of schoolwork and being in her band, Hot Sundae. Spano was a perfectionist, but rather than admit that it was too much to keep up with it all or concede failure, she got addicted to drugs and had that now-infamous breakdown to a Pointer Sisters song. Don’t be Jessie Spano. If you try for your goal, you probably will suck for a minute (see the paragraph about sucking as a beginner), but you won’t stay there for long. You’ll work to get better, and you won’t even need caffeine pills to do it.

Look, here’s the irony about this particular excuse: even if you push yourself to confront it, you will keep encountering it for the rest of your life. When we’re early on the path to personal growth or on the way to achieving a goal, we often have unrealistic expectations of what will happen once we “get there.” Like, if you just have the courage to do this one thing, then it will make you invincible to insecurity and indecision for the rest of your life. The reality is that every new mountain you attempt to scale will likely have been traversed by someone before you.

Every. New. Mountain.

That means that once you get over this big goal in front of you—once you get to the summit (I’m really going all in on this analogy, guys)—you’ll see another mountain range in the distance. In fact, you’ll realize that your mountain was actually just the foothill of something bigger and better. Personal goals are infinite . . . and addictive. Once you achieve one it makes you start to wonder what else you might be capable of.

The answer? Anything you set your mind to.

But first you’ve got to get over this battle with comparison. Because, friend, if you can’t get over your fear of not doing it as well as they do, you’ll never have the opportunity to be a trailblazer for someone else.

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As I work through edits on this book, I’m in the process of creating something that many, many people have done before me. I also have exactly zero qualifications to take on something this massive. About a month from now a documentary we made about my women’s conference will be in movie theaters throughout North America. I mean, who in the actual heck do I think I am? Well, I’ll tell you who I am not. I’m not a filmmaker or a movie industry insider, and when we started on this project I had no idea how we would pull it off. It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever attempted to do, and it will live in a space—in theater events and later streaming services—that are insanely oversaturated. Not only that, but there are people who are experts in this field and sometimes even they fail at it, so what in the world makes me think we have a shot? Well, frankly, the project being successful wasn’t what made me want to do it. In fact, I believe if I had focused on whether or not it would make money, I would have started to obsess over all the ways I was ill-qualified to take it on. Actually, what motivated me to try and work on something so outside my wheelhouse was, well, you.

As we were planning our conference last year, I received thousands of emails and direct messages from women saying how badly they wanted to attend Rise and how much it would mean for their hearts to have an opportunity to be in our audience. The problem wasn’t their desire to attend; the problem was their finances. It’s expensive to attend a conference because of travel and hotels and the price of tickets required to cover the cost of renting out a space so large. Many women didn’t have it in their budgets, and I took that to heart. For nearly a decade I’ve been creating content and giving it away for free, and the idea that you might not be able to access something I believe in so passionately really hurt my heart. I spent months trying to figure out a way to bring the conference and the power of reaching for personal growth to women at a price they could afford. Then one day on a random conference call I heard about event cinema, which is a fancy term for putting a live event (like the ballet or a Justin Bieber concert) into movie theaters on a limited run. Dang it, I thought. If the Biebs can do this, I’m pretty sure I can do this! I asked myself a what if question.

What if we made a movie about Rise weekend?

What if I could find someone to partner with us to help get it into theaters?

What if I could give the tribe the chance to create a girls’ night out in their own community?

I hope you can understand how insane this idea was. We didn’t know how to make a movie or how to get it in theaters or the literally hundreds of steps between there and here. We were the worst kind of dumb—we didn’t know what we didn’t know. But I didn’t spend any time worrying about our lack of knowledge, and honestly, it didn’t occur to me to care about who had done it better or how it might be received. I wasn’t focused outside myself; I was focused on my why. My why was powerful; my why made me feel passionate enough to figure out my how.

If you find yourself worried about the idea that someone else has already done it, you need to flip the script on whether that’s a bad thing. If someone else has done it, you can research and model behavior and test out your own theories using their road map as some kind of guidance. You can combine their how with your why to create something epic.