Unmistakable: Why Only Is Better Than Best - Hardcover

Rao, Srinivas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101981709 ISBN 13: 9781101981702

Verlag: Portfolio, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Stop trying to beat everyone else. True success is playing by your own rules, creating work that no one can replicate. Don’t be the best, be the only.
 
You’re on the conventional path, checking off accomplishments. You might be doing okay by normal standards, but you still feel restless, bored, and limited.
 
Srinivas Rao gets it. As a new business school graduate, Srinivas’s dreams were crushed by a soulless job that demanded only conformity. Sick of struggling to keep his head above water, Srinivas quit his job and took to the waves, pursuing his dream of learning to surf.
 
He also found the freedom to chart his own course. Interviewing more than five hundred creative people on his Unmistakable Creative podcast was the ultimate education. He heard how guests including Seth Godin, Elle Luna, Tim Ferriss, Simon Sinek, and Danielle LaPorte blazed their own trails. Srinivas blends his own story with theirs to tell you: You can find that courage too. Don’t be just one among many—be the only. Be unmistakable.
 
Trying to be the best will chain you to others’ definition of success. Unmistakable work, on the other hand, could only have been created by one person, so competition is irrelevant. Like Banksy’s art or Tim Burton’s films, unmistakable work needs no signature and has no precedent.
 
Whether you’re a business owner, an artist, or just someone who wants to leave your mark on the world, Unmistakable will inspire you to create your own path and define your own success.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Srinivas Rao is the host and founder of the popular podcast, the Unmistakable Creative, where he's interviewed over five hundred creative people. Former guests on the show include Seth Godin, Elle Luna, Tim Ferriss, Gretchen Rubin, Simon Sinek, Adam Grant, and Danielle LaPorte. His self-published book The Art of Being Unmistakable was a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Even though I've lived in California since 1993, I needed fifteen years and, ironically, to leave the country before I finally started to surf.

We often wait like this when it comes to the pursuit of some of our most important dreams. We drive by the water admiring it from the safety of our cars, or we simply stand onshore watching and admiring those who are already in the water. We justify not doing anything by convincing ourselves that people in the water have something that we don't. They've had lucky breaks that we never will, or they've won some sort of genetic lottery or happened to be in the right place at the right time. While in some cases this might be true, our justifications start to become excuses and then narratives we repeat that limit our potential.

When you start to pursue anything that falls outside the boundaries of societal expectations, anything that disrupts or disturbs the status quo, the sirens of safety and security will begin to go off like a fire truck blazing through the streets of New York City. A decision to disrupt the status quo is in many ways a decision to disrupt yourself and your life. But we resist changes like this, despite knowing how much a subtle or significant shift in our lives can come to outweigh what we fear.

And we fear that taking a plunge into the water, into the unknown, and doing the work required to become unmistakable will be worse even than the boredom or dissatisfaction that we currently feel with our lives. So we just stand onshore with our feet sinking into the sand. We continually choose to do nothing, settle, and compromise until we get to the end of our lives and find ourselves looking back at a life that could have been.

• A life in which we could have published the novel we've stashed in our desk drawer.

• A life in which we could have started the company or nonprofit that is deep within the chambers of our heart and mind.

• A life in which we could have dared more greatly and dreamed more audaciously.

But we always have a choice to take one small step forward to begin our quest for change. Nearly every innovative, groundbreaking, creative idea that defies the limits of what we once thought was humanly possible started as nothing more than a thought in someone's head, a moment of creative daring, before it became that person's unmistakable dent in the universe.

Given that we're about to enter a new and unfamiliar environment and attempt to learn a completely new way of living, we have no idea what our limits are. We might imagine those limits to be greater than they are, dreaming of being Michael Jordan when we've never picked up a basketball in our life. Or we might imagine them to be worse than they are, that we can't even try to write or draw, sing or dance.

Inevitably, when you get in the water you'll face obstacles like rocks, waves crashing down on your head, jellyfish, and other surfers yelling at you. Similarly, the pursuit of unmistakable work also comes with its own set of obstacles that you will have to face, like critics, naysayers, moments of panic, fear, anxiety, self-doubt, and competition.

Before you get ready to paddle out, consider what's making your feet feel like they're stuck in the sand forever.

Sharks, Drowning, and Other Things That Keep You from Getting in the Water

Two forces, one external and the other internal, are the most common culprits that account for the delay and death of many potential projects and the failure to pursue our unmistakable art. To become unmistakable, you have to become aware of these defeating influences and how they work, so you understand their power to work against you and know how to assess or ignore them.

The Voices of Parents, Peers, and Society

When you start to become unmistakable, the voices of people who want you to follow their plan will get really loud. Those voices will often come from well-meaning friends, family, and colleagues, and some less-than-sympathetic adversaries like competitors, critics, naysayers, and strangers on the Internet.

Whatever their intention, these voices will question your sanity and say you've lost your mind. They'll give you a list of reasons why you will fail, and tell you how the odds are stacked against you.

For many years, I heard some variation of the following:

You don't have enough experience.

You just don't have the talent.

You're too old.

You're too young.

Your cousin or friend or uncle or aunt tried to do this and failed.

If this doesn't work out, you'll be old and broke. Then what are you going to do?

How are you ever going to make money doing that?

Nine out of ten businesses end up failing.

Only one in a thousand people will make it in acting, writing, or anything creative.

Millions of blogs are out there. Why would anybody read yours?

This is such a waste of your education.

Friends and family will fill your ears with tales of woe, disasters, and debacles. They'll kindly suggest a backup plan that involves following the script that they follow, what society has told them to do. They'll tell you that your work is no good and they'll question your talent.

Why do the voices get so loud?

1) People want you to remain as you are because you make them realize they're ignoring their own calling. People are uncomfortable when you start to change, because your actions remind them what they've been avoiding in their own lives. They're forced to confront the fact that they're choosing to remain the same while you're making a drastic shift in the direction of your life. You hold a mirror up to all the fears they've given in to and all the goals they've chosen not to pursue.

2) Criticizing is easier than creating. If you're a critic you get to avoid the risk of failing, looking stupid, and making the world wonder what the hell you were thinking. As a critic, you're off the hook. But the most iconic creators in history have all contended with critics. Every single book, piece of music, or film has received negative reviews. Browse the contemporary reviews for classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises. You'll find a one-star review for all of them. If your work is unmistakable, it will have critics. So you must embrace or ignore the critics and create anyway.

3) Some people are just rule followers. Sometime early in 2013, I went to a job interview. One of the people interviewing me, Chuck, had become incredibly indoctrinated. When I asked him about the culture of the organization he said, "When we say work starts at eight o'clock, we don't mean eight-fifteen." I never forgot that. Following rules was his world. I quickly realized in that moment that this was not my world and I didn't want to be a casualty of defending the status quo as Chuck had. You can follow a set of prewritten rules or you can start to make your own.

The people who criticized me when I started have since moved on. A handful of critics have been replaced by thousands of people around the world who have supported my work.

If I had listened to those critical voices, I would never have put another idea out into the world.

You wouldn't be reading this book.

The Unmistakable Creative podcast wouldn't exist.

I would have missed out on getting a world-class education from some of the greatest minds of our time.

And I would be miserable.

The best way to silence your critics is with commitment, conviction, putting your head down, and getting back to work. The people you admire certainly didn't start out with legions of fans, readers, and supporters of their work, and they have dealt with their fair share of criticism. They're the ones who didn't let the critics paralyze them. You probably haven't heard of the ones...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101981709
• ISBN 13: 9781101981702
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland