It's a complicated relationship

Two-Headed Monsters • Print Endorphins • Twenty-Seven Club

Two-Headed Monsters

I’m working on my relationship with failure and rejection.

They showed up one too many times, usually drunk with power, busted through the door, shattered all my hopes and dreams, and left without offering to clean up their messes.

Photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash

If I can continue to modify how I look at failure and rejection, I’m fairly convinced my life will be radically different.

Unfortunately, I’ve read too many self-help hit-and-run blog posts about the benefits of failure that I have a lot of bad advice I’m still trying to overcome.

“Fail often and learn much! Really - it’s so great! I love failure.”

These were all just lessons in frustration.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it wasn’t until I picked up Scott Adams’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big that I finally read a perspective that resonated with me.

I’m often like that. I need to be smacked around more times than normal before I finally start to learn my lesson.

Throughout the trajectory of my life, until diving into serious weekly therapy for the last year, my reactions to failure and rejection have actually worsened rather than improved.

Unlike the frog placed in water that is slowly brought to a boil and doesn’t know it’s being cooked alive, for me, progressive failure only compounded my tendency towards depression and anxiety and made me more convinced that failure and rejection were to be avoided at all costs.

Therefore, whenever they (inevitably) made their way back into my life, I’d feel worse each time because I was operating from the perspective that failure and rejection were actually avoidable.

Therefore, I must be a terrible person because I continued to encounter failure and rejection at every turn.

Facing the concepts of failure and rejection from a more objective perspective has been radically transformative.

Remember Sloth from the movie The Goonies?

The kids in the movie all naturally assumed he was a terrifying monster out to destroy them.

Once they stopped running from him, they realized how kind, strong, and helpful he was.

I’m starting to see failure and rejection like Sloth from The Goonies.

Rather than being like the fearful two-headed, serpent-tailed dog Orthros from Greek mythology, I’m now seeing failure and rejection as a two-headed monster that is more like the fuzzy, purple, Sesame Street variety.

In other words, as a result of accepting the inevitability of failure and rejection — of knowing they exist and always will exist — I’m now actually feeling comfortable and (somewhat) safer in their presence.

Given my personality, this actually makes sense. I’ve always been someone who wants the truth, even if the truth hurts. What I don’t do well with are speculation and deceit.

If you’re about to rip a Band-Aid off the hairiest part of my arm, don’t tell me it’s not going to hurt. Tell me it’s going to be one of the worst pains I’ve ever experienced. I’ll then handle it like a champ.

I wish someone told me years ago not to avoid failure and rejection instead of teaching me that failure and rejection were somehow reflections of my own deficiencies.

In just these last few short weeks, launching Greg Takes a Risk! has been a major step for me in overcoming the past stigmas of these twin beasts. Serializing Eighty-Sixed has most definitely been a companion step.

Thank you to those of you who have left kind words of encouragement, and especially to those of you who set up paid subscriptions. It’s been enormously helpful.

Printed Endorphins

When my second nonfiction book was published back in 2013, I immediately took the first official copy I received, went on the front porch, and started searching for mistakes.

As you can imagine from what I shared above, I tend to do this to myself.

In the hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and other articles I pounded out in my twenties, I developed a bit of a neurosis that includes a fear of finding mistakes in my writing once it makes it to print.

This followed me into the Internet age where I would drop everything to fix a typo on one of my websites.

Part of Greg Takes a Risk! is defeating this dragon and instead allowing creativity to flourish more readily without fear.

Just hit publish.

After posting last Friday’s installment of Eighty-Sixed, a reader found a typo.

My first response was akin to Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars Episode III.

My next thought was:

Wait a minute. This could save me hundreds of dollars.

How so?

You can be my editor.

(Note: This is my attempt at choking failure until it coughs up the hairball of success).

So here’s a fun idea, for both you and me (that I may or may not come to regret months from now).

In last week’s post I wrote about name endorphins. It’s one thing to hear your name mentioned on a podcast or see it in an email.

But have you ever seen your name in a book?

That’s a whole other level of name endorphins.

My wife and I several years ago when we discovered our book at a Barnes and Noble in Colorado. Major name endorphins.

In the same vein as taking a risk with these weekly ponderings, and especially in sharing my novel in serialized format, I’ll go further in this new risk-taking venture and proclaim that when all the chapters have been prepared for posting, I fully intend to get Eighty-Sixed published in print and ebook (and most likely audiobook, as well).

And you can get your name included when it does.

I already played with the idea of creating an acknowledgments page to thank those of you who have signed up as paid supporters of Greg Takes a Risk! and including that in whatever final printed format Eighty-Sixed may take.

So I’ll commit to that right now.

If you’re a Founding, Annual, or Monthly Paid supporter, I’ve already added your name to my Notion database (I’ll pontificate on Notion and creativity and productivity in a future post) for inclusion in the final printed product down the road.

Furthermore, I’ve created a tag in my database for “Typo Finders” who will also get special thanks when the book reaches print.

While the chapters have been edited and re-written multiple times before posting them here, having redundant sets of eyeballs catch the little foibles that make their way through my own editorial gates is of tremendous help.

So if you find a typo after I post a new chapter of Eighty-Sixed (misplaced commas, misspelled words, duplicate words, etc.), post a comment on the specific chapter of Eighty-Sixed.

Once I fix the goof, I’ll add your name as a “Typo Finder” to be included on the acknowledgments page.

Thanks to Elizabeth who pointed out this first botched sentence that had a word I meant to delete. I already fixed the typo so you can’t see it now :)

So if you’d like the chance to get your name in a published novel someday, become a paid subscriber or find one of (what will surely be) my many, many mistakes in future chapters of Eighty-Sixed.

Now that I’ve tackled the fear of posting mistakes via this newsletter, I’ve replaced it with the new fear that I’ll accidentally leave someone’s name off the acknowledgments page months from now.

Two people who will see their names on that page in the future are Fr. Cory and Toni. They both signed up as annual paid subscribers this week. And even bigger thanks to Karen who signed up as a founding member (she gets to name one of the characters in my book). Many thanks to you the three of you!

Beach Trip and the 27 Club

Jennifer and I hit 27 years of marriage last week and celebrated with a quick getaway to the Florida panhandle.

I searched Google for “things that took 27 years” and stumbled upon something called “The 27 Club."

The 27 Club is a somewhat morbid list of well-known musicians, actors, and other celebrities who died at age 27, such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and others.

So while I went out looking for some inspiration things, I found that instead.

You’re welcome.

Our time at the beach was sadly mitigated by the daily presence of thousands of jellyfish that have swarmed the northwest coast of Florida in recent weeks. At times they were so plentiful we couldn’t even put our feet in the water for more than ten seconds without having to dodge another jelly, some of which were the size of a pizza pan.

Here’s one with my 11 ½” footprint next to it for scale:

On a more positive note, twenty-seven years of marriage has been most excellent.

I’ve never done anything in my life as consistently as I have in being married to Jennifer.

So in case she reads this:

I love you, Jennifer, and I’m so thankful to be in a much better version of the 27 Club with you.

Working on my TPS reports

As you may already know if you listen to our podcasts, my wife and I have been running a non-profit organization since 2003 and we’ve been blessed to start the right things at the right times that lead to amazing experiences and opportunities.

For example, our Rosary Army apostolate is the very first Catholic organization to ever use podcasting.

We launched our first series in March 2005, just a couple of weeks before the Vatican.

Over these last twenty years, we’ve constantly needed to repurpose spaces for recording, storage, mailing, and everything else that goes into running a non-profit.

Though we’ve only been in our current house for three and a half years, we already had to do a renovation to carve out dedicated space for more media production, and so that I can have a normal office space.

And after all this time in our house, I finally have a door.

We still have all of the details to figure out (wiring, new recording equipment, and much-needed chairs), but after a month of contractors clogging our vents with drywall dust, our upstairs loft area has now been converted into a flexible recording space.

That’s pretty exciting for us.

Final Thoughts

Sincerely - thanks for reading to the end. Did something strike you? Let me know. I’d love to hear your take. Leave a comment below.

The next chapter of Eighty-Sixed will be sent out Friday morning. I created a table of contents page if you haven’t read the first chapters yet.

Talk to you in a few days.