Free B00CHVIVMY EBOK by Jon Acuff

truth, like I did with the ones that told me I was too late and already behind. That’s step one.
    2. Sharing our voices.
    Do you know what fear and doubt fear? Community. One of fear and doubt’s chief aims is to make you feel alone. Like you’re the only one who feels a certain way. Fear wants to isolate you and put you on an island. As long as you keep your fear to yourself, no one can tell you the truth about it.
    No one can reflect back to you that you are lying to you. No one can admit they feel the same way too. No one can help you see what is really going on. No one can encourage you.
    So if you’re going to tell your voices, “Kick rocks, punk,” you’ve got to share them with other people.
    Now, this is clearly a pretty easy thing to do. You’re going to want to roll up to Starbucks, order a skinny extra hot Venti Vanilla Latte, and when the barista asks, “Do you want your receipt?” say, “No, I don’t need my receipt. What I need is to stop listening to these voices in my head that tell me there are already too many professional photographers in the world. Am I right? Do you hear voices too? No? Okay, I’ll just pay for my coffee and this Jason Mraz World Music CD bundle then. Thanks.”
    It’s not easy to find folks to share your voices with. At the conferences I throw, we do that as an exercise. We do a whole session on it, and the tenor of the room changes as people start to realize they’re not alone and that everyone has the same doubts and fear.
    You’ve got to tell your close friends or family or a counselor about your voices. The exact person will be different for everyone who reads this book, but never waste time trying to battle a voice alone. In some cases that voice of fear and doubt will have had a ten-year head start on you. Don’t go it alone.
    Final thoughts on fear
    At its worst, the forest of voices is an insatiable black hole, gobbling up our time, our energy, and our hope.
    At its best, it is a compass. As Steven Pressfield says, it can “point to true North . . . that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.” 8
    Start. And as you pass through the wall of purpose, kick over the ladder of entitlement, and fight back against the voices of fear and doubt, the map to awesome will become a little clearer. The next steps will not be easy, but they will become increasingly rewarding as you stay the course.

4: Learning 
    4
    Learning
    Save for the cost of this book (which I hope was paid for in full and then promptly reviewed on Amazon), the road to awesome will not cost you any money. Whether you have a nickel to your name or a billion-dollar empire, you can walk this road.
    But the road is not free. It actually costs you a different currency—in fact, the most expensive currency there is: time.
    Every land you walk through, from Learning to Guiding, will require deposits of your time. But instead of waiting for more time to magically appear in your day, you’re going to launch a rescue mission of your current days. That starts right now.
    All we need is Thirty
    Recognizing that time was a fuel that moved me down the road, I immediately tried to go from zero to 1,000 mph overnight. That’s not really surprising. Remember the all-or-nothing voice? The one that tells you “Don’t do it” or “Do it all perfectly”? That one gets loud again when you start to be deliberate about how you spend your time.
    The second you think seriously about finding more time in your day or week to work on being more awesome more often, fear will tell you to make sure every second of your day is perfectly mapped out. It will try to get you to pick up a complicated time-management system or, in my case, a sword.
    SWORD stood for:
    Serve
    Worship
    Order
    Rest
    Dance
    I decided that every day, all day, I would be making sure my activities fell into one of those five categories. If I was at work, that counted as serving time. Write it down. If I was sleeping, look at all the rest