Someday Is Today

The hardest thing is that with every passing day, I drift further and further from my dream. I’m actually a very good bank teller — already promoted to a customer service representative — and an outstanding restaurant manager, but I don’t want to be either of these things.

Rather than asking what someone does for a living, ask them this: “How did you end up in your current profession?” and “What was the hardest thing that you recently faced professionally?” Make these the questions you ask everyone you meet.

Believe that everything will work out, then go and work it out.

Even if a pessimist is proved correct in their doomsday prediction, the only advantage they will possess is the smug self-satisfaction that comes with being correct. But being smug and correct about negative outcomes is the goal of soulless ghouls, chronic complainers, jealous siblings, bullies, frenemies, and other varieties of awful people.

Sometimes your misfortune can lead to your success, as it did for Kahlo in the form of a near-fatal bus accident. When the world handed her lemons, she made legendary lemonade.

Zumba inventor Alberto “Beto” Pérez was a struggling fitness instructor and dancer who forgot to bring his regular music to an aerobics class one day. He happened to have cassette tapes of Latin dance music — salsa and merengue — and taught his class using them instead. In the improvised dance steps of that aerobics class, Zumba was born.

“The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Make terrible things.

When you’re a chicken, your world is expansive. Your influences are broad. Your passions are many. That is how I have managed to write a blog post every day of my life for almost two decades.

Not everything I write is profound or transformational. But the truth is that I’m a chicken. Rather than single-mindedly focusing on one subject, I am enormously interested in an enormous number of things. Like the number of projects I am working on, I am also constantly expanding my horizons in terms of subject matter, always looking for the next