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words I’d memorized.
    And the sad thing is, they were right.
    At the time, I was practicing my speeches eight to ten times per gig. I’d stand in my office, face out the window toward the Cracker Barrel next door, and do a full dry run of each speech. Over and over I would practice until I knew every line of my forty-five-minute speech.
    I’d do all the hand motions, time myself, and even give pauses for the invisible crowd to laugh in my office. (Invisible people think I’m hilarious!)
    I practiced this way because I didn’t want to feel out of control onstage. I was so worried about making a mistake that I tightly clutched my hands around my speech. I had it perfectly manicured so I could control every second. No surprises.
    Lanny picked up on that and gave me some advice: “Jon, your speeches are so over-structured that you’re not leaving any space in them for something new to happen in the moment. That’s the best part of a speech, when something brand new appears. When there’s a surprise that both the audience and the speaker get to share. That’s what connects an audience with a speaker, the feeling that you’re going on a journey together, creating something together, and neither one of you knows exactly where it’s going to go, but you’ll end up there together.”
    Giving a speech that way takes a courage I didn’t have at the time, and so does taking your first step on the road to awesome.
    Average is so popular because average is familiar. We all know how to do average. Ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet do average. The road is well worn, the decisions are obvious, and the next steps are crystal clear.
    Awesome? It’s a little dangerous. There may be dragons in those woods (spoiler alert: there are). There are foggy mornings and cloudy nights. Sometimes you’re not completely sure about your next step until you take it.
    Average is predictable. Awesome is adventurous. So when faced with the decision to be awesome or stay average, most of us opt for the familiar, for the comfortable. Oh, we like the idea of an awesome adventure, but most of us default to trying to manicure the road to awesome so it’s as safe and predictable as the road to average.
    We want to plan the road to awesome. We want to talk about our ten-year visions. We want to detail every step before we take a single one. To make sure there’s no room for mistakes or failure. But when we do that, when we squeeze our lives and purposes that tightly, we eliminate any room for surprises.
    We don’t have time for them. They don’t fit within our plan. They don’t have any runway in our day to land on. We scowl when people interrupt what we’re doing at work, grumble when neighbors want to talk at the mailbox, and curse momentary distractions to a day we’ve planned.
    The road to awesome, though, is defined by the surprises. It’s not a block in a downtown city laid out long ago by methodical city planners. It’s a rambling dirt road with twists and turns that offers something new at every corner. Let’s leave room on our maps for some surprises.
    This idea cost me $2,310—please read it carefully
    If taking the first step on the road to awesome were easy, then everybody would already be on it. The road to average would be empty, with just average-sized tumbleweeds blowing along at average speeds on average-temperature days.
    The first step isn’t easy, though, and one of the hard things is that you have to get comfortable with tension. You have to step into tension. You have to be:
    a realist and a dreamer
    practical and impractical
    logical and illogical
    You have to be brutally realistic about your present circumstances and wildly unrealistic about your future circumstances.
    If you don’t embrace this tension, if you don’t accept it and make it work to your favor, you’ll end up stealing money from your grandmother’s church.
    That’s what happened to me.
    Six years ago, I was feeling restless at my job.