Sit still.
Stay quiet.
Keep your head down.
Work your 40 hours for 40 years and get a gold watch and a one way ticket to Florida.
Dream about what might have been but wasn’t.
For years, maybe decades, those were the rules.
Dreams were frivolous, gossamer that the average person didn’t have access to.
But then, the Internet happened.
When my grandfather was my age, he couldn’t build an audience easily. What would he have done? Run for local government? Try to get a radio show? Write for the city paper? He couldn’t reach a million people with a tweet. He couldn’t live broadcast from his own house with his own phone. He couldn’t sell something on Amazon.
When my grandmother was my age, she was one of the first female vice-presidents at a national bank. It was an amazing opportunity for an amazing woman, but it also had to be an isolating experience. She couldn’t start a Facebook group for women around the world who were breaking glass ceilings. She couldn’t get encouragement from other women on Twitter. She couldn’t easily connect with anyone outside of the town she lived in.
She had to live by the old rules, the old limitations and the old opportunities. But I have some good news.
The old rules don’t apply to this new world. That’s what I wrote about in my book Do Over.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because in a few weeks, I’m speaking on a cruise ship with Sandi Patty. That’s a crazy sentence.
For a week, I’ll get to hang out with hundreds of other people floating about the Caribbean. I’m also going to win the first annual Jon Acuff & Sandi Patty Table Tennis Tournament.
I don’t know who originally came up with this idea, but God bless them. (The cruise is already sold out but here’s the team I’m going with.)
How did it happen? In 2008, I started a blog.
I threw my hat in the ring.
I tried.
I did something weird.
I decided ordinary wasn’t fun anymore.
I don’t know what you’re going to do with your life, I really don’t. But know this, you have opportunities unlike any generation in the history of mankind.
You have chances no one has ever had before.
You have tools.
You have resources.
You have community.
Don’t waste your new life living by the old rules.
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