From the Bottom it Looks like a Steep Incline | From the Top, Another Downhill Slope Behind

Hey good morning friends, it's about 8 in the morning which is a good time to, sometimes in the morning I rush in and check my email and see if anything came in overnight. I rush in and check my email and then once I see that there's no emergencies or I do my very first sweep, I do my first initial processing and then that's a good time to take a break and here's your little ASMR, is that what they call it? Big sip of big fresh warm coffee with a little cream and a little sugar, well it's split up, not plain sugar but I do miss it.

I had this experience yesterday and it was a physical experience that reminded me of a literal and figurative, well it's hard to explain but let me just tell you what happened. Yesterday I was out looking for a place to film a YouTube video and there's a park in my town and in the middle of the park there's this giant hill and again I talked about this yesterday a little bit but I thought what a great spot so I climbed all the way to the top of the hill and I was up there and when I was on the way up, before I went up there I was like golly that looks like a really tall hill but the thing is you don't just run up it. When I look there's this sidewalk that zigzags left and right so of course you walk much further than you would have walked if you just charged, the charge brigade run right up it but the slope makes it easier and as you're walking, you barely realize that you're walking up and then pretty soon there you are, you're at the top of the hill.

And so what that reminded me of and it's such a silly place to get inspiration from but of course you can get inspiration from anything, I mean from Confucius to a fortune cookie to some inspirational quote that's written on your coffee mug that you look at every morning and you pick it up and you go yep, just keep swimming or whatever. But there's this band from, I'm going to say from the 90s, most people would say from the 90s, I started listening to them in the, maybe their 80s, I listened to them in the 80s, I still listen to them today and they're called Faith No More, American, I would say rock band that they're most known for but they definitely, they're very eclectic.

And their first major album, they had one of their first hit singles was this song called Fall Into Pieces and throughout the whole song there's all these extreme comparisons because he's talking about being a jigsaw puzzle, like metaphorically he says I'm falling to pieces, somebody put me back together and so there's a lot of these back and forth things. The bridge of the song says indecision clouds my vision and that's a great little takeaway but that's not what I want to talk about, there is a pair of lines or there's a short part of the song, just in the middle of this song and he says from the bottom it looks like a steep incline, from the top another downhill slope of mine but I know the equilibrium is there. By the way, for years I thought it was another downhill slope behind instead of mine and I think it works either way because the slope is behind you, you've done it, but again I want to say this again, from the bottom it looks like a steep incline, from the top another downhill slope of mine and he says but I know the equilibrium is there, that's not really the important part.

Here's the important part, is that climbing that hill yesterday, like when you're at the bottom of the hill, doesn't that seem like a giant hill? I mean you can't see the top, like from where I was I couldn't see where the benches were and stuff. But, I took this little sidewalk that zig-zagged, zig-zagged, you know, it took, you know, two minutes, three minutes, something like that to get to the top of it, five minutes. And then when you're up there, you're like, well, that went hard. And then when you're standing, you're standing on the top of the world, you're looking down, you're like, wow, I'm on the top of this thing. It doesn't, you don't even think about how you got up there, you just, you just get up there.

I mean, if you really want an example of this, when I was a kid, I remember the, there's the stop motion, is it record bass, Christmas thing, you know, with Kris Kringle and, and, you know, he's becoming Santa Claus and he's like, well, how am I going to get to every house? I can't even get out the door, you know, and so there's this whole song, put one foot in front of the other, and then pretty soon you're walking out the door. That's the whole thing, right? So that's the thing is, if you're walking somewhere, like you go, you go, you know, I got to go check the mail. And then literally it's just one step at a time, step, step, step, step, you know, everybody can take a step and then another step and another step and you put all those steps together and now you've walked wherever you're going, you know?

And this particular song, Back to the Faith No More song, I remember it really resonated with me a few years ago when I went back to college. I went back to college, after a 20-year break, I, on a whim, went and signed up for a master's program for a degree in a master's, a professional, a master's of professional writing degree. With no previous background as far as college, I mean, I had, I had originally gone to school for journalism in, starting in 1991. So I had two years of journalism classes from 91 to 93 and I went and signed up for a master's program of professional writing in 2017.

And I had to, you know, submit my resume and, you know, and I said, hey, I've written for these magazines, I've written for this newspaper, I've written, you know, I've written all this stuff, I wrote a, self-published a couple of books and I got accepted into the program. And I thought, what am I doing, you know? And I was ready to sign up, and by the way, this was a full-time, I mean, I was going to sign up, and I did, to be a full-time master's, be full-time in a master's program. If you look that up, people say, yeah, you shouldn't, you shouldn't do anything else in your life. That should be your focus if you're doing this master's program. And I was working full-time and was married with two kids, and I was going to a college that was basically an hour's drive away from my house. So throw all that in together. It was a huge, huge challenge to attack.

I often say that I think, in an adult, it's probably the most difficult thing I've done and probably the proudest achievement, when it took me two and a half years, it's a master's, at a minimum you could do a master's program in about two years, but it took me two and a half, one extra semester, but I walked across the stage and I got this diploma, a master's degree. I never thought, as a kid, I never thought I would be able to achieve that, you know? And literally, I remember driving to school one day and hearing this song, and just having this moment where, when you sign up and you're like, how can I do this degree, it's overwhelming, you know? How am I going to fit this into my schedule? How am I going to do all this work? How am I going to do all this stuff? And literally, from the bottom, it looked like a steep incline. Like I thought, I'm never going to be able to do all this.

And then you just chop away from it, right? Put one foot in front of the other. You do one assignment, you read one book, you read one thing. You just work it, work it, work it. And when I was walking across that stage and walked past, and don't get me wrong, people would be like, they would be like, well, does it seem easy now? I said, no, it seems like the hardest thing I've done as an adult. It was really, really hard. It was a lot of work. But when I walked across that stage, I was like, man, where did the time go? Where did it happen? You can't finish something until you start it, you know? And when you start it, you just chip away at it. Chip away at those little bite-sized pieces. You take one step at a time. You work your way back and forth up that mountain, and pretty soon, you're just at the top of that hill. You're done. And when you look back, you're like, yeah, here I am. I got all the way up.

So I guess that's my point today. I have a book that I started six, seven, eight months ago. It's a book about podcasting as a side hustle.