When you attempt to serve God in ways you’re not shaped to serve, it feels like forcing a square peg into a round hole. It’s frustrating and produces limited results. It also wastes your time, your talent, and your energy.
Truth is truth, and you know it when you hear it. Take the notion of God out of the statement above, if you prefer: spending your days doing things that you’re not good at, don’t like doing, feel insignificant, and/or clash with your personality sucks. It is misery-inducing and produces a negative attitude in you that makes you toxic to yourself and others. How could you produce anything but limited results, whatever your measuring stick?
In day 32, Warren tells us to “discover your shape, learn to accept and enjoy it, and then develop it to its fullest potential.” He advises the best way to do this is to just try different things until you figure out what works – what you’re good at and what makes you happy. If you’re good at it and it brings you, and others, joy to do it, then you’ve discovered a calling.
This makes sense – who doesn’t want to spend their days doing what they’re good at and being joyful? And yet, as I observed in my last post, many of us turn away from what we’re good at and what brings us joy, or we never take up the search for these things in the first place. Why? What holds us back?
In day 30, I wrote about my own fear of not being good enough as something that has held me back in the past. Warren addresses this directly, advising us not to compare ourselves to others: “You will always be able to find someone who seems to be doing a better job than you and you will become discouraged.” Rather, we’re encouraged to take heart in knowing that God made us exactly the way we are to serve Him, so that comparisons are not only pointless (God made us different, and he did so on purpose) but illusory – faulty human judgment of the perfectly Divine.
Warren also warns us that those “who do not understand your shape for ministry will criticize you and try to get you to conform to what they think you should be doing. Ignore them.” Note that while we usually associate the term “ministry” with specifically religious activity, such as preaching and proselytizing, Warren uses the word to mean anything you do – dance, sing, write, write code, write music, play music, build robots, develop drugs, teach, coach, counsel – anything at all. I’ve written before, as well, about how deeply fearful I am of criticism and how much of my energy has been spent trying to evade or undo others’ criticism of me.
He draws on various stories and quotes to reinforce both these points about comparing and criticizing:
In all this comparing and grading and competing, they quite miss the point.
-Quoting 2 Corinthians
If my life is fruitless, it doesn’t matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn’t matter who criticizes me.
-Quoting John Bunyan
The salient point I see in Warren’s words and selected quotes on comparing and criticizing is staunch personal conviction in one’s purpose and works. Their conviction cannot be shaken by comparisons and criticisms because they know those judgments – whether they originate externally or within their own minds* – have no merit and no bearing on them. Comparisons and criticisms simply don’t matter.
This – conviction, belief in one’s works, invulnerability to what others think, confidence – wins every day of the week (regardless whether it is justified by real capability, competence or knowledge). There are healthy and unhealthy, productive and unproductive ways to express one’s confidence, but the old adage is nevertheless true that you have to believe in yourself before others will believe in you. Warren and those from who he draws his examples have this in spades.
And where does this unshakable personal conviction come from?
From their belief in God. Which perhaps makes “personal conviction” an inaccurate description of what they display – maybe a better term is “divine conviction.” In the case of Warren, the apostle Paul, and Warren’s other examples, they are invulnerable to human criticism because they believe their works are serving a higher purpose. They measure their success by the fruits of their works, not by the criticism or praise of others. Now I understand why so many of the early chapters of this book were devoted to emphasizing faith in the idea that we were created by God on purpose to serve Him – because this belief is what Warren’s conviction in his own purpose and works rests on.
Whether you share his religious beliefs or not, you have to be impressed by the strength of Warren’s conviction, his personal invulnerability to criticism by others. I am, at any rate. I’m always impressed by people who exhibit such unshakable strength and confidence in their path because I simply don’t have that. I never have. I am the proverbial dinghy, aimlessly listing about at sea, tossed hither and thither by every wave.
If believing that you were created by God to serve a higher purpose gives you the conviction to do what you’re good at and what brings you joy regardless what others think of you, then good for you. I envy you. Of course, I also know atheists who pursue what they’re good at and what brings them joy with equal strength and confidence and zero fucks given about what the haters think. I love these people.
Belief in God and in serving a higher power can provide one with the same conviction demonstrated by Warren and others of his ilk, but it is by no means a prerequisite. Regardless your personal religious beliefs, Warren’s advice for developing that conviction is sound:
- Discover what you’re good at by trying out lots of different things
- Do the things you’re good at and that bring joy to you (and to others)
- Don’t compare yourself to others
- Ignore the criticism of others
Again, nothing too groundbreaking in this advice. It’s all stuff I’m sure I’ve heard time and again in my life…and yet never really heard at all. Old truths breathe new life into us when we become receptive to knowing them.
*I would add a side note that many spiritual traditions do not distinguish between what originates externally and what originates internally – it all originates internally, and anything we see as external is something we first created in our own mind and then projected onto the world. In this particular case, if we perceive criticism or judgment from someone else, it is because we first criticized or judged ourselves, then projected our own criticism and judgment onto the world, which reflects it back to us. If that concept is too abstract to be palatable, it can effectively be reduced to the idea that the criticisms and judgments of others only have power over us if we believe them to be true ourselves – we become immune to the criticism of others immediately and only when we have become immune to our own self-criticism.
TL;DR: No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.
