The Outline

Below is the outline of my book. My goal is to have the rough draft written in 30 days. I will write each morning in my blog. I will email the chapters (or at least the rough versions of what I have written) out to you each morning.

I am writing my book in plain view. Feel free to share it or pass it on.

This needs to happen. I must get these ideas out of my head and onto paper. If I don’t do it, I’ll never forgive myself.

P.S. - I have spent the last two hours on this and I have no spell checked it. But wow, I finally have my book.

Here we go.

Title: Hit Publish

My story: I have written this story many times. My youth brought me to a place of complete and quiet desperation. My drug use, my troubles, my cutting. It was terrible. Where did it come from? More importantly, how many of you reading this have the same problems I did?

• Feeling stuck inside your body

• Trapped inside your mind

I got to Florida. In the heroes journey, this was “crossing the chasm.”

While in Florida, I learned about why I had felt the way I did. I learned that my spirit was sick and that I had been harboring resentments my entire life. I learned that fundamentally, I didn’t have a higher power or something bigger than me that I could lean on.

Why do any of us do the things we do? Why do we eat junk food? or sit on the couch? or yell at the TV? or spend or lives in anger or rage or sadness?

At the core of our problems is the false belief that we are in control.

You are not in control. You never were, and you never will be.

A day came where I listened to an interview of a guy named Seth Godin. I had never heard of Seth Godin before. He was talking about his book, “Purple Cow.” At the end of the interview, they moderator had asked him to give advice for someone just starting out.

I was enthralled. I was fascinated with what this guy was telling me. I needed to know his secret.

He said “start a blog, don’t tell anybody about it, and write in it every day.”

So that’s what I did. It completely changed my life.

Part One: The Lizard King

Everyone wants to be creative. Everyone has something to share or something to give to the world. Then why don’t you?

• The lizard king is what I call the amygdala

  • It’s a tiny prehistoric part of your brain that cares only about staying alive.

  • It protects you from danger.

  • It’s irrational.

  • It’s powerful.

• The lizard king is the voice inside of you telling you not to speak up, not to be the best version of yourself.

• We are not designed to live in todays world. Our brains have evolved for the African plains of 250,000 years ago.

  • Speaking out gets you kicked out of the tribe.

  • Speaking out could offend the chief.

  • Being isolated is to be vulnerable. Being vulnerable (or along in the wilderness) is death.

  • Not just death, but starving to death. The most painful and horrible death there is.

• We don’t speak up, we don’t HIT PUBLISH because the most powerful and prehistoric mechanisms in your brain are telling you not to.

• We must appreciate the power of this. The fear you feel isn’t that your weak, it’s that there’s 250,000 years of evolution that has prewired you for survival.

• The Lizard King doesn’t care that you succeed, only that you stay alive.

Part Two: Creativity

Why do we have a compulsion to create?

Creativity is left over. Our ability to problem solve comes with a unintended biproduct of creating narratives. We perceive life in stories. Everything is a story.

When we hear a rustling in the bushes, we imagine a story.

The Lizard King has tried to establish a survival mechanism and an unintended consequence was our obsession with creating a narrative and a story around everything.

So the question isn’t, “why do we create?” But rather the questions is “how do we create?”

This part will emphasize the point that you are human. You have this compulsion, whether you admit it or not. It may look different for everyone. Some people write, some people dance, some people do spreadsheets, some people lift or run and jump off cliffs. But everyone needs to express themselves.

And that’s the point.

• Your art is the way you serve the world.

• Art is the practice of figuring out who you are

  • It’s an experiment.

  • It’s how you treat others.

  • It’s how you treat yourself.

  • Art is the manifestation of self discovery

• All money is made through creative work

  • Creative work means bringing forth that which does not exist.

  • If you want to get rich, you need to create art.

• Art is expressing yourself.

  • This is why it’s so powerful, because we see ourselves in other people’s art.

  • A great example is this picture. For most people, they have no idea what it’s like to be a Muay Thai fighter. But when we see something that captivates us, we must look at it.

  • 

  • Another example is this music video. Why is this so captivating?

  • The reason is because we can see when people are creating art as a way to figure out who they are. We are captivated by it because we all long for it.

• This is what it means to be human. This is the human condition. Who are we? More importantly, who is it that we could become?

Part Three: Connection

Survival is not enough. We must be connected.

In fact, we all already are connected. We always have been.

When we HIT PUBLISH, what we are really doing is searching for connection. The very act of sharing your self with the world is within itself, a manifestation of connection.

We need this. We need it perhaps more than anything else. This is what The Lizard King will never understand. This is why you MUST hit publish. It’s not optional. Without it, you will not be a person, you will simply be an organism.

• My story of discovering connection.

• We don’t want to be happy, we want to be connected.

• We’re all crammed inside this metal and glass.

  • We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.

• The reason why social media creates loneliness

  • Loneliness is consuming. Connection is creating.

  • Connection is interacting.

• Creating is creativity. but HITTING PUBLISH is connection.

• It doesn’t count unless you publish it. It only counts if you expose yourself in rebellion against The Lizard King.

  • Publish is simply to share it with the world.

  • If you’re a weight lifter, than sharing your knowledge with others is HITTING PUBLISH.

• Some of my best friends are online.

• How P!nk helped me get sober.

Part Four: Control

Mastery of yourself is understanding and accepting what you can’t control.

This is higher power. This is life. This is what keeps us up at night. This is being human. All life is a battle of control. Most of you are unhappy because you try to control things that you can’t.

So you make up stories. The Lizard King convinces you that you have control. It tells you that if you keep quiet. He tells you that life is about pleasure. That hardship and pain is to be avoided. He tells you that you aren’t good enough, and that you should hide in the corner.

He tells you to be skinnier, or smarter, or prettier, or better.

He tells you that you aren’t good enough.

Ironically, the answer to this riddle is to let go of control.

All you can control, and all you ever will be able to control, is your actions. You can control your output, you can control what you publish.

HITTING PUBLISH IS THE ANTIDOTE TO SUFFERING.

• How liberating is it to know that you have no control

• Life is a river.

  • No matter how hard you struggle, you will always end up at the end. So there’s no point in swimming upstream.

• The difference between output and outcome.

• Have an aim.

• The illusion of control is the reasoning behind all your suffering.

• Discipline = Freedom

  • You can better focus on yourself when your outside items are put in order.

• Detachment from the outcome

  • The outcome isn’t actually real. It’s simply a label. It’s a convenient way to compartmentalize our wort

• Be an anti guru

  • Gurus who people who pretend to know what they’re doing. But no one knows anything.

Part 5: Freedom from Concern

What concerns you? : Fear.

When you are sharing yourself with the world, you have absolutely nothing to worry about, because you have done all there is to do. Anything else is The Lizard King, trying to trick you into thinking you know better than the spirit of the universe.

HITTING PUBLISH is the method to acceptance. Acceptance is the answer. Acceptance is enlightenment. Acceptance is a behavior.

You know those people you aspire to? What do they have that you want?

It’s simply. They have acceptance. They are free from concern because they know they have done all they can and have liberated themselves from the burden of the outcome.

• Jim Carrey

• Publishing every day in winning the daily war of art

• Your financial fears will melt away, because money flows to value

  • Serendipity

  • Hitting publish every day is how I met,

    • Jonny Nastor

    • Amanda

    • Ethan

    • Rebecca Matter

    • Brian Clark

    • Gonz

    • Azul

  • Good things happen to those who “put themselves out there.”

  • In 2022, the winners are the one’s who are willing to be vulnerable. Perhaps this has always been the case.

• Publishing every day is a daily reprieve from the grips of The Lizard King

• Your work matters