In her awesome talk on Oprah’s Super Soul podcast, bestselling author Cheryl Strayed shares about how her goal to write the Great American Novel, though it had propelled her in crucial ways for a long time, eventually became the very thing that blocked her from writing at all. About this conundrum, and her solution to it, she says…
“You have to ask yourself not who you aspire to be, but to reckon with who you actually turn out to be, who you actually are. And what I realized, what humility taught me, is that I couldn’t any longer adhere to the narratives that had gotten me this far. I had to relinquish all of those anthems of greatness and dreaming big and aiming high. All of those beautiful, powerful, important things that had really gotten me there. They weren’t serving me anymore, and so I had to come up with something that would.
That truth that rose up at my humblest, lowest moment was basically that I had to write a book. And that was it. It was, ‘Forget the greatness, forget if anyone would even read it.’ I had to write a book. And I had to surrender to the idea of my own mediocrity. I had to really just go, ‘Hello mediocre person who is just sitting alone in a cottage writing a book, nice to know you. I’ve spent 33 years in your company and we’re going to now get to work…’
So I decided to write the only book I could possibly write, and whether that was a good book or a bad book it’s about saying, ‘I’m no longer going to say I’m something and be another.’ Right? It’s also saying, ‘What are those goals I set way too high to reach?’ Those goals don’ serve you. Make your goals down here so you can grab them when you need them, right?
If I printed a bumper sticker, it would say, ‘Surrender to your own mediocrity…’ Part of being evolved is having the capacity to hold two opposing truths in one hand and recognizing the truth of each and understanding how they serve each other. When you surrender to your own mediocrity, what you’re doing is humbly acknowledging that the very, very best thing that you have to give us is only what YOU have to offer. It’s what you already have, it’s what you already hold. It’s about learning how to put it out into the world in a way that you absolutely are the most original master of that endeavor. It’s about not paying attention to anyone else’s script of success or goodness, it’s about singing with your own voice. And the word for that is greatness.”
