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Weird Kid

Howdy and welcome to chapter two of how to effect perfection and in the book, chapter two is titled Fear. But I have gained so many insights and learned so much since I wrote this book that I want to talk to you about an idea that I feel is much more pressing and it is called Weird kid. Okay. Um no great story ever began with the line. I played it safe and did what was expected of me, right? We want more, moving more powerful line and the best line I know to begin any story is when I was a kid, I recently witnessed a, a woman accepting her Oscar on stage and she said when I was a kid, I had an acting coach tell me I'd never make it. She said, I just kept going and I kept showing up and here I am. Right, that's a great story. That's the one we want to hear. Listen the things that made you weird as a kid, your grit, your goofiness, your storytelling, your loudness make you great today. Super important to understand that. Okay, um, weird, weird, weird Weird is a relative word, right? Mm S...

omething smells weird. It's like, we don't know what it is, right? It's the unknown. Um, weird has become a catch all phrase pertaining to anything that lies outside of our expected perceptions, Weird is literally the unknown. Okay, um, we go, ooh, that's that's, that's weird. I don't know about it. Write anything that we, anything that we're not familiar with. Um it's outside of the norm, but here now for you and because of because of the idea that the things that made you wear as a kid make you great today. Right? If you can, if you can believe that if you can hold on to that for a second, um, that is your personal authority. That is your power source. That's where you come from. It is something to be expressed and explored and tapped into and put into your work and put into your life, not something to be, to be. Um, it's not a target, right? It's not something to be, to be stowed away or to be hidden. You know, we have to, we have to strengthen that through practice and through use. It's your innate creativity. It's your true voice. It's your authentic power source, your weirdness but only and this is big, but only if you can accept that and practices weird is an acknowledgment that you have a choice in your path. A choice in controlling your destiny. You get to decide whether your weirdness is a gift or a curse. Okay, my beautiful son Wyatt and here he is in the book, right? I talk about him in the book, why it was born with something called hemi facial micro so mia, it's a condition which um, structurally this side of his skeleton in his, his, his or uh skull and its jaw is different than this side. And for him it just makes him really cute. But he's six between seven and 10 is when kids start noticing things about each other. Hey, you're different. Hey, why are you this thing and why it is going to have to choose. He's going to have to choose whether his asymmetry is a gift or a curse. And I as a conscious aware parent, I also have to teach him something from this book that he has a voice. He has something to say. You also, you also have the power to deliberately choose your response to any situation. Your response to any situation from your own inner authority and not an external source. Your parents, family, culture, society or, or, or some habitual pattern. Right? This is a practice and self love. It's a practice in autonomy and owning who you are creating and building on your weirdness. It is of embracing the weird bits in your life and recognizing them as a boom to you on your, the epic adventure of your life following that beautiful North star, to that, to that creative life that you have dreamt of and your weirdness and owning that is the way we can all look back on the um, are weirdness as a kid, right? The interests, the quirks, the obsessions that made us who we are. My owners like rubber tires, anything that races, anything that rolls um, nature. Um, uh, girls quite frankly women and women's parts. Um, and drawing on everything, including things that race and women's parts. Um, or it might just be the trauma that you've experienced, right? I have a coaching client and a beautiful young woman, supremely talented whose mother just snaps at her everybody spot along the way and that's her weirdness and that's something that she's going to have to get over. She is literally the beautiful flower growing out of the sidewalk. Here's the story, here's a story from my childhood. So my very first memory, my very first visual memory is of a pool of melted crayons on a hot concrete patio. Right? It must have been when I was um, probably five because we live in Albuquerque New Mexico and I brought that up with my mother not too long ago and I said, hey, this is the first thing I remember. This is my first visual memory and she said, oh, I remember that too, which is interesting and very telling, but I didn't ask my mother how she remembered it because I think what happened was this, who's gonna clean that up. We don't own this house, that kind of thing. Right? So this beautiful visual memory that my work is constantly trying to aspire to. How about that. Right? I'm constantly trying to get back to that. But I think there's the added extra part that there was something, there was some emotional trauma at the time because of my mother's reaction and me thinking at that time going, this is dangerous. I like it true story in order to fully understand weird, we have to understand its counterpart. Right? We have to be curious about the other side. On the other side is normal. Right? I wrote something for the follow up to affect perfection. The follow up the next book. Um, and it is called What is Normal. So let me read it for you here. Okay, let's keep this simple. If we're does anything unfamiliar and unknown, then normal is anything generally accepted by society. Society itself is a collective agreement as to roles, rules, customs and expectations of what is considered right and wrong. No one questions that these rules were quite frankly just made up by our ancestors. So we accept the inherited social system placed upon us rather than a life imagined and created by ourselves by that definition to be normal means to unconsciously follow what others say is acceptable for you following external extractions and not listening to your own personal guidance system is normal. Sad, straightforward and normal for many of us. The problem is that there are no precedents for weirdness in our lives. You know, the, the town I grew up in, there were no artists, There were some little old ladies who painted water colors. Right? But that wasn't what I was interested in. So we have to uh, we have to go make it up, we have to go find it elsewhere. Right? Um, on top of that, we're told by a society that are weirdness. Our creativity quite frankly, um, is an unfortunate part of us, creative but worthless for many of us. The problem is that there is no precedent for our weirdness in our family, right? Or or in our universe, like the town that I grew up in, there were no artists, there were no wildly creative beings. Um, there were some old ladies who made water colors, but that kind of wasn't my gig, right. Um, on top of that, we're told by society that um, weird is an unfortunate part of us, creative but worthless. And this limits what we believe is possible and therefore what we are capable of, right? We can never see new from under the cloak of old. Here's a beautiful idea from the book. It's called you the reluctant hero and I've got news for you. You are already a hero. You just don't know it yet and you're reluctant, you don't want to accept again except that role. If you can tell your story, you're a hero, you know, your struggle with your weight. Um, I have so many so many young proteges who talk about their their career and how difficult it is to in in what they're trying to build. And I'm like, tell your story, tell your story. Talk about your fears. Talk about your love's celebrate everything. Tell your story because if you can tell your story and you're a hero for all the people who can't even get to where you are, You're the reluctant hero tell your story. Put your weirdness into everything that you do celebrate everything. Here's another big idea. It's called in the particular Lies the Universal means means everything that James victoria loves and fears is everything that you love and you fear, right. This is important. This should bring comfort. And I know this as a fact because I've read it in so many different pieces of literature throughout the ages that in that particular lies the Universal is true because we are all made out of the same stardust, right? That's why we can read about the lives of anne frank or victor frankel or or or Marcus Aurelius and we can see ourselves in them because we are them, we are them were in the same struggle are things that we love and the things that we fear are the things that they loved. The things that they fear and we just have to be able to put them in our lives. Put that into our work. Except except that weirdness, the Wizard of Oz is a powerful story for so many people because we all want to go home. We all want to get back and recapture our weirdness. So my advice to you dear Dorothy surrender, surrender Dorothy, let go accept who you are, accept who you are. Tell your story, Put your weaknesses and your strength into your work, Right? You're the reluctant hero, a weird, reluctant hero. Thank you Chapter two of how to affect perfection. The weird kid. So one of the seminal ideas Infect perfection is this idea of the things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. And I loved this page and the way it's set it up so much that I had made it into different formats into, into larger, into larger posters. Um, and this thing has taken on kind of a life for, for itself and actually become the, the originator of an entire new book after this, based on this, uh, tentatively called a weirdo. Um, that will be coming out soon, I hope. Um, there's another piece of art that I want to talk about here from, from, from, from the book and it's this one here, which is under the title of, there ain't no rules, right? Um, and what I did here is basically made a little, a little sheet of the rules and here it says, uh, number one, never worked for assholes. Number two fire bad clients. # three, No Smoking. Number four, go for long walks and then number five treat others as you would like to be treated. And at the end I decided to switch number one and number five. So we just crossed him out and change them. Um, there aren't any rules. There aren't any rules where the makers of manners, right? We make up our own rules, especially creatively our own rules, our own boundaries, how we want to play, you know, um um if you do follow the rules, it leads down a very narrow sphincter another piece from the book that I want to share with you. Is this watch that I designed for a company? Um This one is under the title of work is serious play. So this is the actual, this is the actual watch that I designed. Um and it's instead of using hands, we decided to use women's legs. Like I said, um nature is a metaphor that I like the female sex is a metaphor that I like playing with legs and arms and hair. I am the idea to design a watch that you kind of can't really tell time with was interesting to me. Um but I was given a format that I've never worked in before. I was given an opportunity by a, by a a risky client, right? And japanese watch manufacturer and they said, James make us something fantastic. So I decided to make something that I had always thought would be a funny idea was just to watch, it doesn't have hands, it has legs. Um um like I said, it's not important to me that you can tell time with it, you know, I don't think anybody went and said, I need an exquisite time telling piece that's gonna, and then came home with this right watch with legs on it. Um um, but I take every opportunity as an opportunity to make something fantastic and something fun and make myself happy and in turn what happens is I make other people happy. So the funny thing is the watch sold out Really quickly. I'm lucky to have at least one copy of my own. So those are some of the pieces from the book and um, some of the pieces from chapter two Weird Kid. Thank you. Yeah. Mm hmm.