by Pat Flynn
More personal, however, was the sense of perspective this experience had given me. Who was I to worry about missing a book deadline (God forbid) while this family and their boy were grappling with arguably the most impossible struggle of all? Immediately my ego was vanquished, my petty problems dissolved, and I began to pray. I walked out of church a delivered man and resolved to remain a delivered man for at least the next several hours. But at that moment I became solidly convinced of one thing: God answers our prayers. He might not always give us what we ask for, but if we’re receptive to subtle—or in some cases, not so subtle—hints, we’ll find he is always willing to give us what we need, and then some.
OK, great—how does all this play into becoming better at (almost) everything? I’ll tell you. Faith is the ultimate—and perhaps only—way of orienting yourself toward happiness. It’s what drives your efforts and goals in a direction that actually will fulfill you and actually could make a difference in the world. Look, I’m a believer in capitalism (if that hasn’t already come across), but if it’s being conducted by people of good conscience, all the better. Because then we wouldn’t need the stupid government to keep interfering with things, which almost always has the effect of making the problem worse than it was to begin with. What’s that Harry Browne quote, the one about government being the only entity that could ever make you feel grateful for handing you a crutch after breaking your leg? I like Harry Browne. He knew things.
Just imagine if all people were rooted in a sense of higher purpose. We probably wouldn’t have much, if any, need for the EPA or the IRS or international trade agreements. People would stop doing things just because they were profitable and start doing things more because they were good. Obviously, I’m fantasizing. Utopia is not of this world. People would still have to do hard and dirty jobs to pay their bills, and people are by no means angels. But you can’t tell me things wouldn’t at least significantly improve if everybody were rooted in a sense of something greater—something beyond themselves. Now, I’m not saying without faith you can’t be a good or moral person—I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying if your worldview is one of ultimate meaninglessness, then you don’t have much of a reason to be. That’s what Nietzsche taught me. I like Nietzsche. He also knew things, at least some things. I think he was wrong on that most fundamental premise of reality, but darn if he wasn’t consistent all the way to his conclusion.
That’s one big reason we need to practice—and notice I didn’t say “have”—faith. Not the I-go-to-church-on-Sundays or I-read-a-spiritual-book-once kind of faith, but a deep, abiding love of humanity and God. Faith is the orienting mechanism, as I said. It’s what can drive you and give you a why so enormous and unshakable and profound. You’re not working out just because you want a set of abs or learning guitar just so you can get with groupies. No. You’re doing things for reasons so much more meaningful than that. You’re building a skill stack so you can change the world—maybe even save it—and serve some greater purpose in life. Having a why—having faith—is what will keep your butt in the chair or get your butt to the gym. You’ve got to offer it up.
Now, take it a step further. Faith compels not only trust but virtue. In other words, it’s not just about what you believe but also about the kind of person you become because of that belief. This again is very Aristotelian (Aristotle argued that the point of knowing and making and doing good things was, at least in part, to build positive character traits). You do good things because doing is becoming.
Therefore, morality is about not only the acts you perform but the sort of person you’re shaped into because of them. Here again is where faith can either help or hurt, depending on how well you understand it. You want to do the right things, but you also want to do them for the right reasons. Because good acts without good intentions don’t make a better person, do they? You’ve gotta want to do the thing you know you’re supposed to, if you get what I mean. For me, that was always the hardest part. I was charitable before I had faith; I just didn’t particularly want to be. Mostly my generosity was driven by my desire to buy myself a good night’s sleep. Now it’s driven by love . . . mostly. I had to work at that and am still doing so. It’s part of my spiritual practice.
We can argue that, at the end of your life, faith is the only skill that’s going to matter. Ninja skills, writing skills, your abilities as a salesperson—none of that is coming with you—and neither is your Beanie Baby collection, your bank account, or that Cayman GT4. What you will be remembered for is the person you were and how you affected others. This point was made painfully obvious to me when my grandfather passed. He was a man I never considered to be the epitome of success, when I was growing up. He had a lower-middle-class job and lived in an upper-lower-class neighborhood. He never seemed to aspire to anything. But that’s only because I had the wrong view of aspiration. My grandfather aspired to everything, because he aspired to love people and be a man of faith. And he accomplished both. He was the one who always held me on his shoulder as a crying babe, came to all my sporting events (however insignificant), volunteered constantly at charity events, and never missed a Sunday sermon. His was the most crowded funeral I ever saw. People lined up around the building like at a midnight premiere for a summer blockbuster. And that’s when I realized he had a skill that was fundamental and essential and utterly lacking in my own life. If I had died that day, I doubt if even most of my own family would have shown up. For me, the line would have been like one at a matinee of a movie that’s been out for three months.
My grandfather taught me that faith was not just believing but also trying really hard to make good on those beliefs, no matter how many times you fail or don’t live up to your own expectations. We’re all going to fail and to some extent we’re all going to suck at having faith—especially at first. But that’s what makes it a skill. Repetition and Resistance. Integration > Isolation. Just start with small acts of goodness and giving. Bring water to the thirsty and food to the hungry, and offer somebody who looks downtrodden an unexpected compliment. Meditate and pray at home or in church, but then bring your faith out into the world. Then take on more challenges. Maybe work a mission trip in there somewhere. Or here’s a challenging one: tithe. Let me tell you, tithing is tough: you have all these plans for the money you’re making—vacations, retirement, clothes, whatever—and then you go and just give it away. Don’t tell me that’s an easy thing to do. (Maybe for some people it is, but certainly it wasn’t for me.) Don’t tell me faith isn’t a skill.
Yes, make gobs of money doing good and then give gobs of money away to an even greater good. But don’t stop there and don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Go out and do the good acts yourself. Prep the meals. Visit the poor. Wash the feet of some very sick person. If you tell me these things are hard, I’ll tell you: I know.
Honestly, I’m not trying to be pushy about religion. Which reminds me, a friend of mine goes to a church whose motto is “friendly, not cultish.” I like that. I think it makes sense. That’s another person who knows this: Whatever religion you are, or whatever religion you aren’t, faith should be attractive because it’s beautiful and because of the good things it gets people to do and because of how it brings people together. You don’t believe in God because you want eternal fire insurance. That’s not what faith is about. You believe in God because you love the world and want to save it and because you love Him and everything He’s given to you.
Faith will stop you from taking shortcuts. Faith will give you the framework you need to engage in fulfillment. If you need a practice plan, start with this: When you meditate or pray in the morning, you don’t need to make it just an exercise in focus. You can make it a spiritual workout, as well. Start there.
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ONE-PAGE SPIRITUAL PRACTICE PLAN
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Morning Meditation
Spend five to fifteen minutes in mindfulness meditation. Use a guided app to get started if you need to. The skill being deve
loped is focus, and the benefit is presence and awareness. This will flow into all the rest of your life. Be sure to do it every day.
Midafternoon Affirmations/Prayer
Whatever your religious orientation, prayer is a powerful and transformative practice. (Affirmations also tend to work well.) So spend five to fifteen minutes on prayer every day, whether reciting affirmations, chanting mantras, praying the rosary, or praying in whatever way your religion suggests or you feel comfortable. (I prefer to do this in the midafternoon, though I will sometimes stack this with my morning meditation session; prayer, I’ve found, can often be a steadying force to lead into meditation.) There are no strict rules here, aside from that you should try to stick with one prayer or form initially, in order to set up a pattern for yourself.
Evening Journal Session
Finally, spend five to ten minutes every night reflecting upon your day in a positive manner. Don’t just record what you did; rather, explain why you’re grateful for whatever happened. This simple exercise gets you into the habit of seeing the good in things—and seeing that life itself is good—a much-needed habit in a society that constantly slams us with bad news.
Recommended Additional Reading
Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis).
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Chapter Six
SKILLS YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN (BUT MAY NOT NEED)
This next step is easy. Start getting good at the things you want to get good at.
This is not so much a next step as it is a simultaneous step—there’s no reason to wait to develop your interests. The metaskills, while foundational, don’t have to come first. It’s better if they come sooner than later, but this is why we have a practice method and Short-Term Specialization and all that—so we can get better at many things instead of just one.
What are your interests? What do you want to get better at? There are no rules here, really. The only thing I would suggest is this: if you’re going to get good at something, make it something you want to get good at. That sounds like a truism. And that’s because it’s true. Remember when we talked about discipline and how the only way to develop discipline is by practicing discipline, and the only way to practice discipline without already having discipline is by doing something you like? Well, it’s time to find that something that you like.
When I was growing up, I went through a long stretch of being a seriously bad student. I’d skip class and refuse to do homework. Once, I got in-school suspension for showing my underpants to my German teacher. Some thought I was a degenerate. The truth is, I wasn’t so much a degenerate as I was disinterested in all the subjects I was supposed to learn in school. I didn’t really care about calculus. I didn’t really care about German, either. Looking back, I wish I had paid better attention to both, because now I see the value in these things—well, maybe not German, but French would be nice. Unfortunately, nobody ever taught me that math was a way of learning logic—instead, math was just a way of learning math, which I thought was a skill with limited value when it came to high-level branches such as calculus. I would have been interested in logic. Maybe. It’s easy to say that now. Mostly back then I was interested in music.
This is why, even as a terrible student, I’d spend hours practicing guitar. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any motivation; it was just that my motivation chased a separate set of interests than what was being taught at school. This is what I want for you. I want you to develop whatever makes you most excited. Yes, we need some “liberal arts”—and that’s why we have those foundational skills, and that’s why I took so much time explaining why I think they’re important. Maybe you’re interested in those, or maybe you’re not, but over time, I think you will be. Either way, let’s get started with the things you like.
What do you like? Woodworking? Painting? Gardening? Cooking? Training dogs? You can make a business out of just about anything you can be good at.
Well, let’s return to music. Let’s say you’re interested in drums—or you know what, scratch that—guitar. Drums are cool, but I know guitar, so let’s go with guitar. Say you want to make music and you want people to pay you to do it. And say you want to grow your hair out and get it highlighted. I think that would be just fine.
Let’s go back to a few of our principles. If you’re starting a new skill, the first thing to do is to short-term specialize in it. This goes for guitar and it goes for anything that isn’t guitar. I would say you should dedicate at least an hour of practice a day to anything you’re short-term specializing in. That’s a reasonable start. You could do more, depending on the skill, and in some cases, you could do less—there’s not an exact prescription for this. You need to use some judgment to decide how much practice is necessary and how much is too much or too little. When in doubt, ask someone who’s figured it out. Hire a coach, in other words.
Next let’s consider Integration > Isolation. What kind of guitar player do you want to be? Do you want to be a rock player, a jazz player, a country guitar player? Or maybe you want to be a generalist with your guitar playing? Certainly, I wouldn’t argue against that. Still, you’ll have to pick a place to start, so let’s say you want to learn to rock. Let’s say that whenever you hear Metallica, it sends a yellow streak up your spine, because if something can get you going like that, it’s a skill worth investing in; you probably think that it’s cool and resonate with it. Imagine all the things in your life that do that. Maybe it’s reading a piece of writing or watching a comedian or solving a math problem. I can’t tell you what you might be interested in. I can only tell you how to get better at that thing, once you determine what it is.
For me, there are now quite a number of things that fill me with giddy excitement. I’m not actually a huge sports fan, but I can see why people get into it. Debating I love—boy, do I get giddy when someone gives a great argument on stage, something I only started to appreciate after I joined the debate team in middle school. What else? I get giddy over yo-yo tricks sometimes, though I’m not sure I get quite giddy enough to want to dedicate my life to learning them. But still, it’s enough to cause me to learn at least a little bit. I get giddy over philosophy and science, and certainly I get giddy over growing businesses. Finally, I get giddy over God. Faith gets me triply giddy. These are my interests, most of them, anyway. Now it’s time to identify a few of your own.
You might not even know your interests at first. Maybe you have a few fleeting areas you’re interested in, a few suspects in the lineup, so to speak. But maybe you’re not positive because you’ve never spent time practicing them. That’s the test, because to the extent you love something, you won’t mind practicing it, despite the endless frustrations that are absolutely destined to occur. I remember watching a clinic by one of my favorite guitarists back in high school, and at one point someone from the audience asked him how he found so much time to practice guitar. He said, seeming almost confused, “Because I want to play the guitar?” To him it wasn’t a valid question. Of course he found the time to practice the guitar. Because he wanted to play the guitar. How simple. I mean, of course!
If you want to do something, you’re going to find the time to do it. This isn’t a question about making time or scheduling or anything like that. This is a question about what moves you. This is a question about what matters most in your life. Now, hopefully, I’ve done a fair job explaining what should matter most in your life—in case it isn’t clear, I’m not exactly a moral relativist. Aristotle taught us that there is only one right way to live and that one right way is living well. A truism? Perhaps. But isn’t it still true?
Aristotle also taught us that living well means focusing ourselves around certain interests, developing virtue, and—most important—seeking the good. Aquinas, his successor in many ways, defined happiness even more specifically when he said it involves engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities and doing so to the extent that both the effects and intentions are morally good, or, at the very least, neutral. So there are not too
many restrictions here. If you follow these sages, you can align your interests to produce actual, real, authentic happiness. In other words, something isn’t good just because you desire it. Rather, there are things that are really good for you, so those are the things you should desire.
Aristotle said this:
He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance periods but throughout a complete life.
And Aquinas wrote this:
It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is that perfect good which entirely satisfies one’s desire; otherwise it would not be the ultimate end, if something yet remained to be desire. Now the object of the will, i.e., of a man’s desire, is what is universally good; just as the object of the intellect is what is universally true. Hence it is evident that nothing can satisfy man’s will, except what is universally good. That is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone.
What does this mean? Actually, it’s simple. It means that while we’re alive, perfect happiness can’t be attained, but certainly a large degree of it can be, and that would be through the prudent accumulation of knowledge, virtue, wealth, and friendship. People hear that word wealth and they’re like, Ew, was Aristotle some sort of fat capitalist or something? I don’t think so. But he did recognize the importance of having your material needs met. Aristotle was basically saying that it’s hard to be happy when you’re starving to death. He even went so far as to distinctly declare that wealth should be possessed—as with most other material things—in moderation. It should be deliberately built, but not to excess. In other words, make a lot of money if you want, but don’t do it only for yourself. In fact, you should probably give most of it away if that’s the case.