If you’ve never watched The Last Lecture, I highly recommend you watch it as soon as you finish reading this.
The guy who wrote it, Randy Pausch, was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who got diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2007. Knowing he was dying, he was motivated to give what became probably one of the most famous lectures that’s ever been given.
And there’s one particular line from it that’s been quoted so many times since then that I’ve been thinking about recently.
The line goes like this: “The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. They’re there to show how badly we want something. They’re there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.”
When I read that line, I get why so many people have really been impacted by it. It sounds great, right? It’s one of those lines that gives you something to hold on to when things get hard. But the reason I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately is because I think there’s just a little something missing from it.
What if you don’t actually want it that bad? What if you’re just not willing to stop wanting it?
Because those are definitely two different things.
One of them is about passion – the kind of thing that pulls you forward without you having to whip up some manufactured reason. The other one is about stubbornness – that refusal to let go of something that you stopped loving a year ago, but you just can’t admit it yet. Because the fear of quitting means you wasted all that time.
Both of them work, that’s for sure. Both of them are going to get you over that brick wall. They both look exactly the same from the outside, and I can’t say that either one of them is more noble than the other. And I know this personally because I’ve done both, sometimes even on the same project.
Last year, I spent pretty much the whole year building a website and a newsletter for people with ADHD. I called myself the Dopamine Drop Guy. And the reason I did it is because everyone said that you have to niche down in order to succeed today. You have to pick something really specific.And so of course, as a guy with AuDHD, I picked that one. It seems legit, right?
Except the thing is, AuDHD isn’t something that I’ve really solved in my life. It’s just something that I’ve kind of learned to live with. I’ve found some really good workarounds and some strategies and some coping mechanisms, but mostly I’ve just accepted it and kind of moved on with my life.
The thing that’s actually changed my life is figuring out how to move forward when you’ve been stagnated for so long that you can’t even remember what forward progress feels like.
It was me learning to stop telling myself stories about why things hadn’t worked out and why I was doing certain things and instead, starting to write a new story through actual action vs. forever planning. Procrastination through planning is what I like to call it, and I was the expert. That’s the only transformation that I’ve actually lived and therefore maybe acquired some specific knowledge and expertise in.
But even after figuring that out, I still tried to keep my ADHD site going for a while. Even though every time I sat down to write another newsletter, I realized it had become a chore and I had to summon the energy for it. I had to try to remind myself of why it was so important.
And the thing is, that’s not what real passion is. All that is, is just not knowing how to walk away from something you’ve already invested a whole year into. Walking away felt almost impossible because it meant admitting yet again that I’d picked something wrong.
So instead of walking away, I just kept going and I called it commitment. I called it sticking to something because that was the whole point of the site is that I couldn’t stick to anything, and damnit, THIS one was finally going to be the one that I stuck to. I called it a lot of things, except for what it actually was: stubbornness masquerading as persistence.
And so I guess the problem I have with Pausch’s line is that it makes the assumption that the only reason people quit is because they just didn’t want it bad enough. That was the line I had used to beat myself up for most of my life. Paul, if you really wanted it that bad, you’d keep going.
But you know what? Some walls are just freaking walls. Sometimes the things that you wanted a year ago just don’t fit anymore because you’re not the same person anymore. Sometimes brick walls are there because you actually built them yourself by following somebody else’s plan.
Sometimes the things that you keep doing aren’t because you love them, but because stopping feels worse than continuing.
And that right there is the real question that most of us aren’t asking ourselves enough. It’s not, “Do I want this badly enough to keep going?” It’s more like, “Am I willing to keep going without really knowing if I still want this?”
Because the reality is that’s where most of us actually live most of the time. Most of us don’t have this perfectly clear sense that what we’re doing is right. We don’t live with certainty most of the time. We live in the middle where it’s not really terrible but it’s not that great either. Where quitting feels weak as hell but continuing on feels pretty hard too.
And so we end up just continuing to move forward on whatever we’re doing. Because stopping requires that hard truth. The kind of honesty that says, “You know what? Maybe this isn’t it. Maybe I was wrong.” And let me tell you, that’s a lot harder than hitting a wall because it immediately makes you think, “Well, if I’m wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?”
And so I’m not saying just quit when things get hard. I’m not saying that everything that’s hard is necessarily the wrong thing. All I’m saying is that we need to stop pretending sometimes that the only reason you’re still doing it is because you want it so bad. Maybe you do. Or maybe it’s just because you don’t really know how to stop without feeling guilt. Because walking away again from something else feels like failing again.
Sticking with things and quitting things are both valid at different times. It’s a decision that we’ll all face time and time again if we’re doing anything that matters to begin with.
But making that decision is important though because it’s the only thing that’s going to get us where we want to go.
So I think the brick walls aren’t really just testing how bad you want something. They’re also testing whether or not you’re willing to tell yourself the truth about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
And that’s the real wall that a lot of people never get over.
Trail Marker:
Are you still doing this because you want it, or because you’re afraid to admit you don’t?