Mel Robbins says "pick yourself" instead of waiting for gatekeepers to validate your work. Turn your manuscript into a PDF, email it to your network, and ask them to share it for free. If it spreads, opportunities follow. If not, improve it and try again.
2 words. You ready? Yes. Pick yourself. The dominant system does not want you to pick yourself. The dominant system wants you to wait to be invited to go on a reality show, to be invited to apply for a job. They want you to go to the placement office and wait for the company to come interview you. The idea that someone else will pick you and authorize you— they will call you up and they say, Mel, we know you have a novel in you. Would you please write the novel and we will publish it? And I'm speaking from experience here. I've talked to thousands of people in this very situation who have a book inside of them, and my advice to them is, it's simple: make it into a PDF, email it to 20 people, ask them to share it with others for free. If it spreads, your phone will ring, and now you can get hired to write another one. If it doesn't spread, write something better. The end. And almost no one does this. Because it's really awkward to say, yeah, I picked myself, I wrote this, here, I made this. And those 4 words, here, I made this, are so challenging, right? That it's easier to buy a cookbook and follow the recipe than to invent something you're going to serve to people you care about. And so if we can find a life where we can identify the things that are important to us, truly important to us, and then pick ourselves not to do the work to win a prize or get a medal, but because we have agency, because we could. The word for that is freedom. It is the responsibility of showing up to make a thing and offering it to the world. That's where dignity lies. And everyone I've ever met wants more dignity in their Bye.
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
