The Villain Within
I was devastated. I remember hanging up the phone and al- lowing disempowering thoughts from the past to flow back into my mind like some sort of dam had just broken. And the reason they came back so fast was because like many of you reading this, I had been taught to work on my weaknesses for most of my life. My subconscious tried to make me believe I was incompetent for thinking I could ignore my weaknesses. I immediately started thinking back to criticisms my teachers directed at me in school, and I reflected on them in such a negative way that I started saying to myself, “I should have better grammar, better spelling, understand how to punctuate, and do all the other things that good writers do! Who are you, Dean, to think you could write a book?” My negative, defeatist thoughts ran away with my mind, and my confidence was temporarily destroyed; my momentum disappeared. The villain grew stronger and stronger as I spent about 24 hours beating myself up for not taking the time to work on my weaknesses before I wrote the book. Luckily for me, about 48 hours later my thoughts shifted, and I remember thinking, “Stop it! Look at the stories you’re telling yourself! Are you kidding me? I may not be a trained writer, but I have a powerful message, and I need to share it with the world. I know my message can change people’s lives. Who cares that I’m not perfect at grammar and my book sounds like a two-hundred-page conversation?” I called the editor back the next day and said, “I respect your opinion, but I don’t need your services anymore. You’re fired.” Okay, I’m not sure if I said the words, “You’re fired,” but I like to remember it that way. I soon found someone else to edit the book, and I sat them down and said, “Do me a favor: just make this readable, but leave my words as intact as you can. Don’t rewrite my personal- ity or my message—just edit the spelling and grammar. I don’t want to try to sound like someone else because this book is me. This is who I am. People can take me or leave me, but I’m going to be me.” It was the first book I ever published and it became a New York Times bestseller in weeks. I’m truly honored and blessed to be able to write that, but at the end of the day, who cares about
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