Don't Die With Your Gifts Inside
My meditation teacher asked me to give my first public talk. I tried every excuse to get out of it. Then a stranger walked in, sat down three feet from me, and changed how I think about sharing your work before you're ready.
I was terrified.
My teacher had asked me to give a talk. Thirty or forty people, that was all. But I found every reason to say no. I'm not ready. I'm not qualified. What if I freeze. What if they judge me. He kept asking, and eventually I said yes.
I walked into that room and wanted to run. My hands were wet. My heart was going so hard I was sure the front row could hear it. I started anyway, stumbling over my words, my voice shaking, just trying to share something real from my heart.
Halfway through, the door opened. A tall man with wild hair and the biggest, most genuine smile I'd ever seen walked in and dropped down onto the floor three feet from me. And for the rest of the class he just beamed, like he was watching something holy.
His name was Nick Good.
After class he came straight over. "That was incredible. I need to be around this." Then he said something I've never forgotten. "Can I stay in your garden?" I laughed. This man I'd known for twenty minutes wanted to camp in my backyard. But there was something about him. Something free. Something alive in a way I wasn't. So I said yes.
He stayed for years.
Nick lived free in a way I didn't
We meditated together most mornings, sometimes starting at half past two, the kind of sitting where you forget you have a body. And slowly I started to see the difference between us.
Nick wasn't careful. He didn't plan everything to death. He didn't wait to be ready. If he wanted to go somewhere, he went. If he wanted to try something, he tried it. If he wanted to tell you something, he just said it, with none of the hours of rehearsing in his head that I did.
One day he announced he was moving to Hawaii to do his sacred work. I said, how? You don't have money. You don't have a plan. He just smiled. "I'll figure it out." Six months later he messaged me from a house on the North Shore of Kauai, doing exactly what he'd said he would.
I was still calculating every move. Still preparing. Still telling myself, not yet, not quite ready, a little more first.
The morning everything changed
Years passed. We built things together, then drifted the way friendships sometimes do, trading the odd message. Then one morning I opened Facebook and saw a line that didn't make sense. Did you hear that Nick died?
He had messaged me that same morning. I pulled it up with shaking hands.
"I'm calling in your presence in my life, bro. I need this connection. I'm on the battlefield, I'm absolutely in it."
— Nick, the morning he died
He had reached out for connection on the day he died. And I had been too busy. Too far inside my own head. Doing too much of not enough.
Nick died suddenly, four days before his sixty-fourth birthday.
I sat in front of the screen and couldn't breathe. And something cracked open in me. Because Nick had lived sixty-four years and he had actually lived them. He went where he wanted. He said what he meant. He shared himself, messily, fully, without waiting to be ready.
And I, with all my so-called success, the programs and the students and the business, was still in a cell I had built myself. Still preparing. Still perfecting. Still waiting for a someday that kept not arriving.
Sitting there, crying for my wild, fearless friend, I made a decision that has shaped everything since.
I would rather do things imperfectly and live fully than die with my gifts locked inside.
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What perfectionism is actually costing
Here is what his death made impossible to ignore: we don't have forever. Not you, not me. We tell ourselves we'll share the real work when it's polished, when we're qualified enough, when life calms down. But next month comes and we're still not ready. Next year comes and we still haven't started. And the gap between the life we're living and the one we're here to live quietly grows wider.
Perfectionism doesn't feel like fear. It feels like care. Like high standards. Like doing it properly. But look at what it actually does. It keeps the book on the hard drive. The program unlaunched. The gift sealed up where the people it was made for can't reach it.
And while you wait to make it perfect, someone out there is struggling with the exact thing you already know how to help with. That is the part we forget. Your perfectionism doesn't only cost you. It costs them.
A palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware spent years with people in their final weeks and wrote down what they regretted most. The number one regret was this: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Notice what is not on that list. Nobody wishes they had waited longer to be ready. Nobody wishes they had spent more time perfecting. The regret is never that you tried and it came out imperfect. The regret is that you never tried at all.
You go first, then you get good
You don't beat this by finally becoming perfect. You beat it by going first, before you feel ready, and letting the work be imperfect on the way to becoming good.
That terrified talk was the most imperfect thing I had ever done. My voice shook the whole way through. And it is the exact reason Nick walked into my life and changed it. The shaky, sincere, imperfect version was enough. It was more than enough.
This is the heart of what we teach at Awakened Academy, and the reason I built a 21-day journey called Don't Die With Your Gifts Inside. Not to make you fearless. To help you move while you're still afraid. To set down the impossible standard and share the thing you came here to share, gently, imperfectly, starting now.
You don't know how long you have. I don't know how long I have. What I know is that the people who need your gift are waiting, and the only version of it that ever helps anyone is the one you actually share.
Source
Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
Many blessings, and lots of love 🙏 Michael
Questions people ask
How do I stop perfectionism from holding me back?+
Stop trying to clear the fear before you act, and act while it's still there. Perfectionism is rarely about quality. It's about protecting yourself from being judged. The way through isn't a better version, it's a shared version. Put the imperfect thing in front of the people it's meant for, learn from what comes back, and improve it from there.
I don't feel ready or qualified to share my work. Where do I start?+
You don't need to be ten steps ahead of someone to help them. One step is enough. Share what you've already lived and learned, honestly, as someone still on the path rather than someone who has finished it. That honesty is exactly what people trust.
Isn't it irresponsible to put out work that isn't polished?+
There's a difference between careless and unfinished. Doing your sincere best with what you have right now isn't careless, it's how everyone who ever got good got good. The first version is never the final one. It's the one that lets you make the next.
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Founder of Awakened Academy. Certifying spiritual coaches since 2012. Pioneering spiritual life coaching since 2004. Host of Your Wish Fulfilled and Don't Die With Your Song Inside.
