David McElroy

There are a lot of motivational books about how to get the success you want. Millions of people buy those books every year, but few people end up satisfied with what they have in life. Why?

We talk a lot about how to get what we want, but we rarely talk about how to know what we want — and I’ve come to the conclusion that very few people understand what they want and need. This leaves them pursuing other people’s goals and living other people’s lives.

I’ve spent many years working to get myself emotionally healthy. That has involved looking at where I came from and what happened to me, but it took me a long time to question what I really wanted. For many years — especially early in my life — I was certain that I wanted success, power, money and fame. In a culture driven by those things, it’s an easy mistake to make.

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I felt panic when I got the photo assignment. I was an 18-year-old part-time reporter and photographer with only a couple of months experience. Sports editor Mike Kilgore handed me a piece of paper with an assignment for later that night — and I had no idea how to do what he wanted.

The assignment was simple. I was to shoot pictures of a basketball game at Cordova High School, a small school about 10 or 15 miles outside of town. But I had never covered a basketball game. I had no idea what to shoot — and I told Mike that.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” he told me. “Just get in a position to one side or the other behind the basket and shoot what feels right.”

The game was a blur to me. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I shot several rolls of film, hoping for one usable photo. I felt as though I was in way over my head. The gym was badly lit. I didn’t know a soul there. I couldn’t move the camera fast enough to catch the action.

I walked out feeling like a failure. I was scared to turn my film in.

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Starting when I was a freshman in college, I worked as a part-time newspaper reporter. As the youngest and most inexperienced person in my newsroom, I was given the assignments nobody else wanted. The job taught me how little I knew about people.

I frequently went to a home or office out in the middle of a rural nowhere — on a dirt road 30 or 40 miles from the office — and I couldn’t imagine the people there could have anything interesting to say. It was a prideful attitude from a young man who thought too much of himself.

I soon discovered that even the most mundane person has a story — some meaningful narrative about what he’s seen or felt or lived through. Many times, though, their stories seemed so routine to them that they didn’t recognize the drama or inspiration that they had to share.

I often left interviews with “boring” people — folks who I’d met with a feeling of disdain — with a sense of humility and a realization that I was the one who didn’t yet have much wisdom to share.

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