# 30 - The Hidden Surprises and Delights of Follow Through

Episode 30

[00:00:00] : Well, hello there, listeners. This is Rick Lewis once again, back for Episode 30 of the follow through formula podcast for those of you have been listening regularly. I just want to say thanks for tuning in regularly. This is a daily podcast. That's a lot to expect anybody to listen in daily, and I don't expect that you're listening to each and everyone, but if you're listening to most of them or all of them, I just want to say thank you for listening in and sticking with me in this experiment. To do this on a consistent basis each and every day and not every day is the greatest day. Some days I just don't feel as inspired or connected or on top of the world in relationship to my passion for this project. But there has been tremendous value in just showing up each day for this conversation for myself, and I hope that it's valuable and useful to you out of respect for your time and attention. I'm going to do a shorter one today. I just want to tell you a quick story that popped into my mind this morning that very much is a story about follow through, and the story comes from back again from my street performing days when I lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and the story takes place around Canada Day. Canada Day is the equivalent of Fourth of July in the U. S. It's the big Canadian summer holiday, and for those of us who were street performers, Canada Day was the primo day of the year, because at Granville Island, Public Market, where I used to perform, tourists would show up even locals as well. But tourists and locals would show up by the tens of thousands at various gathering points for Canada Day Fest festivities. And Granville Island was one of those spots, one of those gathering spots. So we had so many people that we could draw upon to gather crowds and earn really good money from those big crowds, as we would do shows all day long. So in one particular Canada day, we all showed up, ready to crank out as many shows as we could, because that's what we would do as a community. The street performers would cooperate. We'd all gather around the pitch. Whoever showed up in whatever order. We would just take turns and rotate through that order. And we would just delivers many shows as we could on this particular Canada day. The weather was very Pacific Northwest E, and by that I mean rain sun clouds spitting rain, little drizzle, more sun, clear skies. So the weather was very unpredictable and the rain was coming and going all day long. And it just so happened that in two of what turned out to be the three performance slots I had for the day in the first two slots, I started my show when it wasn't raining, spent a lot of effort and energy building up a very big crowd and then had the clouds open up in the middle of my show, drench the crowd and send everybody away. And I didn't get to the hat pitch. The hat pitches the donation time where I say, Okay, here's my hat. Come make your donations. I hope you enjoyed the show, so I never got to do that. I had two great shows. At least they started great. Rained out right toward the end. So here I waas at the end of the day under the same skies that these brooding dark clouds that we're like I felt like were taunting me. It reminds me of that comic strip with the Peanuts comic strip with Lucy and Charlie Brown, and Lucy would hold the football, and every time she'd say, I won't pull it away, really try and kick the football. It felt kind of like that. I was being taunted and tempted to do just one mortgage rate big show that the clouds would just rain out on me. So I actually decided because I was feeling so frustrated by my earlier attempts, I decided, No, I'm not going to do another one. I'm just gonna pack up and I'm gonna go home now In the street performer culture, the ethos of our culture and community. We have a particular code, and the code is no bail. And what no bail means is you give every street show your complete, all in 100% effort. It doesn't matter if the weather turns bed in the middle, or if there's a dog in the front row of your audience that some pet owner has brought up and his barking incessantly through your whole show or that kids are coming up in the middle of your performance and trying to steal your props. All sorts of things can come up in the street show, but what you don't ever do is what's called bailing. Bailing is when you quit. Stop because you think, Oh, this isn't going well or they don't have a big enough crowd and I'm not gonna make enough money. So we have this code, which is you just never bail on a street show. And it's an international street performers code. Just this is what we do. And it was just so wonderful to be part of that culture because it's got such integrity and such a sense of professionalism. And it was pretty uniforms for those of us who were performing all over the world because street performers air also a migrant group going to Australia in the winter months of North America because it's warm in Australia in December, performing at Sydney Harbor and Perth and then coming back to North America in summer. So there we were all gathered, and as I was about to not start my third show, a friend of mine name named Owen, who's a magician, a street performer came up to me and he said, Hey, what are you doing? And I said, I'm I'm packing up. I'm heading home. I'm not gonna get rained out again. And he said, Oh, come on. Look, you've got all these people here. What if it doesn't rain? You will. You will have missed this wonderful opportunity to do your show again. Everybody loves your show. You should follow through and do it. And I It was hard for him to convince me to start the show. And I figured to me I wasn't bailing because I was deciding not to try it at all. But he was really holding me to the standard of Look, you're here. It's not raining right now. Follow through and deliver your show. If it gets rained out, it gets rained out. So it was very, um it was very positive message that came from him. And it just it was like waving this smelling salts of our art community spirit under my nose. And I was just like, Okay, I'll do it. So I went and set up and launched into the show, and it actually did start drizzling about halfway through my show. But instead of letting the crowd drift away and me just stopping and going alright, this isn't gonna work because of the rain. I started talking to the crowd and I said, Look, I am not going to quit on this show. It doesn't matter how hard it's gonna rain. And at this point, I was up on a 10 ft high Eunice cycle doing this. So I had some skin in the game and I was just saying to the crowd, Stay with me, Don't leave. I'm going to finish the show to the end. And even though it was raining slightly, the crowd stayed, Everyone hung in there and I got to the end of the show. Some people did leave, but I still had a pretty good crowd at the end, and I was able to pass my hat and actually make some money in Canada Day. So that was just a really cool feeling. As a demonstration of how much having someone else around you in your atmosphere, who is holding the spirit of follow through for you really is helpful is super helpful. So I went home, um, I took as Usually what we do when you get your money in your hat is just you just put it in a bag and then you count it later when you get home. And later that evening, when I was at home sitting down with my bag of money, which is one of the best parts of the day when you get to sit and just quietly and slowly unfold your bills and stack them all up and count your change and find out how much you made. So I was sitting there counting my money, UH, one bill at a time in one coin at a time. And when people donate, what they often do is they'll take their money, especially if it's bills and they'll watch. Sometimes they'll want it up into a crumpled heap. Sometimes they'll fold it very neatly if they're giving you a number of bills like a bunch of ones, they're sometimes folded in a stack, or sometimes they just throw them in as scattered singles. So you have this whole array of just this wad of crumpled, folded, stacked, assorted cash and coins in your hat. And as I got to the end of counting the bills in my hat there was $11 bill that had been folded over itself like four times. It was in this small little square and I pulled it out of my hat and I unfolded it this $1 bill. So that was in, you know, quarters. And then I unfolded it again. Now I'm looking at half of the bell, and when I unfolded it for the last time, tucked inside the $1 bill was a $100 bill, and I sat there with this $100 bill in my hand, and that happened to me a few times in my street. Performing career was wasn't a frequent things you could imagine, but it's a pretty cool affirmation to have somebody give you, ah, $100 as a donation and on this particular day to have somebody in the audience recognize the effort of follow through that was made and reciprocate monetarily and say, Hey, way to go. I appreciate that was the icing on the cake for that day. It just really cemented for me that you just never know what the benefit of your follow through is going to be. And when we start out and we say, Okay, I'm gonna be consistent about something. I'm gonna practice. I'm gonna follow through. We might get the result we were looking for because maybe our follow through is about getting more customers or MAWR followers or improving our skills in a certain area. But when we follow through with actual action, there are usually benefits and results that we just don't see coming. There's sort of additional side benefits that show up. And this was one of those examples where somebody my putting myself in this community of street performers and committing to this art form and then getting encouraged to follow through and on the back end having somebody recognized that not in a way that I expected or was demanding. But it just showed up. So I just thought that was a really cool story, and I thought of it. This morning is as an example of the joy and beauty of follow through and the unexpected surprises that can show up. So whatever is there for you, my friend, whatever you're thinking about pursuing with mawr, consistency or passion, I wish you the ability to hold this sense that follow through is worth it. Whatever shows up when you take action, you know that you're going to be surprised with some things you didn't expect in terms of your development, the outcomes, the results that are generated and when we don't follow through, we're never surprised. We always get the same thing, which is nothing if you're overthinking and just staying in your head than what you don't get. Is anything new other than what you already have? Follow through is where the surprise and the joy off life shows up and meets us with its values and benefits that we can't perceive ahead of time. So go do it. Go follow through and whatever it is you need to follow through on thank you again for listening today. Hope you enjoy the little story. This is Rick Lewis, with episode 30 that is 30 will say it's a month now of daily podcasting. And guess what? I'll be back tomorrow