Story of failure: Losing a piece of furniture on the highway.

Jake Williams is a former teacher, and football coach, with background in sports and art. Jake is also the author of Organic Reconstruction, where Jake details a time in his life where he felt stuck, and the journey he took to overcome his fears.

About Jake: In case you’re wondering, ‘Trustin’ isn’t some made up moniker. It’s my actual middle name. Some of you know me as Jake Trustin, others know me as Mr. or Coach Williams from when I used to teach high school art and coach football. Most of you probably just know me as Jake. Art has always been a huge part of my life. I started as a little kid drawing pictures of superheroes, then athletes, and then anything and everything else.

The older I get, the more I realize life is more of a DIY kinda thing than a playbook you can follow. That’s why, a few years ago when I was feeling particularly stuck in life, I decided to set up my own DIY tour through America and Europe. I backpacked 45,000+ miles by way of planes, trains, and automobiles bringing a journal and sketchbook with me to document the experience. When I came back, I made a bunch of paintings and wrote a story to go with it. That’s what my book, ‘Organic Reconstruction’ is about. You should check it out.

Lately I’ve been really into painting pictures of ancient statues and landscapes from the places I visited along my travelling. I don’t know how far this art thing will take me, but I still find as much satisfaction from making things that I did as a kid.

In today's episode Jake talks about:

• • his background in art and sports
• • teaching high school art and coaching football
• • feeling stuck in life after tearing his ACL
• • three years of rough surgeries and not being able to control life
• • feeling the pressure to be married
• • comparing himself to other people and feeling stuck
• • growing up thinking he had to be a perfect person and the weight the comes with that
• • his parents being concerned about his well being
• • something he thought he’d never share with anyone
• • Skyping artists around the world while teaching
• • Voka and visiting his place
• • planning the trip to Europe and friends bailing on him
• • not wanting to look crazy to Voka when meeting him in person
• • being honored to learn from Voka
• • his closest mentors being his parents
• • why it helps hearing from people that aren’t family
• • Stephen Holland as a mentor
• • not caring about artists or art history growing up
• • famous people being normal
• • Norman Rockwell and his routines
• • there’s no guarantee that problems will ever go away
• • “failure is just unmet expectations.”
• • “Sometimes finding success in failure is just shifting our expectations.”
• • finding an interesting story through being stuck
• • not being married when he thought
• • opening up about going to a counselor
• • the constant of expectations
• • writing a book and fearing no one will want to read it
• • starting the podcast and knowing it’s going to suck at first
• • Brock Frizzel
• • his dad telling him to go to counseling
• • just work through it and don’t be soft
• • the value of counselors
• • what if I’m not messed up enough?
• • the story of tearing his ACL and his recovery
• • working hard to do everything exactly the way they asked in rehab
• • tearing his ACL again in front of a gym full of people
• • focusing on other things rather than reliving high school glory days
• • you can make all the right moves and sometimes it still doesn’t work out
• • the good thing about setbacks being empathy
• • stuff happens you can’t control
• • working through discouragement and talking with those close to him
• • praying through tough times and refocusing
• • being a teacher is a hard thing to do
• • stepping back and resetting yourself
• • the intimidation of chasing art full time
• • getting into Youtube videos
• • what I work hard and nobody pays attention?
• • “You have to give yourself permission to say, ‘this is going to be really bad for a while.’”
• • the first reaction of quitting teaching
• • feeling passion towards the book and feeling like it was important
• • looking forward to trying as hard as he could
• • letting things in our head overtake action
• • spending 4.5 years working on his book
• • his former student working with Jake to design his book
• • going into it with few expectations
• • it’s as simple as trying

www.jaketrustin.com

Jake’s Instagram - @jaketrustin

Organic Reconstruction Book

Link to Jake’s Paintings

---

Learn more at www.professional-failure.com