There are always easier paths than the one that will take you to becoming awesome. There will be paths that suck the life straight out of your veins. Often the path of mediocrity is the path that is most comfortable. You just coast along in your crappy job giving you just enough to get by. You go back to college after having some difficulties trying to get a job, because it’s comfortable to be a student. You aren’t responsible for your life if you’re a student. You can just say “Hey I’m still learning – it’s not my fault”. The fact is that you have created your life as it is now. You created yourself into your crappy job, your never-ending education, and your own immaturity. You may be headed on your way to ultimate mediocrity, but you don’t have to be. Crush your comfort zone. See it driven before you. Hear the lamentations of your scared friends. Create a plan (spend at most 30 minutes on it) to eliminate the path of weakness and mediocrity. Let’s look at some examples:

Say you live in a dead end town in Iowa with your girlfriend. You have no job and no skills to speak of. She is working as a waitress. You play computer games all day dreaming about how awesome you could be. Do you:

A: Look hard for a crappy job in the dead end town.

B: Move across the country to live with some friends who are making their lives awesome and are willing to help you do the same

C: Keep leaching off of your girlfriend and dreaming about being awesome.

Which of those things do you think I did?

If you answered B – you are correct. You win a prize. As a result of my doing that, I learned I actually did have some skills that were valuable (playing with Linux since early teens turns out to be useful), started my career in the tech business and got my first (real) job paying $20 / hour (many times more than I expected to earn back in dead-end ville). I worked with some really awesome developers for 2 years I think. Then I decided I wanted to go freelance (the company was unfortunately going down in flames.) So I moved again (back home – near dead end ville geographically) and learned how to work remotely.  I refused to get a ‘regular job’. I completely failed miserably for a good year and a half. I think I earned less than $10,000 in 2007. Then something amazing happened. I started earning more money than I knew what to do with.

I can honestly say that all of this happened because I burned the ships that led to mediocrity. So lets work on you now: What are you going to do to eliminate the mediocre path from your life?

You probably have some thing you WANT to do. Do you want to live in a new city? (Get in your car and go.) Do you want to get a new job? (Quit your current job… miraculously, you now have 8 more hours every day to find that perfect new job.)

Note: This takes serious gumption. (That word rules.)

What would happen if you did that? You would either:

A: Figure it out and survive, or:

B: Die.

Here’s the thing: if you don’t do it, you will also die. It will just take longer and be more painful.

If you don’t do it now, at least set a deadline for when you will do it. Then you can fret about it all you want, dilly dally, and waste your time and your life for the next X days / weeks / months, but when the day comes, you know you have to do it. Or you will die.

Don’t set yourself up for total failure,  but don’t soften the reality. If something is draining your life, you need to eliminate it from your life. Move. Get new friends. Think about what a person who has already achieved what you want would be doing in their life.

I need to do this too. I love my job(s) in general, but I need to cut some of them off because they aren’t as fulfilling as others. I need to focus on what I want, and let the rest fall by the wayside. Let’s do it together.

Here are the steps you need to do, once more:

1. Find something you are doing that is pulling you towards mediocrity.
2. Create a rough plan in less than 30 minutes to eradicate it from your life.
3. Kill off the weak mediocre activity in your life.
4. Enjoy your awesomeness for a little while (but not too long) and:
5. Start at 1 and repeat the entire process again.

Coming Thursday: How I’ve actually done this recently in several areas of my life, and what I’m doing to keep the momentum going.

No tags