Do You Want to Survive or Thrive?
You’re 22 years old. You just graduated college. You have been promised an amazing career with your degree that you have worked your whole life towards. You land your first job. You don’t get paid what you were promised in college. You allow that because you are the new guy on the block and are just excited to start. This enthusiasm will be carried out for a couple of months, maybe a year. Your parents are proud because their child is a “success” to society and they tell all of their friends. Society says, get good grades, go to college, get a job, work 40 years, save for retirement, retire old, and die. You can’t wait for life to start.
Maybe one year down the road you buy a house. At this point, reality starts to set in. You are officially an adult. With being an adult, you learn that not everything is as fun as you might have anticipated. You have been going to the same job for a year now and lie to yourself how much you are enjoying it. From the outside and your friends, you have the life. House, job, college degree, car, maybe a new family. But from the inside, you know that there has to be more to life than getting up, drinking coffee, going to work pretending what you’re doing is making a difference, talking to people you have to put on a fake smile for, then coming home and binge watching Netflix until you decide to order Uber Eats for the 7th time this week and realize that you’re wasting all of your money on food and dumb shit on Amazon.
Reality is setting in that this has become your life. You are holding out for that raise that never comes. Over worked and under paid. You want to stay loyal to your company because that’s how it used to be. Work for one business for 40 years and then you’ll get a pension, I mean 401K because those are gone. You’ve been instructed your whole life, no, brainwashed your whole life in not going against the grain. You have been taught being orderly and not asking questions. Walk in a straight line in the halls, don’t talk in class, raise your hand if you have a question, only getting good grades matter. Your free expression has been murdered by society reins. You as a kid once questioned things, explored your interests, and had fun. School taught you to stay in line, not to explore your interest but rather learn useless crap that will have no impact on your life for the majority of your school (insert quadratic equation and trigonomics), and most importantly, school has molded you into how to be a professional 9-5 worker for 40 years.
You have known your whole life that you’re different, that you’re destined for more. It’s hard to break from the mold of society because that is what is accepted and heaven for bid you try to better yourself.
I ask you, when are you ready to put that line in the sand?
When are you going to start that blog talking about DIY cupcake decorating or start that YouTube channel about fantasy football? When are you going to put down the drinks and junk food and start getting healthy? When are you going to start applying all of those podcasts you listen to? When are you going to start that business you’ve always had a dream about?
I’m here to tell you, the time is NOW.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been tempted to take the easy route recently and have felt guilty about it. You know deep down inside that you’re capable of amazing things. The hardest thing for anything new is the beginning, to start. That is until I listened to the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
I’m not sure what clicked in this book for me but one piece of advice James gave in the book was that in order to start a new habit, you just need to do something for two minutes and build upon that. For me, getting into the habit to “work” after work was something I had gotten out of habit. I took the author’s recommendation and printed out a tracker sheet. My goal was to sit down on my computer for two minutes a day for a week and start building my dreams, two minutes at a time. In the beginning, I was just so happy to check off on my tracker that I was doing something moving me forward in the direction that I wanted to go, I am designing my life. Seeing the streak of checks motivated me to continue that habit. What happened next, I didn’t expect.
I found myself once sitting at my desk, actually staying there much longer than two minutes and actually enjoying what I had set out to do to build my business. I had so much preconceived notions and apprehension to starting that it just overwhelmed me and I was paralyzed and would do nothing. I would tell myself that tomorrow I could start.
Success is not a destination. Success is never owned, it is rented, and the rent is due every day. You hear so often of these “over night successes”. When you peel back the layers, you can truly see it was the habits and consistency that made that individual great.
I challenge you. You have been putting off building that dream business, starting your fashion blog, becoming a professional athlete, designing your own clothing line, starting your own podcast. You have just read and agreed with how your life is very similar with what I outlined. If you are still reading this, then I know you are like me, that you are meant for way more of what life has to offer and you refuse to accept reality for what it is right now. You might be scared of failure but let me ask, haven’t you failed already up to this point? Only deep down at your core you can truly answer that.
Every great journey begins with that first step. Take the step with me.
