Tim Grover writes in Relentless, “Few people know what they’re truly able to accomplish, and even fewer want to find out.” This reflects the status quo bias. We’re happy being comfortable. As we age, we want to explore less. We shy away from struggle. We seek comfort and sameness and not testing our limits. We stop learning, growing, exploring, and become stagnant and subject to the forces of entropy. Seeing what you are capable of and trying to become better as a lifelong battle whether physically or mentally is one of life’s greatest satisfactions. Improvement is intoxicating. Improvement is engaging. Improvement and the struggle for it is what makes living worthwhile.
A comedian, Gracie Allen, suggested with respect to life to never place a period where God placed a comma. In media res or in the middle of the story is the way to see all aspects of your life. We’re all works in progress. Don’t let others or you define your end point. You’re still in the fight. You can still get better. You can still make a difference in some way, somehow. Pause v. period. Take a break, regroup, rest, and recover, but do so with the intent to keep going. It’s not the end, unless you let it be. Each day is a chance to begin again. Commas allow you to continue. Periods define an end.
Consider the consequences of not continuing to seek improvement as Laura Vanderkam suggests in What the Most Successful People Do at Work, “Think about the social and economic cost of the failure to get better—of repeating every day, but not practicing. It’s kind of dizzying.” Too many of us go through the motions day after day, year after year, and decade after decade. We grudgingly do our duty and put in our time. We aren’t working on improving. The opportunities for improving productivity, our own lives, and the lives of others are all squandered by our absence of attention, intention, and effort. We remain mired in mediocrity.
Guru of grit, David Goggins, writes in Can’t Hurt Me, “What am I capable of? I couldn’t answer that question, but as I looked around the finish line that day and considered what I’d accomplished, it became clear that we are all leaving a lot of money on the table without realizing it. We habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or race course. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole.”
Jordan Peterson has suggested that hell is on your last day on earth meeting the person you could have been. The disconnect between your reality and your potential would be devastating to your psyche. Work to improve continuously to avoid this death bed regret. Seek to strive because you can. Choose to contribute. In How They Succeeded, Orison Swett Marden answers the question of what is the greatest good someone can undertake writing, “The greatest good he can do is to cultivate himself, develop his powers, in order that he may be of greater use to humanity.” Seek to embrace the sentiment of “While I can, I will. While I will, I can.”
Ultimately, as Steve Kamb puts it in Level Up Your Life, “No matter where you come from or where you are now, today represents an opportunity to be better than you were yesterday.”
Do you have gas in the tank? Do you still have something to give?
Sure, you may be old, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be bold.
Your experience is worth its weight in gold.
Have you progeny to who you hope to offer utility?
Do you believe that you can get better and are willing to do the work to continue improving?
Does the word sage contain age because it takes time to become wise?
Do you think that all good things in life take extended effort over time to create?
Are you convinced that as long as blood moves in your veins you’re still in the game?
If you can’t help but nof when asked if there’s fight left in the old dawg,
Then you may be a DADDY.
A Dude Ain’t Declared Dead Yet. DADDY.
Happy Father’s Day
