This page is intended to capture the first several posts and the core of the philosophy of your 'perfect' antidote.
Jack Squat
Those are harsh words from easily the worst fictional motivational speaker of all time and yet it’s funny because the thought rings a certain truth to us. The “what do you want to be when you grow up” questions asked of us as children were always answered with the loftiest of goals – a doctor, astronaut, president, professional sports player, etc. Yet only a miniscule percentage of us achieve the pinnacle of those professions much less any profession. So what happened? Why in the years between such proclamations and professional reality did most of us ‘Fail’ to achieve greatness? Did we not try hard enough? Did we not want it badly enough? Of course we did. The answer is that is wasn’t meant to happen. Not in a predestined sort of way, but in that we are all different. We have different capabilities and limitations, different life circumstances, and a host of seen and unseen influences that shape our future achievements and potential. And this goes for every aspect of our lives, not just professional, but in relationships, health and fitness, appearance, and intelligence too. Just as most of us do not reach the pinnacle of our career fields, most of us are not the most thoughtful spouses or friends, we do not have movie star looks, we have high blood pressure, or food goes straight to our hips. The point is, most of us are average in just about everything we do or are.
So what you ask? If we're all average, why do you need a guide to 'achieve' averageness?
Because we all spend an unbelievable amount of time and considerable effort to not be average, yet we all still are. And we'll spend the rest of our time figuring out why that is. Along the way we'll learn about what that effort looks like, tips and tools for reducing that effort, and we'll share our experiences in our quest for averageness.
The Endstate
I've been in grad school for a long time. In fact, it feels like I'm on the seven year plan. A lot of people go to school for seven years, you may say. Yes, but those people are called doctors.
A couple of years ago in class, our professor went over the answers to our mid-terms having passed out the graded exams. As the class was dismissed there was one student who approached the professor and began vehemently disagreeing with her grade. She was obviously distressed having put in a lot of time studying, yet having not achieved her goals. She left the room without resolution and was clearly spending emotional effort. There were most likely internal and external forces that defined her endstate success by that grade.
I hoped that someday she would have perspective on her situation and she would see that the grade would have much less effect on her future than many other factors. But that didn’t change her immediate feeling of effort not equating to success. I walked away thinking that we often don't understand the endstate we're striving for, and it led me to two core thoughts. The first being:
1. Despite considerable effort, “success” may never be achieved.
First of all, we don't have to define "success" too stringently. We can just call it any desired endstate to which we commit effort. And this core thought is a result of so many different things: we may not truly understand what it takes to achieve the endstate, we may not have the capabilities to achieve the endstate, or there are other random factors in our lives that prevent achievement. In any case, we often struggle without understanding why we're not succeeding, why we don't escape the bounds of our current state.
Think of a mountain with “Good” at the bottom and “Great” at the top. To achieve greatness you must exert effort to roll a boulder up the mountain. Only by getting the boulder all the way to the top do you achieve your desired outcome, at great effort nonetheless. Anything short of that, no matter the effort expended, the boulder rolls back to the bottom, or back to a state of “Good.” Like the Greek myth of Sisyphus, we are condemned to an eternity of rolling the boulder uphill over and over again only to have it roll back to “Good” every time. Or like the Coyote who never gets the Roadrunner despite great effort. Pick your analogy.
The Endstate, Part 2
As a young Army Lieutenant in an aviation unit I made the mistake of telling the aviation Battalion Commander that we needed two Blackhawk helicopters for the upcoming mission. At which point he efficiently told me that was incorrect. What I really needed was to move 22 people from one point to another. THAT was the goal. The means by which that would happen would be based on multiple factors, none of which included my “expert” opinion. Since then I have been careful to distinguish ‘means’ from the goal. But I see a lot of the confusion of the two when we spend effort that has nothing to do with what our ultimate goal is, and that brings us to core thought #2:
2. If “success” is achieved, most often the rewards don’t equate to the amount of effort expended.
We’re always told that hard work and perseverance is the gold standard for success, when in reality it may only give us the experience of working hard and persevering. The core thought results from two things: We may not have understood the endstate to begin with and couldn’t figure out the actual effort required to achieve it, or it wasn’t the endstate we wanted anyway. In either case we incorrectly understood what we truly wanted. We confused the effort with the endstate, and the means we think we wanted, may not be the easiest, nor the most effective way to achieve our goals.
The Effort
So far we've briefly talked about averageness and the realities of achieving success, and now we come to the effort we expend to achieve those goals.
First of all, we'll define Effort as the physical, mental, or emotional expenditure required to do work or achieve something. Effort may also encompass our physical reactions to certain factors such as stress of failure, or time pressures. All to achieve a certain level of success.
Let's call that success, "Greatness," which we'll define as an ideal state of being in regards to any aspect of your life. It is a completely self-defined state. However, in each case it is the ideal ultimate state, whether in your career, hobbies, relationships, beauty, self-worth, whatever. Examples may include a perfect beach body, promotion at work, the perfect relationship, a .400 batting average, acing the final exam, or the perfect recital.
The effort to achieve that may take many forms. Whether it's stress at work, time studying, pleasing others, or emotions in response to failure or negative situations, we all expend effort every day. So before we can begin thinking about what drives us to achieve greatness, what the problems associated with our ambition are, and how we can begin to change or reduce our effort, we need to understand the six components from which our effort is derived:
- Our understanding of our own capabilities
- Our need to meet others’ expectations
- Our productivity-derived self-worth
- Our time management skills
- Our susceptibility to the allure of the perfect state
- Our emotional state in achieving success
