Stop Settling for a Mediocre Life

I lived a mediocre life for many years. Mediocre was my mindset.

It drove me to hide in my bedroom with the blinds down and sit in darkness. My life was dark. It felt cold. I watched everybody else in my life succeed at a business or a career or starting a family. Not me though, I was a joke.

It seemed I could never catch a break. A place like the internet was never going to accept me. I would spend hours telling myself how stupid I was. I’d eat fried food every day, numb the pain with a bottle of Johnny Walker, and scold strangers in the Youtube comments for fun. Life wasn’t mediocre. Life sucked, big time.

Settling for this miserable life was my default decision. I was unintentional about every decision no matter how small it was. Going for a run seemed too small, so I never did it.

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It took me many years to understand that a simple act like going for a run can lead to outcomes you could never predict. What changes your life is not something huge — generally, it’s something small. Something so small you don’t ever imagine it could have an impact in your life.

A mediocre life is created for you when you don’t think about the small stuff.

The small stuff leads to the big stuff. I wrote one article back on the internet in 2014 and it changed everything. It didn’t feel like that at the time. I hit publish and assumed failure and disappointment.

What transforms a mediocre life into an extraordinary life is when you live with intent.

When you’re intentional about everything you do, your habits and rituals have a place. For example, I exercise because it’s part of my writing career. Without energy, I can’t write. So while exercising is small, because I have no dreams of being an athlete, there is intent behind the activity. The unrelated activity is linked to something bigger — writing.

You need to know — why — you’re about to do your list of daily activities. If you don’t know, the good news is you can invent a reason. Your mind won’t know any better.

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Intentional decision making takes you off autopilot that leads you to mediocrity, highlighted by your obsessive complaining and blaming of others for no good reason.

You can’t blame and complain when you have to explain yourself to yourself.

If everybody was intentional about the decisions they made and could see the possibilities that come from small actions, we’d live in a different world.

Writing a tweet would be the pathway to writing a best selling book. Selling a $20 product once would lead to an online business bigger than Amazon. Taking a 4 AM run once with a friend would be the route to the Olympics and winning a gold medal.

You drastically underestimate how important the decisions are you make — small or big.

What changed for me was when I started seeing simple tasks like a LinkedIn posting habit (that takes five minutes) as the difference between mediocre me, and the version of myself I’m proud of.

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You may not feel like living an extraordinary life. It sounds like hard work after all. Who wants to reach mastery when there is so much on Netflix to watch and an invisible health crisis making everybody sick?

It’s easier to give in to mediocrity by saying one simple phrase:

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

These four words kill people’s dreams. No you won’t do it tomorrow. Tomorrow is a distant reality that your mind can’t be bothered with. If you are doing something with intent, now is the best time. If you see a small action like going for a run as leading to the Olympics, you’d do it now, not tomorrow. You’re so much better than your current achievements.

Of course if you ever decide to make small decisions with intent and see them as leading to huge audacious goals, people are going to shoot you down. Why? Mediocrity is a lonely place if you have no one to do it with.

That’s why people always tell you what you can’t do, never what you can do. They want you to play life at their level so they can feel warm and comfortable. But warm and comfortable leads to a lifetime of regrets if you never take action on anything and be intentional.

Here’s how to do better for yourself.

• Stop settling, and start making the tough decisions.
• Create a vision of where small actions could lead to. Use your curiosity and creativity to draw the picture and don’t be shy.
• Dare to dream a little.

You can do so much more with your life if you decide to. You’re only limited by the decisions you made today. There’s still time left to make a decision and be intentional about it.

Live with intent, and you’ll leave behind a mediocre life by default.

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Disclaimer

The original version of this story was published on another platform.

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