It’s a tough pill to swallow, but most people will never reach their full potential for success. For some, it’s simply easier not to.
It’s difficult to fight the comforting pull of mediocrity. If you are unwilling to strike out and can’t accept the possibility of failure, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself stuck. Whether your goal is starting your own business, or climbing up the corporate ladder, moving on up is possible if you can drive away the negativity and focus on the right things. If you know where to start and what to do truly anything is possible.
Considering how easy it is to fall into a pattern of mediocrity, I thought exploring what keeps people trapped in this state and how to fix it would be an interesting topic to cover. If you’re reading this and you’re feeling stuck in some aspect of your life, only you can know what’s keeping you there, but it’s my hope this article will help drive you to make important decisions.
You Must be willing to fail.
The idea of failure is frightening and if you’ve failed before the reality of it can make it worse. The idea of someone trying their hardest to achieve something and not achieving it can feel like the worst possible outcome. While it’s easy to understand this fear, remember that not trying might result in not failing, but it also results in not succeeding.
Failing isn’t proof that you aren’t good enough. It’s proof that you have tried and that next time you’ll adapt and try differently. If you don’t accept that, you won’t get anywhere. To be your best self, you need to brace yourself for failure, it will teach you how to improve, make you humble and develop your character. When you accept failure as a natural part of life and as something that is occasionally inevitable, you will see your success rates and attitude improve greatly.
Mindset is key. Believe and ACT like a winner.
The truth sometimes stings but most people don’t have the self esteem to believe that they can accomplish their goals and dreams. The problem with thinking this way is that you are creating a self fulfilling prophecy. You won’t succeed if you don’t think you can. Your attitude and mindset carry so much value towards your goals. Focusing on a proper state of mind is a must.
Your mindset is about believing in something that is positive. This will sometimes be very realistic and sometimes it’s a long term vision. Acting like you are successful or understanding that success is simply a try, or multiple tries away, to avoiding mediocrity.
Place value on educating yourself.
“Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.” -Scott Adams
Learning and growing is not easy, and that’s why most individuals choose mindless entertainment and distraction over education and changing themselves. (Queue the next episode of Suits) Unfortunately, this is a major reason why people stay average. If there isn’t a focus on working to better yourself, you’ll stay exactly where you are and no one grows that way. Without my collection of books, I can honestly say that I would have faced far more challenges throughout my career.
Set goals and commit to them!
Not setting goals or blindly working towards an unrealistic goal are two big mistakes I see daily. Setting Smart Goals (click to learn about setting goals that you can accomplish) will help you. When setting goals they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Setting goals that you can accomplish will drive you in the best direction to stretching your goals over time. Writing down your goals and sharing them with people will help you commit to them more easily.
Work towards growth and education, not titles and money.
I’ve witnessed countless people chase money or a title only to be disappointed. Your focus should be on experiential learning and personal transformation. By focusing on improving yourself and consistent learning, the reward for that hard work typically comes with furthering your career. It also goes without saying that you should always focus on what you are passionate about.
People are passionate about different things. Ensuring that passion is focused on tasks that can help achieve your goals is a key to success.
Don’t spend more time being jealous than working on succeeding.
Jealousy provides zero benefits, clouds judgement, and does not provide any value to you, your career, or your development. Ideally, just stopping here and avoiding jealousy would be great but is quite unrealistic.
Jealousy is a major reason why people get stuck at a standstill. They see what someone has accomplished and make excuses for them and themselves and then force themselves into a negative mindset.
The time that is spent on jealousy is time that could have been spent working on yourself – with a positive mindset. If you are constantly keeping track of other peoples actions your mindset focuses on them and not you. What they do, or don’t do, doesn’t help you shift from your state of mediocrity. Choose to convert the time you spend being jealous of others and imitating them into time you spend working on growing who you are. Basically, stay in your lane.
Focus on setting working on your goals. If you miss a goal, find out where you went wrong and try again. Don’t focus on the fact that others have things that you want. Focus on tangible ways to achieve your own success in your own way.
So how do you avoid mediocrity?
“The moment you accept total responsibility for EVERYTHING in your life is the day you claim the power to change ANYTHING in your life.” -Hal Elrod
Yes. That quote and everything about it, yes. The most important thing to understand is that you are responsible for everything in your life and you can only control your actions and your ability to set goals and maintain an effective mindset. When those things come together, it’s amazing what can be accomplished.
The truth of the matter is that MOST people will remain in mediocrity. They will latch on to the average and subpar evidence of success and never learn to grow and reach for more. They will sleep late when they could wake up. They will be late when they should be early. They will not try based on the fear of not succeeding. They will half-ass what they could of put more time into. They will not set goals and will consistently be inconsistent.
However, it does not mean that you need to be any of those things and that you need to get stuck in mediocrity yourself.
