Excellence vs. Survival
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It seems that life can divide people into two contrasting groups: Those who are excelling, and those who are surviving. If you're not excelling, you're surviving.
Excelling entails growth and requires ambition. In a way, survival requires some ambition as well, but only the least potent kind. If you're surviving, you're motivated enough to feed and shelter yourself. The survivor keeps his or her health good enough as to stay ambulant and working, most of the time that is. The survivor does what it takes to bring in a paycheck each month, but the prospect of wealth is kept as a mere fantasy.
If the requirements are lowered, the survivor does less.
The survivor finds comfort in the familiarity that stagnation offers.
The person who excels in life is a much, much different being. Personal growth is a priority for such a person, and any sign of stagnation is quickly recognized and dealt with. The way this person sees things, it’s either growth or a spiritual death of sorts.
It’s possible to experience both modes in life, but not at the same time. These are states of being that are mutually exclusive. It’s either one or the other.
Each mode requires its own unique mindset. This mindset will tend to govern everything that comes into your life. The specifics of life will be dealt with according to this mindset.
It is, however, possible to jump from one mode to the other in a lifetime.
I've lived in both states at different times in my life. I know what it's like to be in survival mode. I've been there before. I've lived a life in which I went to work, putting in my nine hours each day only to come home, watch TV, eat a pizza and go to bed. Everything in my life was mediocre. On the surface everything seemed to be going fine, and in a sense it was. I paid my bills, attended family events, and even managed to read a book here and there, but excellence was not my forte. I was, well, surviving.
This period in my life was definitely a strange one for me, because it seemed to come rather abruptly after a period marked by years of excelling. In college, I excelled. Things just seemed to get better for me all the time. My grades were better every single semester, and my overall personal development seemed to be moving at the speed of light. I saw the world as interesting and overflowing with opportunity, and in fact it was.
So what happened? How did I fall into survival mode? The key here is that I didn’t fall into survival mode. I chose it. It’s always a matter of choice. You may choose survival mode, but you will never be forced into it.
As for my situation, I settled for a job that didn’t stimulate me and didn’t pay well. Instead of using that job as a stepping-stone to something better, I settled. To cement myself into full-blown survival mode, I made certain that my expenses would be roughly 105% of my pay. At the end of each day I was exhausted. Not even exhausted so much by the day's work, but more so by the mere prospect of having to do it again the next day with no foreseeable reward in sight.
The only solace I found was in mindlessly staring at sitcom reruns on Nick At Night that I'd seemingly seen hundreds of time. They were comforting. The problems on those shows were light hearted, and the character's silly antics were easy to chuckle at.
Days, weeks, and months went by with no noticeable changes in my situation.
My life was rife with redundancy.
Survival mode can really be defined by redundancy. If you're doing the same things day in and day out without making any notable progress, chances are you're in survival mode.
Now when I use the word "redundancy", I'm not referring to dogged persistence, which is often a requirement of great achievement.
Building a business, for example, often requires dogged persistence. There's likely to be some redundancy in such an endeavor, but this is redundancy that is a means to a hopefully well-defined end. There’s an important distinction here: If you're noticing redundancies in your life that aren't clearly directed at achieving a well defined end that you’ve decided you will achieve, then you have a problem that ought to be addressed.
My workout schedule involves quite a bit of redundancy. I go to the gym on the same days at the same times every week, week in and week out, and I do mostly the same style of exercise. This is all for the purpose of achieving a certain body composition. My goal is specific, and the repetitive nature of the whole process is what facilitates its accomplishment.
If you're not using at least a decent portion of your free time to move yourself towards accomplishing a specific goal, then you're likely to slip into a repetitive pattern that won't get you anywhere. For those working the typical 9-5, this is a common trap. Go to work, go home / eat / watch TV / relax / go to bed, repeat. This is survival.
Survival is getting by. It's doing just fine. It's paying bills, showing up for work, taking care of responsibilities, but it's far from excelling.
Excelling involves well-defined and lofty goals. It requires foresight. It requires a vision, and a plan of action for realizing its achievement.
If you want to excel, what you will not need is a lot of stress in your life. A common trap that the ambitious often fall into is a stress filled life. You'll want to avoid stress. Stress is not a requirement of goal achievement.
It's possible to excel in life in a calm and relaxed manner. When the goal is clear, and the plan is clear, doing so becomes possible. The key is to break the plan down into small and incremental steps. Stressful feelings come from being faced with too many possible actions step choices at once. The more you can break down your plan into small and clearly defined steps, the better off you'll be. You'll want to be able to accomplish one small thing at a time without the repetitiveness of having to think about each step over and over again.
The more you can break your plan down into clear steps, the more you'll accomplish with less stress.
If your goal seems to be stressing you out no matter how well you've broken down a clear plan into accomplishable steps, consider the possibility that you may be on the wrong path all together. Your goal should stimulate you and challenge you, but any related stress should not steam-roll you.
Pursuing your goals should afford you a rather calm sense of diligent conquering. You should feel like you're in the zone when you're working. This is the way I feel when I'm writing for this site.
When you're perusing a goal that is lofty, but you don't feel stressed by it, this is a clue that you are on the right path. If this is the case for you, then just keep doing what you're doing. If not, then you may need to make revisions. Your goal, or lack there of may need revision. Or, the goal may be right, but the plan may be insufficient. Don’t hesitate to review, revise, and recalibrate.
Also, goal achievement need not be perused just as a means to a better life. This is key. When you're really on the right path, the action steps you take in order to accomplish your goals will bring you a sense of fulfillment in and of themselves. You'll need not wait for the fulfillment to come once the goal is accomplished, but rather you’ll feel fulfilled all the way through.
If you feel this way now, then you're on the right path. If you don't, then consider changing the goal itself, or your attitude towards it. Remind yourself that your goals are not holding your happiness for ransom until you achieve them. You can feel fulfilled before, during, and after goal achievement.
