Life lessons | Happiness | Failures
We Do What Society Says We Should Do
The number one thing that millions of people regret towards the sunset of their lives
There’s a funny thing about success and failure when we succeed we love to believe that we were the reason we succeeded. But the funny thing is that when we fail we love to believe that maybe we were not the reason why we failed.
I think in life the reality is that success and failure both have elements of luck, timing and our own personal choices. In this post I thought I would share three common reasons that I see people continually fail in life and why I was failing and struggling for a very long time.
I want to share one story that encompasses this idea of drift which to me is the most dangerous thing in the world to watch out for. I was speaking with a guy in his early 40s he was about 44, let’s say and he was telling me how shafted he felt by his life.
He felt like life had betrayed him and that at his age, he thought he would be so much further. He had a great family, great wife, great kids, but he felt like his career would be doing so much better and he was a bit grumpy that he was only making 80K a year and he thought he would be you know at least making 250K, doing work he loved, traveling all the time with his family, having great friends and he would be the most fit he’d ever been.
But in reality, he said, he was making about one-third what he thought he’d be earning. He was taking not even one vacation per year because his work wouldn’t give him the time off and he didn’t make enough money to take his whole family.
He was 30 pounds overweight and frankly didn’t even enjoy his job very much and he was kind of lamenting the fact that he thought his life would be in so much different of a place at this age you know.
At 35, he thought in 10 years everything miraculous would have happened and it didn’t and he felt like he’d been tricked by life. The first thing that I see that comes up is drift. You are letting drift control your life which is the expectation that the dreams and goals you magically love and dream of will just again magically happen and the reality is that they usually won’t.
So whether that dream or that goal is a certain financial goal or whether it’s to have a job and do work you love or to be married in kids by a certain age you often can’t control the timing of certain things but what you can control is your daily habits and your daily actions.
Drift is really what happens to so many people because we think that by a certain age this will just happen but our daily habits are not congruent. With that our daily actions are not aligned with that and what happens is below our expectations as time goes on we’re 30 then 40 then 50. We thought all of these great things would happen and then they don’t because the great things you hope of in life often don’t just happen.
You need to do something strategic.
The second reason I see people fail in life is that you’re deciding what you want based on what other people tell you. You should know that last conversations of hundreds of people before death — the number one thing that people said was some version of I wish I’d lived a life true to myself and not the life others had expected of me.
Let me paraphrase this I wish I did what I actually wanted to do and not what my mom or dad or boss or society or grandparents or teacher told me I should do.
The fact that this comes up repeatedly is not surprising but what I see happen with so many people is that we make this bargain with the devil if I just get the high-paying job that I don’t care about! I become an investment banker or a doctor even though I’m not that interested in.
The day-to-day work sucks if I just do that and I suck it up for 10–15 years and I can retire, take care of my kids etc. May be things will work out and I don’t think even half of us are having that conscious conversation with ourselves alone but often what we’re doing is we don’t do what we want.
We do what society says we should do. We work the nine to five which is usually a nine to seven even though we don’t really want to. We do the job we don’t really want to do, we marry the person that’s safe and that’s good not the one we really want to marry and in general our lives are filled with all of these things that we should do rather than all the things we want to do.
But what’s crazy is that you know, everything you see around you is created by people no smarter than you. The people that I know that are entrepreneurs and consciously driven people are living the most incredible lives only because of one thing they questioned — the idea of what you should do or what you’re supposed to do. They did what they actually wanted to do.
Whether that meant as a parent they’re taking their two young kids out of school and they’re going to sail around the world and do homeschooling or that instead of working the nine to five they’re going to become an entrepreneur and control their fate and their future or that instead of living this life where they wait until they’re 65 to travel.
When you know their cheeks are hanging to the floor and they can’t even walk because their knees hurt, they decide that I’m going to do what I want to do right now. So I’m going to find a way to travel once or twice or even three times a year and I’m going to make that happen.
So many people decide what they want to do based on what they see other people doing or what they think they should be or what they think is realistic.
Don’t do that and don’t do that because you will never be happy living someone else’s life.
I love this idea of joseph Campbell when he talks about the hero’s journey and he was saying he developed this kind of superstition as his life went on that when you chase the things that are exciting to you.
You know he coined that term follow your bliss when you chase those things it’s almost as if life puts you on this track that was always there all along and it’s the idea that these doors then open for you that were closed all along before.
So I love this idea of when you chase the things that are excited they are connected to your purpose in some way and I think so many of us think we have to quit our jobs and move to some place or leave our kids or whatever it is but you don’t it only takes an hour a day to change your life.
So I think if you dedicate time in your life to chasing what excites you — an hour a day to taking little baby steps towards that goal or that dream or that change you want to have and then you really are disciplined about taking time every single day to move towards the life you want. You can create something that is so incredible and so inspiring that you never would have thought that it was possible but only if you prevent drift.
You decide what you want. You chase the things that excite you. You don’t listen to the instructions of society or other people and you really make sure you actually are taking daily action aligned with that goal whatever it is whether it’s writing a book or building a business or finding love if you take that action that’s aligned every single day whether it’s six months or a year or three years you’ll look back and you’ll realize that now at 44 you’ve built the most incredible life.
You’re just getting started.
This story is submitted to the following writing invitation. Thanks Mil.
