Don’t Win, Focus on Growing.
Happiness is highly correlated with goals achieved. In other words, the goals you set dictates your happiness.
That means you are happy when you reach your goal, but that happiness also comes with its own dangers — it makes you more complacent.
Winning, achievements, goal checkers are not things that will lead to eventual growth — they lead to short-term growth. Do you ever find yourself slacking off after you take off — either you lost that pound or achieved the yearly revenue goal?
You don’t want to be falling back to the comfort rabbit hole after things start to take off. Don’t give in just because things are good enough. Don’t stop because you’re satisfied.
Innovation happens when people ask questions about why we think things are good enough. Innovation happens when people work on things that are deemed good enough. Innovation happens when people don’t give up working on things just because it’s good enough.
Don’t be complacent, practice being anti-complacent.
1. Create Mental Triggers to Avoid Being Complacent
The first step to learning or adapting to something new, like practice being anti-complacent when you’ve never practiced it before is to unlearn the things you’ve been comfortable with all along.
You can’t start being anti-complacent until you stop being complacent.
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. “— Lao Tzu
What I’ve started to do recently was establishing mental triggers to signal to myself whenever I start being complacent. Some things I’ve started doing:
- Before you sleep, ask yourself how you’re working towards being more helpful to the world. But don’t ask yourself what you’ve done, because the point of this question is to guide you to realize how much more you can do.
- When you debate whether or not you should go that extra mile, stop debating and just do it.
2. Set Moonshot level Goals
Don’t just be a box-checker, and don’t just set goals to achieve them.
Every time you check off a goal, always set a new one. While you’re at it, don’t just be complacent with setting just any goal. Try setting a moonshot level goal next time.
What’s does moonshot level mean?
- Moonshot level is thinking 10x. It’s not about how you can improve by 10%, it’s about how you can improve by 10x.
3. What’s Your Why?
Your drive is your why. Without your why, you won’t be able to take off because you don’t know what you’re in it for.
Remind yourself of your why. There’s always a reason why you want to try hard and put effort into something. The why doesn’t have to follow a story, it doesn’t have to be super emotional, but don’t think you don’t have one just because it doesn’t fit into the traditional definition of what your “why” is.
Your why can be as simple as I’m curious, I want to be helpful, I’m grateful, or I want to give back. Those are valid “whys”.
4. Don’t Wait. Do it Now.
The key to being anti-complacent is to stop waiting, just give it a shot. Stop waiting for the perfect timing, stop waiting until you are ready, stop waiting until you find meaning, just stop waiting.
Waiting doesn’t help, it just leads to inaction.
Remind yourself every day that you only have 100 years on Earth, and that’s the maximum. We all likely have spent the last years waiting, there’s no more time left to wait — you just have to do it.
Creating a sense of urgency around the important things you value in life is key.
“The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.” –Walt Disney
Don’t be complacent. Complacency loves to make you think that all you’ve achieved is so far is all you can do.
There’s so much more waiting for you and you don’t have time to be complacent.
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.“ — Andy Grove
✌️ Joey
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