Slightly Below Average

My Bad Advice For Good People

Taylor J Wallace
The Startup
5 min readMar 26, 2018

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For the last 111 days I’ve been presenting my poorly and ill-informed advice and thoughts to good people around the the inter-web people in a person quest to dominate nothing. And it’s been great.

I’ve posted A LOT of stuff in the over the last few months. Safe to say that I’m as exhausted of writing and thinking about it as you are for putting up with seeing it in your precious temple that is the social feed. But don’t worry, it’s over, at least for now. Mostly. I think.

“Confidence is the successful reputation of any endeavor.” Debbie Millman

I’ve written and shared 50,000+ of my personal best words, favorite thoughts and most impactful principles that I’ve encountered.

What started out as a personal challenge to share something of value every day for a week blossomed into an assault on life consisting of 100 “meaningful” posts directed at contributing something authentically representational of how I see, think and connect with who we are and the world we live in. But why?

To produced the content of the poorly written, below-average book I was never really going to write in a free, easily digestible public format. So there it is and there I am. These are the things I GAF about.

IF IT’S PROBABLE, IT’S POSSIBLE. ANYTHING!

And all it cost me was a small chunk of my sanity, some personal pride/ego, a small slice out of my social life and repurposing some of my “free time” for productive time doing more meaningful things.

Suffer a little now for the opportunity to live a life without suffering. Anything is available to you. All you have to do is work for it: in time and attention, not in thought and prayer.

And if you want a normal social life and a fairly meaningful relationship with both friends and a significant other, you are going to give up the opportunity to excel in other areas. With that you’ll have to accept that there are harder working, more progressive people out there learning more, and more often, at more progressive rates than us. They know more, give more and think differently.

I may not be one of them but from the little I do incomparrasion, I can certainly appreciate their efforts and what they create and share with the world. So thanks to them and the constant inspiration to be slightly above average some day. 😉

As a caveat, this process lead me through 7 books, 150+ hours of podcasts and personal development videos and podcasts, a career change, a slew of fitness-related personal records and completely new and revitalized appreciation for life and those I’m lucky enough to have in it

Sincerely,

Your slightly below average friend, coach and confidant Taylor.

Go Get Some!

Throwback Thoughts From Me For You

A collection of the first few thinkings posted only a few months ago…

Making Sense

We spend the majority of our lives in the space we are not, rather than the space we are in.

It’s often thought that life lives in and through the objects, motions, thoughts, feelings and things we can identify and put words and a place to. But it seems more and more that the space or void between what we know is the missing piece of the puzzle, needed to make sense of it all. .
That is of course, if it’s anything we ought even to make sense of.

One might argue, sense is made. That there is nothing more to make sense of. But if there were, it certainly seems the only ingredient available would be non-sense.

And there’s today’s rub.

When You’re Strange

The stories we read, write and live through often follow predicable patterns. And as simple beings, with simple and somewhat fearful minds we love predicability; we crave it. It’s comfortable, it’s what we know and it’s so satisfying. That is of course unless you are strange.

The strange aren’t so simple. They’re different, slightly chaotic in thought and nature and grow bored of predicability; they may even despise it. And when they’re bored, they stir. And when they stir, they create havoc, chaos and erratic behavior that challenges the status quo and makes everyone around them, including themselves, a little more uncomfortable. Innovation and change loves the strange; politics, social norms and the analytical do not. It doesn’t fit, yet.

Either way, be authentically yourself and acknowledge the existence of alternatives. They both play a role. And if you’re one of these strangers, stay strange. Leave the predictability to the other 99% and write us all a story that couldn’t possibly be fictitious. We’re all dying to read it.

Tattoo Yourself With Today

Why do we do things? How more generic can that be. To experience? To have.

We do to have, to remember; and we are tattooed. In the best and most permanent of sense.
With something we’ve experienced. It’s a lifetime.

It may be forgotten time to time, years even, go by without a glance or acknowledgment but it’s there, forever.

We’re covered in them, tattoos, and if you’re not, go get one.

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Taylor J Wallace
The Startup

Thoughts and words. My curious experiment in designing a life worth living and passionately killing it, one beautiful moment at a time.