Jul 7, 2017
19 Ways to Remain Average and Unspectacular After Work
“Work at a job you don’t like for the majority of your professional life. Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work. Read every article on CNN.com every day. Attend useless meetings.
Take the credit when things go right. Put the blame on someone else when things go wrong. Never take responsibility for anything. When you fail at something, resolve to never try again.” -Chris Guillebeau
Benjamin Hardy, author of Slipstream Time Hacking tells a story of a friend who wanted to take his family on a vacation to Hawaii.
His friend projected they would need about 15 years to save the money and accumulate enough vacation time to afford the trip.
Hardy asked his friend why he couldn’t make the trip in 3 years. Or better yet, 3 months.
Sure, it would require momentous and monumental effort — but it was possible. They’d effectively save over a decade of time.
His friend didn’t have an answer.
That’s because his friend, like the average worker, is too used to being average and unspectacular.
Like Hardy’s friend in this example, the average person doesn’t think astronomically. They’re concerned with “paying their dues” and simply doing what they’re “supposed to do.”
You don’t need to waste time chasing the stereotypical definition of “success” to be successful and extraordinary.
The average worker is so used to their routine that caters to their average life, anything out of the ordinary has become foreign, scary, and generally to-be-avoided. They aren’t even interested in learning about shortcuts and wormholes.
Here are 19 ways to remain average and unspectacular once you get home from work, and thus ensuring you’ll stay on the same wide path everyone else is crowding.
1. Turn On the TV
“Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become.” -Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning
The average American watches at least 2.8 hours of TV a day. That means you need to fit in 2 Game of Thrones episodes and at least a couple Parks and Recreation reruns before bedtime, every workday.
You only have a few hours of free time during the week when you have a full-time job. Watching TV to unwind is fine, but most people aren’t responsible enough to use TV to relax.
Most people waste what little time they have through overconsumption.
Your level of success is closely connected to your level of personal development. If you want to be successful, is watching Netflix from dinner until bedtime every weekday really something you can afford to do?
2. Don’t Open Your Drawer With the Gym Clothes
“When you believe you can do a thing or not — you’re right.” -Henry Ford
“I just can’t.”
That’s what most people tell themselves about exercising.
Thinking of reasons you can’t exercise after work is extremely easy. Shall we?
- I’ve had a long day and I’m tired.
- I have a long day tomorrow and I should conserve what energy I have.
- I need to eat dinner first, and it’ll be too late by then.
- I don’t have anyone to go with .
- I had to wake up early this morning and I don’t have energy at 6pm.
- I’m fat. I’m just straight-up fat.
Timex did a survey of 1,000 individuals and their gym habits. Over half of them said they didn’t exercise more than a couple times a week. About half of that group said they didn’t exercise regularly at all.
How many people can you name that successfully work out routinely, even after a long day of work?
Probably not many.
Which is the point. The overwhelming majority of people don’t prioritize exercise.
Evolving is painful. Most people will simply choose the pain-free option. This is also why most people will never be successful.
3. Check Email / Instagram / Twitter / Snapchat / Facebook
“The time you spend being jealous of others’ success is time they spent working. Guess which one is more valuable.” -Jon Westenberg
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Group, you’ve almost certainly checked Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat today. Maybe Twitter. Definitely your email.
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work; Rules for Focuses Success in a Distracted World, he discusses the epidemic of unfocused, “shallow” work these days, where everything is interrupted by everything else.
“Deep” work requires intense focus, an unapologetic refusal to be distracted. It’s extremely rare and difficult to cultivate, and can’t happen when social media and push notifications constantly interrupt you.
But this deep work skill one of the most lucrative and in-demand skills in today’s economy.
When you constantly check social media and email during your few hours of free time after work, you forfeit your ability to become intensely productive and focused.
4. Drink Alcohol
“Alcohol — it’s cheaper than therapy!” -Anonymous
I used to work in phone sales. You guess it — it was awesome and I loved it!
Kidding.
I was having 8 cups of coffee a day to stay motivated, and about 2–3 beers when I got home to come down. I was stressed out as hell.
I wasn’t alone, either. Recent research has found that people are drinking more and more after work, especially after stressful days.
Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to practice self-control and use alcohol effectively; like TV, alcohol is a way to relax that most people overuse and abuse, leaving them numbed and lethargic.
If you thought going for a jog or reading a productivity book was hard after a long day, drinking a big glass of wine ensure you’ll definitely stay on the couch with the remote.
5. Drink Caffeine
Caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means it takes a full twenty-four hours to work its way out of your system.
Drinking caffeine messes with your sleep, one of the most important resources you have. It creates surges of adrenaline and makes it difficult to fall asleep, much less get a good night’s sleep. And this is from your morning cup.
Imagine what your evening cup does.
Many productivity and health experts urge people to quit caffeine entirely.
If you think you’re being more productive and energetic after work from that caffeine, you’re right — for a short time.
But after that little high, the rest of your night is spent tossing and turning. And guess which parts of your life are affected by being tired?
- Relationships
- Quality of work
- Emotional wellness
- Motivation
- Energy
- Sex drive
- Decision-making
- Inspiration
- Creativity
6. Drink Soda and Eat Junk Food
“It’s easy to pick up fast food for a meal. The hard decision is to take the extra time and effort to nourish and energize your body the right way.” -Tony Robbins
Most people have convinced themselves cooking their own food is simply too difficult.
You need to drive to the grocery store after work, wait in line, drive home, carry the groceries into the kitchen, put it away, prepare dinner, cook it, eat it, clean it, and save the rest for lunch tomorrow.
Nope. Going to Panda Express again.
Your body is a car. Cars need certain qualities of gasoline to work.
If you fill a high-powered Lamborghini with basic fuel, the engine will literally start to break down and fail far sooner that it would have had it received better gasoline.
On the other hand, a 1998 Honda Accord doesn’t need anything special. It’s fine with the cheapest grade of gas.
What kind of “car” do you have now?
What kind of car do you want to have?
Lamborghinis are rare. When they’re on the on the road, people tell their friends to look.
Hondas are a dime a dozen, and so are people who eat junk food when they get home.
No on turns their head for a Honda.
7. Play Video Games and Phone Apps
“What you focus on, expands.” -Benjamin Hardy
Two friends of mine and I have a bi-weekly Skype call where we help each other achieve our goals.
From one of my friends;
“I know video games are like, the obvious and most cliche time-waster there is,” he said. “But I still make time every day to play them. They’re relaxing, and I love playing them.”
Video games, like TV, are fine in small doses. But most people don’t know how to use either as an effective means to “recover,” and time they spend thinking they’re “relaxing” is actually time spent getting more wound-up.
When you spend time playing video games and escaping from reality, that mindset expands into other areas of your life.
One area of your life affects every other area.
Through overconsumption of TV and video games, you forfeit your precious time to connect with friends, read important books, and do the work necessary to develop the life you want.
8. Stay Up Late
“If you want it badly enough, and are willing to make some changes in your life to cause it to happen, you too can take over the world…The only things you’ll need to give up are assumptions, expectations, and the comfort.” -Chris Guillebeau
Sleep is like a black market commodity — it’s rare, expensive, and you can usually only get it at night.
Sure, some people can wake up early to write or read books or work out…but those people only include Kimmy Schmidt, Navy SEALs, and Chris Traeger from Parks and Recreation.
Right?
Most people wouldn’t say they’re a “morning person.” On the contrary, claiming to be a “night-owl” is a far more common response.
Of course, the “work” and activities most self-proclaimed night owls do at night largely consist of watching TV and mindlessly browsing social media.
If the average bedtime is around 11:30pm, and most people are “tired” to “very tired” when they wake up…
Is it any wonder most people don’t call themselves a “morning person?”
9. Keep Your Phone Within Arm’s Reach
The average person checks their phone during work at least 35 times a day.
I mean, what else are you going to do in elevators, on the can, or waiting for friends to show up?
Think about this: you probably literally spend less than 1 hour a day being more than 5 feet away from your phone.
When you’re driving, at work, when you’re eating, when you’re with people, and you’re on the couch at home, when you’re sleeping…
Your phone is always within arm’s reach.
By design, so are distractions. Your life, friends, family, job, interactions, and all bathroom breaks all become inherently less important than checking to see what your phone just buzzed about.
10. Don’t Read Blogs or Listen to Podcasts
“Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.” -Scott Adams
Most people would claim they want to make their life better.
But when it comes time to prove it, most people aren’t willing to spend the time reading articles and listening to advice by extraordinary people.
Who listens to podcasts on the way home? Who sits on the couch with a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when they could just watch Scandal instead?
Maybe a few people.
Probably the same few people who will eventually start a successful personal business, finish writing their first book, and eventually get enough freelance work to work entirely from home and spend time with their family.
Is it worth it to not read those books or listen to those experts?
What are you working for, anyway? Just to get home and watch TV?
11. Watch Sports
Watch a lot of sports, of different varieties. It doesn’t matter if they’re teams you don’t even care about.
Remember that when your team loses, you lose. Will them not to. Spend the next day fuming that “we” lost.
Cancel hangouts with friends to watch key match-ups.
12. Watch Porn, Reality TV, and the News
“If you are subsisting on content that’s unsettling, anxious, and soulless (see: the news, reality shows, horror movies, books written by hateful authors, porn), your mind will become stressed, scared, and cynical.” -Charlie Hoehn
It’s difficult to explain how often I looked at porn growing up.
Often, I would start around 10:00pm and end around 6:00am. If I was uncomfortable, scared, stressed, or anxious, porn would conveniently numb those feelings.
Reality TV and the news offers a similar avenue to numb out. Most of what the media reports on isn’t positive — it’s biased, critical, fear-mongering manipulation. Yet people experience a high when consuming this content.
These types of time-wasting activities that actually damage your soul.
They distract you from dealing with the things you need to confront the most — your own insecurity about being manipulated by your boss. Acknowledging the red flags in your relationship. Taking a hard look at your life and asking yourself, “is this where I want to be? Why am I still here?”
13. Shop Online
“I wonder what it is that the the more we have, the more we become prisoners of the thought of losing it, rather than setting us free.” -Nirmalya Kumar
I have a friend who has 6 t-shirts and 5 work-shirts, a few pairs of jeans, and a couple pairs of shoes. He’s the only guy I know that has so few items of clothing.
When I asked him why, he replied his wife and him simply want to live a simpler life. They’d rather spend the time/thought/money previously spent on clothes on each other instead.
I think that’s fucking awesome.
Mark Zuckerberg is too busy running the largest social media company there ever was to waste time making “silly” decisions about what shirt to wear in the mornings. Who cares?
And if someone like him doesn’t care, why do we care so much about what we look like that we spend hours worrying about it?
Buy what you need, and then stop worrying about it.
You can buy all the clothes you want when you have thousands of dollars coming in from the business you worked so hard to create.
Not before.
14. Put No Effort Into a Side-Business
“‘Good’ is the enemy of ‘great.’ Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for the good life.” -Jim Collins, Good to Great
Thomas Stanley’s groundbreaking financial book The Millionaire Next Door discusses the lifestyle of the majority of actual millionaires, not just the ones we see on television.
In reality, most millionaires are frugal, quiet people with intense discipline. A large number own businesses and have passive income streams. Their neighbors have no idea they’re wealthy, because they live well beneath their means.
This is what allows them to have lives we all want — freedom to spend time doing what they want to to, instead of being chained to a job that limits our potential.
They don’t just to “have a million dollars;” they have something better:
The ability to live the life made possible by having that wealth.
Developing these income streams is hard. But it’s even harder to keep working at a job you don’t like, trapped by debt and dissatisfaction with your career.
(If you want an easy, funny, and practical resource to start making passive income, check out Pat Flynn’s podcast, Smart Passive Income.)
15. Complain About Coworkers / Bosses / Your Commute / How Tired You Are / The Weather / The Cost of Gas / (Be Creative)
“Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining — it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.” -Zig Ziglar
I’ve had lots of bad bosses. They’ve been dysfunctional, lazy, and selfish.
But over time, I discovered I didn’t feel good after I spent a chunk of my date night with my wife complaining about them. I just felt more frustrated.
“Complaining is expressing ungratitude towards what God has dealt to you. And what life he deals out is what he intended and wanted. By complaining we hack away and destroy a small part of the larger whole.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
When we complain, we refuse to resolve the problems we were meant to solve. This hurts you and everyone else.
Instead of complaining about how bad the circumstances are, change what you can.
16. Spend a Long Time Making Dinner (and Don’t Pack Lunch Either)
Psh. “Meal prepping” is only something bodybuilders and Intragram fitness celebrities do to maintain their ridiculously-toned bodies.
Right?
My wife and I started to “meal prep” on Sunday evenings. We buy a week’s worth of lunch and dinner, and make all of it. We make huge pots of pasta, entire racks of chicken in the oven, and all of our largest bowls are full of salads.
It isn’t hard, and the benefits have been instant and significant.
We always have lunch to bring to work, so we’re saving money by not eating out. We were eating healthier foods, so our bodies feel better, as well as our emotional lives.
Best of all, we save a ton of time. Before, we would get home exhausted, and have the arduous task of cooking an entire meal from scratch if we wanted to be healthy.
Cooking it all at once saves time every evening.
17. Don’t Connect With Friends
Someone is always looking for a job, dealing with relationship problems, or asking for help with something they’re doing.
Ugh.
Connecting with friends takes time, money, effort, empathy, support, interest, motivation, and gas money. Sure, you know you should connect with them, but…long day of work.
Sorry.
This is the attitude most people begin to develop as they mature. As such, it’s probably not surprising our number of our close friends is shrinking.
Decades ago, an average person might feel confident they have 4, even 5 very close friends — people you call when your ass got dumped, people you can disagree with about politics (and still get along), people you text when you need an emergency ride to the hospital.
Nowadays, that number has shrunk to just under 2 close friends for the average person — and I’d bet it’s probably less than that for most people.
If you want to stay in the national average, keep ignoring the needs of others and save your energy for yourself.
It’s kind of weird to Google “how to make friends,” so I did it for you. Here’s 32 ways to connect with others better.
18. Worry About the Next Day
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:34
Most evenings feel like Sunday evenings, huh?
The uncomfortable dread sets in for most of us. Panic and deeper anxiety set in for nearly half of us. We know there’s a lot of stuff that could go wrong tomorrow…“better think more about it, that’ll help!”
Once you get home from work, worrying about tomorrow is possibly the most unproductive behavior you can practice.
It prevents you from ever fully enjoying what you do after work, which leaves you in a constant state of starvation from relaxation, even if you “gorge” on Fridays and Saturdays.
I eventually committed to not checking my email once I got home from work. It was fantastic. Over time, I began to learn how to leave work, both physically and mentally.
Focus on just today. There’s enough crap to deal with without worrying about tomorrow.
19. Wish It Was the Weekend Already
If you develop a mindset that seeks to “get through” the days, a few things will happen:
- You’ll accomplish it. You’ll get very skilled at getting through the days as fast as possible.
- Every boring, annoying, uncomfortable moment will eventually be numbed out and passed through without remembering it.
- Your days will start to fly by. Birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones will come sooner and sooner. Life will get much faster because you’re seeking to “get through” it, not savoring it.
- Your highs will only be during times where you’re free from unwanted obligations like work, school, commuting, etc. These times will seem rarer and rarer. All the rest of your time (which is most of it) won’t be enjoyed that much, if at all.
Focus on the here and now. Your days will have more hours in them, and your hours will have your days in them.
In Conclusion
“If your life feels out of whack or off balance, you’re likely avoiding the very thing you should be doing. Avoidance leads to busyness and distraction.” -Benjamin Hardy
Most people will never be successful.
Evolving is painful. Most people would rather take the easy, comfortable path of the majority.
But becoming extraordinary means giving up a “normal” life.
If you wish to continue on the same path as everyone else — being overweight, empty, unproductive, and stuck in a rut — practice these 19 behaviors. You’ll ensure you rarely ever feel uncomfortable or experience pain.
But if you wish to start living an extraordinary life…
It’s a good idea to stop doing any of these behaviors.
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