Nobody is Going to Hand You An Opportunity to Disrupt the Status Quo

This is not your practice life. And when that sentiment ceased to be esoteric bullshit, when the poetry of that statement dissolved into the full weight of its truth and practicality, I began to make wildly different decisions. I began to recognize that living for tomorrow is nowhere as near as potent as living for right here and right now. — AJ Leon

Mostly we wait

• Until we’re old enough
• Until we’re courageous enough
• Until we have enough money saved
• Until we are finally get picked and plucked from obscurity into the limelight
• Until we’ve gotten nods of approval from every single person we’ve been trying to prove wrong for the entirety of our lives (ex-boss,ex-girlfriend, high school teacher, parent or sibling)

- Until someone pundit, internet celebrity or breeder of unicorns deems us worthy of disrupting the status quo.

But here’s the part that is in the fine print, that part you probably glossed over in the contract of society’s life plan.

Nobody is going to hand you an opportunity to disrupt the status quo.

Nobody is going to tell you that you don’t have to choose from the options in front of you because

• Students would walk out of universities
• Retailers would see their bottom lines plummet because people would stop buying shit they neither need or want.
• The pharmaceutical industry would implode
• The list goes on and on…

Just imagine a world in which EVERYONE thought they didn’t have to choose from the options front of them.

Nobody is going to tell you that you can shape and shift the world around you, because if this was conventional wisdom being passed onto the masses the earth may tilt off its axis and it would be anarchy.

• It doesn’t come wrapped in a blue box from Tiffany’s.
• It doesn’t come in a red gift bag from Victoria’s secret.
• It’s not listed on Linkedin as a position you can apply to.
• You can’t order it on Amazon even if you’re a member of Prime.
• It doesn’t come in an email from Oprah’s crew letting you know that you’ve done something deemed worth of an appearance on Super Soul Sunday.

The opportunity to disrupt the status quo is something you create. It’s a decision to live deliberately, to stop treating your life as a dress rehearsal, and realize that this is in fact not your practice life.

And should you dare to do so, you’ll not only reap its rewards but inevitably encounter the obstacles that come with it.

It won’t be easy. In fact, it will be fucking hard, probably harder than anything you’ve attempted to in your entire life.

• You’ll endure sleepless nights.
• You’ll endure blood, sweat, and tears.
• You’ll endure the demons of fear, anxiety, depression and self-doubt.
• You’ll even want to quit.

And when you get to the end of it all, you’ll have a lot of scars. But the courage to live deliberately to challenge, question and defy the status quo is the thing that stands between you and a greater level of significance, not success but significance. To live a life of intention, meaning and purpose, and not look back if you were going to die tomorrow and find yourself wondering about a life that might have been.

I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Every Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. Receive our next issue by signing up here