What is your alternative? -A response to Gary Vaynerchuk

This blog entry serves as my personal response to Gary Vaynerchuk’s question of “What is your alternative?” in his blog post he writes:

I feel as though, in a world where more and more everyday I’m being asked questions to help navigate, and figure out and dictate how people should feel and what they should do, I’ve found that this one little statement is basically the answer 94.2% of the time.

And that is, “What’s the alternative?”

There are so many people in the world that dwell about their circumstance of how they think it should be instead of how it actually is. They wonder what if and they don’t do. They ask me how to be happy, or how to work harder, or why they should do social media or why they should develop brand, or why they have to work so hard for their dream, or why it takes exercise to lose weight? And the answer simply is, “What’s the alternative?”

The moment you are old enough and capable enough to leave the shelter of your parents roof, it’s totally on you. Everyday I remind myself that I am where I am today because of my own choices. This holds true if I’m in a good or a bad place depending on where I am at that day.

We all have our off days. During these days when im feeling unmotivated to put in the necessary work I just think to myself how disappointed I woud be in myself if in a years time I was still in the same place. Get off your lazy ass son and go do something that will match your ambition.

On the good days its still prudent to think back and realise how much you have to be grateful for. Being thankful for what you have helps you gain perspective as happiness is relative afterall and it means different things to different people. It seems however that some do not know what their definition of happy is and they just base their definition of happiness on what they see in others. This is where the “keeping up with the Jones’” mentality comes from.

Every few moths or so when I go back to the city to catch up with friends I always hear the same story from them. It’s the same old just working their 9–5 in a job they hate to pay the bills, pay off their million dollar mortgages, pay off the credit card debt they’ve accumulated from living it large, working for the weekend, thank god its friday kind of mentality. Maybe i’m wrong and working for someone else till retirement to pay off the mortagage after morgage will make them happy. But this seems more like 30 years of slavery to me.

I get that entrepreneurship is not for everybody. But if you’re complaining about rising interest rates, bad tenants, shitty work colleagues, the long hours, how broke you are etc… how could you not want more out of life than to simply exist on a rinse and repeat cycle of working like slaves to pay the bills, hoping that your property’s value goes up and maybe go on holiday every now to escape your reality however temporary. Seeing people stuck in this seemingly inescapable cycle of reality just validates the path of Entrepreneurship i embarked on since 1999 as the right one for me. The reality that many of my friends live is a scary alternative in my world view.

Most of us are privileged to live in a world where one is free to make their own choices and in doing so map out one’s own destiny.

You’re in control. It’s your life. It’s on you.

Thanks for reading! I’m still new at putting my thoughts down into words beyond a comment on social media. So I apologise if this post seems a bit disjointed when reading it, I’m litteraly just typing as I would speak.

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