Mediocrity.
Look around most places you go: where you work, the places you shop, at the grocery store, the restaurant, the fast food place (if you visit such places).
What you’ll notice at any of these places is the middle aged and older people working here. What happened?
Did any of these people plan on being where they are right now. Did any of them plan when they left high school or college that “I think that by 40, 50, 55, etc I’ll be a cashier at Walmart, Lowes, a shift manager at McDonald’s”?
When you look upon most of these people, do they look happy? The long tired faces indicate not. The chit-chat and conversation of them indicates not either.
The great danger that lies ahead is that you may become one of them. Maybe you are already.
So how did this happen? Why are so many Americans, living in the land of opportunity, seemingly doomed to end up on the wrong side of a statistic? (You know the one about 97% of all people reaching retirement age not being able to retire financially independent).
The problem is two sided as I see it. Both of which, when combined, create this disaster that most people will, unfortunately, end up living.
Number one is the total lack of planning. Or the same as not updating plans or making new plans when the original plan fails. And yes, plans will likely fail.
You may get the excuses about life intervening in various ways as to one’s particular situation. Which leads back to the failure to update plans or make new plans. Stated another way, and heavily borrowed from Earl Nightingale, Do you have a “Plan B” should plan “A” not work out? What about Plan C?
Number two is equally important and also deadly. Whether it’s health, relationships, career, etc. It’s getting comfortable where you are. Accepting your current state of affairs and not improving/settling for less.
Health-wise, this is why you see so many people out of shape and overweight. The long term effects of this are devastating as far as longevity, quality of life, and overall happiness are concerned.
Financially this leads to decades passing by before one realizes, if ever, that they have made grave errors by getting comfortable about their future. Had the middle aged/older people we talked about earlier not gotten so “comfortable” with the way things were, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, they wouldn’t be in the situation they are now.
I write this not as some over achiever that has made all the right choices and been super successful by the age thirty. Far from it. As I write this I’m fast approaching forty and have much to accomplish if I myself wish to not end up like those discussed. It scares me that this can be a possibility, IF I let it. Which I will not.
So what does it look like to NOT be as everyone else?
Here’s a glimpse. Exercise a few days a week, eat properly, take time to plan for your future. This creates the situation where you enjoy the benefits of each.
Here’s what you may have experienced to varying degrees in getting comfortable. You don’t exercise, ever. You eat the fun foods that are not very nutritious at all. You get home from work and plop down in front of the TV for hours everyday, preventing any time to plan for your future. This leads to “paying the price” as Zig Ziglar puts it.
OK, so to be fair, this is a downward spiral. Eating the fun foods leaves you with little energy to want to exercise, and at the end of day it’s all too easy to watch TV because you haven’t properly fueled you body to do much else. It’s really easy to get wrapped up in any series TV program so you want to see what happens next. You have nothing to get excited about because you left little time to plan your future, other than your next vacation, which most often amounts to overindulgence in different pleasures.
And the time goes by.
Day after day, week after week, year after year. Next thing you know you’ve been laid off, you’re 55 and supposed retirement is right around the corner, you have a heart attack or stroke, or any other of life’s related hurdles. And, due to lack of planning and getting comfortable…there you are.
Scares me enough to make the changes, to create plans for my future, my health, my family, my legacy. Enough for me to get un-comfortable so that I do not end up on the wrong side of a statistic.
What about you?
Will you head the danger that lies ahead?