Intelligent, Ambitious, Curious and Industrious ? Say Grace Everyday.

It is in the nature of the ambitious person to be pushing themselves everyday. An ambitious person looks at something they do everyday and thinks to themselves:

“Hmm.. how can I do this better?”

“How Can I do this faster?”

“How can I save more time?”

“How can I save more money?”

How can I add more value to this experience, to life and my time?

If you add to ambition a good helping of industriousness you get someone who is always trying to move in one direction — Forward, upward, better and stronger.

Ambitious people become addicted to the kick of growth and improvement. Everytime they implement a new strategy for their work or add a little more weight on the bar in the gym, there is a positive feedback loop in the head that feeds what appears to be an ever present flame. To ambitious people, if something isn’t helping them grow, its a waste of time. If they’re not growing, they are dying.

One step forward, two steps back.

One thing that makes ambitious and successful people stand out is their ability to concoct and implement routines. Most ambitious people hold one thing , above all of their other resources in value — their time. Ambitious and intelligent people are acutely, and often painfully, aware of the time they have on earth. As far as they are concerned, it’s the only thing anyone has and it’s hard to argue with that.

The ambitious , like the rest of humanity, are subject to the tendency of the human mind to get used to things. It is a double edged sword. It lets the human mind put up with terrible circumstances for long periods of time. It also makes you forget why you started doing something in the first place.

It appears to be a struggle between letting go of something that has been serving you well for a long time for something new that might be better. I made meditation a regular habit of mine for a long time. It helped me greatly with many an existential crises. Sometimes though, I just forget how bad it can get without the practice and I neglect it only to get dragged back into a hole.

We seem to have a tendency forget why things are so good. When things we used to have to “work” to achieve becomes so routine that it doesn’t feel like work, when it doesn’t feel like it takes effort, we become complacent and slide back two steps.

Plateaus.

Ambitious people have a hard time handling plateaus in their lives. In strength training, for example, this is a very common thing. The stronger you get, the harder it is to get stronger. Adding 10 more pounds to your 500 pound squat may take more time and effort than it took to add 50 pounds to your 200 pound squat. The forward progress isn’t as noticeable as it once used to be. Sometimes it’s hard to say if you’re moving at all and that hurts.

What Am I doing with my life?

There comes a point in everyone’s life when they ask themself this question. It’s a hell of a question and one that demands an answer. Somewhere, deep in our minds we have a need to be “doing something with our lives”. We need to have some sort of progress and some sort of forward motion. We are but sharks in the ocean of our lives.

There are times in my day where I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. I feel like I’m sitting still as the world speeds on by me. I feel like I have nothing good or useful in my life. Every so often there has come a point where the things I’ve been doing and the effort I’ve been exerting just becomes the new normal. There comes a time when the food I eat, the places I go and the people I have in my life is just that — my life. My brain will adapt to a new baseline of what “normal” is. It is at this point that I become most vulernable.

Grace.

The problem with always looking forward is that you don’t see how far you’ve come. Life is an incremental journey. Sometimes those increments come rapidly and sometimes not so much. It’s depressing and painful. A good way to throw away what you have already is to not be able to look back and see how far you’ve come.

We have adjusted to the new normal. If we come home enough times to our family at the end of the day, it becomes the new normal. We forget that they were just hurtling around in a metal box at 70+ miles per hour along side other people in other metal boxes. We forget all the things that could go wrong. We forget all the people obeying the laws of the road, all the brakes in all the cars that worked that day and all the right decisions that were made for you and your family to go out in the world, thrive and come back home together in the evening. When we have all the food we want everyday at home, it becomes the new normal. We forget the entire supply chain from the store to the farmer that made that possible. We forget to be grateful.

We forget to take a second to stop, turn around from the horizon and look back at all the things that we have to be grateful for. All the little steps that we have taken and the effort it took to get where we are.

Of course you have to keep moving forward. Of course we have to keep getting better but if we don’t look back and remember all the things that worked, all the routines, beliefs and practices that we seem to have forgotten, we risk tumbling backwards to repeat our mistakes.

So, when you’re feeling like you have nothing to loose and like you’ve never got anywhere, bow your head over the fact that you have food to eat and that you’re back home, alive at the end of the day. It maybe the new normal now but it wasn’t always. You may have a long way to go, a long life to live and great things to achieve but remember, you’ve already come a long way. You didn’t come this far to only come this far but you also won’t get any further without being grateful for getting here.