I've touched on this subject in a bunch of threads in this forum before, but I've decided to write a piece about it with it as the sole focus of a thread to describe my stance.
I watched this railroad safety training video recently. Statistically, the longer you work on a railroad, the greater your chances of being hit by a train are, since the more exposure you have to trains, simply by sheer numbers, the greater your chances for mishap. But, additionally, through time your caution becomes lax by nature. So to my surprise, those portrayed to at the greatest risk of being hit by trains on the job were not the new guys, but the veterans, the 10, 15, 20 year veteran employees who have been working on the tracks long enough to begin to get careless.
This brings us to the topic of my discussion: complacency. Americans in particular adopt too many policies of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “out of sight, out of mind.” Think about the parents who work hard everyday at their jobs, every day, to support their children, and then go home and tell them about how they want a better life for their kids. Well, that is commendable, but I feel they are standing on the dock waving their ship good-bye when it’s really not that hard to get on board themselves. The parent may work very hard, granted, but are they challenging themselves? That’s the key here. I’d say easily 99 out of 100 times, NO, the parent is not challenging him or herself. It’s like the old saying: work smarter, not harder. Working hard, because it can often become a practice of habit, is not what I call a challenge. Working in new ways, changing your occupation or routine and learning different trades, that is challenge.
Think about the person who wants to be rich. Well, seems step one to being rich is getting a job, and step two is saving up money, right? I used to agree with this school of thought, however, I have veered sharply from this mentality in the last couple years. The reason: this is a path of complacency. I look at people who work at the same company for most of their adult lives, perhaps only on a mediocre path for advancement. It will be extraordinarily difficult for someone in this situation to acquire wealth. I feel that the way to do it is not to work for “the man,” but to go into business for yourself. Working for a large firm, it gets too easy to get sucked into the system. You work, you get your two weeks a year, and through time you settle down, you get married, you raise a family, all the way getting a bone thrown at you once or twice a year in the form of a 3 to 5 percent raise. Is this supposed to be living? You are walking the beaten path to nowhere special. You never stray from the path of mediocrity. More importantly, you are never forced to step out of your comfort zone.
Most people coast through life (once they have finished school) never having to do anything that makes them uncomfortable. I know I’ve rambled about this before, but I’ll do it again to beat my point a little more: where would early humanity have gotten if they (these are our ancestors now) had decided to be lazy and not carry out the battle to survive by hunting and gathering food? They would have gone extinct. And this struggle was fought every day. Look at us now: we work eight hours, then come home, and chug a few beers sitting on our asses with a bag of Doritoes in one hand and the TV remote in the other. Seems at some point we realize we are not the supreme beings we once thought we were, so we instill our desire to better ourselves in our kids, and try to “inspire” them to grow up to be better people and make more of themselves.
My friend and I noticed this. We were hanging out during our senior year of college, working hard on thesis, and partying like rock stars whenever we could find the time between thesis chapter due dates and career counselor meetings, because hey, college is where all the fun is, and its all downhill from there: the real world awaits. Well, we finally did graduate, and a couple months afterwards we got on the phone, and remarked at how easy real world life is once you’ve got a job, a car, and a place to live. We found that being a working stiff is a cakewalk compared to what we were subjected to in college. School is where the challenge is (at least relative to most career paths)
I think about the poor immigrant who comes to America with nothing but the promise of the American dream. They may have nothing to work with, but chances are, just getting onto these soils with a visa was a struggle in and of itself. This person will do much better for themselves than their equivalent native American in a similar situation. I must tread cautiously, I am not making a statement here to trash the work ethic of the average American, or say that there are not Americans in poverty, etc. My point is that I am inspired by people like this, people like Andrew Carnegie who came to America broke, and his projected with today's inflation, he may still be the wealthiest person in history.
To sum up, most of us are victims of complacency. Stop and think about how often you do something that makes you really uncomfortable, or something that scares you. If you can say even once a week, you are not in sparse company. Because I have seen too many people that go unchallenged for years. This is why I think complacency is among the worst of all human qualities. It ties into wealth, it ties into matters of life and death, it seems interlaced with our very existence. We somehow gravitate towards being sloths, and it is very sad. Because imagine if you could accomplish and overcome something that scares you, or do something that makes you uncomfortable, and survive it everyday? You’d feel like a million bucks, and that’s pretty much what you’d be worth. I believe that people driven enough to never stop challenging themselves will never settle for failure, will never give up, and have no other option than to succeed in whatever they do.
Thanks for reading-
-JD