Earlier on in my life I was very judgmental towards those people who settle for mediocrity.
Now, I come from a really underprivileged background so I was always starving for opportunities.
That’s why I couldn’t understand how is it possible you have all these opportunities
but you just don’t take any advantage of them.
It made no sense to me.
Then enough time past, enough careers observed, I noticed something very interesting, which
allowed me to stop being judgmental towards those.
What I observed had to do with lethargy cycle.
Regardless of your privileges, your status in life or your career level, you can very
well be stuck in it.
It’s a syndrome where you lack energy to take any drastic action.
It’s when your negative thoughts lead to lack of action, and lack of action contributes
to negative thoughts.
It’s a negative feedback loop.
This continues until you hit the bottom.
Sometimes you hit the bottom in a year sometimes in a decade, a slow career death.
You hit your mid 30s, then you realize that somewhere along this career journey you steered
off course.
You ended up not where you wanted to be at the beginning.
Big name employers are not interested in you, your skills are not valuable, you don’t
have major skills, your experiences are fairly basic.
You’re just not in demand.
Now, why does it happen?
Here’s why.
Bear with me for 2 minutes.
You get energy and more willpower when you achieve your goals.
And conversely, when you don’t achieve your goals, you lose energy.
In simple terms, every action has a consequence.
If you take action and you win, you get energy boost.
You take action and you fail, you lose energy.
Fairly simple to understand right?
I’ll repeat.
You take action and you win, you get energy.
With that energy, you can shoot for bigger challenges.
You take action and you lose, you lose energy.
Next time, you’ll have less energy, less willpower, less confidence, less motivation
to take a similar action again.
It doesn’t mean once you fail, you won’t be able to pass in the 2nd try, it just means
this time you’re more likely to fail compared to the first time all else being equal or
you need more resources.
This applies to every aspect of your career.
You get a promotion too early and you fail at that job, it’s more difficult to recover
your career instead of waiting for the right time.
You heard the phrase failure is just a step towards success.
It’s part of the process.
That’s true but it’s misunderstood.
Failure after doing all you can, giving your 100%, your blood, sweat and tears, then sure.
It’ll be the greatest teacher ever.
But failing after not doing your 100%, and picking a battle where you have no chance
of winning in the first place is just plain stupid.
You’ll learn nothing from that experience and it’ll put you on a trend for lethargy
cycle.
After a few failures like that, you’ll lack any energy to keep going.
You know that if you gain that particular certificate, it’ll help your career immensely.
But you somehow never find the time for it.
You want to get a better job, but you never tried anything other than making click applications,
online applications.
These are all symptoms of lethargy cycle.
How do you break it?
You need wins.
Quick wins.
Your brains priority is not to make you energetic or successful, or even happy.
I’ll repeat, your mind doesn’t care if you’re successful or not.
Your mind’s priority is to keep you alive and pass your DNA to next generations.
That’s it.
So, you’ll have to trick your mind with wins.
You need to get that winning sensation.
However small that win is, you need to get it for the right hormones to be released.
It’ll be your jump starter.
It could be getting a better job, maybe not the one you want in the end but something
better than what you have, or getting a promotion, getting that professional certificate maybe
not the greatest one but still a certificate that will be useful, you need wins.
With more wins, you’ll get more energy, with more energy, you’ll get more wins,
see where I am going with this?
It becomes a positive feedback loop.
You will just keep going up and up for many years.
There’s no stopping you.
You just need to break that lethargy cycle first.
See you next week.