What does Average Mean?
“Mediocrity comes from the Latin words medius, meaning middle, and ocris, meaning rugged mountain. Literally translated, it means to settle halfway to the summit of a difficult mountain. It’s a compromise of abilities and potential; a negotiation between the drive to excel and the biological urge to settle for the most comfortable option.” -Todd Henry
Average can represent different things. In math, the average is the middle or central point. Sometimes, average is used as the standard like the average woman or man does this or that. Medical and academic results are also explained in terms of the average results for the group. In this write-up, the average I am talking about is closely related to the definition of mediocrity by Todd Henry in his book, Die Empty. Specifically where he says, “It’s a compromise of abilities and potential; a negotiation between the drive to excel and the biological urge to settle for the most comfortable option.
Do you recognize when and where you are living an average life? Would you like to experience excellence which is the opposite of average? There are a few simple things you can do to breakthrough any average in your life you would love to change.
In this blog, we will look at:
- what may be wrong with thinking and being average.
- the cost of just “coasting” along.
- 3 simple ways to move from average to excellent.
Is Average Wrong?
Everyone cannot be perfect in everything all the time. As humans, there are certain things we may be good at and things we just do, and other things we are not just good at. And this is perfectly okay. What is not okay is settling for average when you have the abilities.
What a year it has been! 2020 started off with many promises for most people. Good and great promises. I started the year really pumped. I had lots of dreams and milestones planned out for the year. Then the pandemic happened! Some have had it great this year and many others have lost loved ones and gone from one challenge or loss to the other. As a collective whole, the whole world is crying out as we do our part to pull each other up in these times.
No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
William Penn
As we approach the final days of this year, I am reflecting a lot on the journey of this year. I see some pain and suffering. And amidst that, I also see a lot of progress and accomplishments. Most of these would have remained unthinkable had the pandemic not happened. The year reminds me of the fact that it’s in pain we know our capabilities. “No pain, no gain”. “There’s no crown without a cross”
As I reflect, I ask myself, why good has to come from suffering. Why can’t there be great progress and accomplishments like we’ve seen in the past few months without so much pain? I think part of the answer lies in the fact that most people like comfort. If we can just get by and meet some of our basic needs, then we remain where we are. We may occasionally wish for better yet we do nothing different.
Coasting along can be “fun” most times. Yet, we sometimes get that nudge or maybe guilt that reminds us we could do better. But…, well, if I am not struggling you may say, what’s the point? After all, not everyone is cut out to be famous and rich. That is true and a fact but it also totally depends on your definition of success and your life purpose.
Everyone can excel in their life purpose. In fact, we are doing our world a disservice if we do not excel in the gifts we are blessed with. Now, this is also true because everyone has been blessed with some gifts – not just one gift.
The Cost of Compromising your Abilities
In the scriptures, Jesus told the parable of the talent- Matthew 25:14-30. He uses the story of the merchant who was traveling and called his three servants. He gave them each some talents. To one he gave five talents, the next, he gave three talents and the third servant got one talent.
Interestingly, the first two, who got more talents put their talents to work. They doubled their talents. The servant that received the one talent did nothing with the talent he was given. The one talent he had was taken from him and given to the servant with ten talents. While there are many lessons from this parable in the scripture, one of the poignant lessons is on using the talents and gifts you’ve been given to bless others and better the world. One of the consequences of doing nothing- coasting is that you will lose even the little you have
Have you noticed how this actually happens in your life? There have been times I just got comfortable and did not use some skills for a while. When I had to use them, it was a challenge as I had become quite rusty and out-of-date. There was a lot of work to be done to get that skill back to shape or even catch up with the front runners.
So, why remain average especially with those talents and strengths you’ve been endowed with? Have you ever had a bad experience with excelling? It is good to excel! You are blessed by excelling. Your family, friends, neighbors, team, and everyone in your circle of influence is blessed directly or indirectly when you excel. The opposite happens when you are coasting in mediocrity: you suffer; everyone suffers as you deny yourself and the world your awesomeness.
Moving from complacency to Excellence
How then can you move from average to excellent? Especially when the “flesh is weak but the spirit is willing” – Matthew 26:41
During the past months of 2020, I have excelled in different areas of my life and I can attribute this successful journey to a couple of things. These were mostly simple, common things that we all already know. But of course, most times, simple is never easy. And what makes simple, not so easy is usually because we have to do some work. We have to build the required habits, be disciplined and consistent in our simple yet impactful practices and habits. Then and only then do we start to see results, First, the results come in trickles, then it hits the peak. Keeping the momentum going with the consistent actions then transforms these simple acts into effortless actions that continue to yield excellent results.
3 Simple Steps to excellence
#1. Set your Intention: At the end of 2019, I had enrolled in a transformational coaching program that kicked off in January 2020. Usually, towards the end of every year for many years now, I take several weeks to reflect on the year and set a theme for the coming year. Having enrolled in this coaching program, I made a conscious effort to really set my intentions for the coming year. And so I sat down and wrote down what several areas of my life would be by December 2020.
Who knew what a year we were getting?! But as Jim Carrey said, “When I say life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you, I really don’t know if that’s true. I’m just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so that I can deal with them in the most productive way.”
Setting my intention was not an easy exercise because I had some limiting life beliefs around working hard and harder. During my reflections, while doing this exercise , I asked myself some really hard questions. I have always been a hard worker and still am. As a matter of fact, I believe that I cannot have excellence without working hard.
But the revelation I got during the period of reflection was that on looking at some of my results till then, working hard was not cutting it. I was also good at working smart, however, I was definitely missing something. I took some time to study some successful people and began to notice a pattern. They were not just doing stuff or working on things and getting results. They are laser-focused on their purpose and intentions.
That was simple action #1 – what was I working hard on? Not that I didn’t have a sense of my purpose, but getting very specific did wonders for my purpose. It was fuel to manifesting my intentions for the year. And better still, I can actually track accomplishments and be thankful for them. I could go on about the power of setting your intentions – daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc, but I will save that for another blog. So watch out for that.
#2. Get crystal clear on your purpose: Setting your intention is a great first and powerful step. To excel however, you need to do more than setting your intention. Your intention becomes even more potent in your mind when you get crystal clear on your purpose. Distractions are a terrible thing when it comes to being excellent. We see distractions everywhere – our mobile phones and devices, people in our lives, including people that just make their way into our lives uninvited( thanks to TV and social media).
What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.
Robin Sharma
When you are crystal clear on your purpose, you will find that your focus changes. In Proverbs 23:7 (GNT), the writer says, ” What he thinks is what he really is.” Your thoughts determine your behavior which then influence your actions. There are exercises to help get you clarity. Being crystal clear is not a one-time exercise. You will need to work on embedding that vision strongly in your thoughts. That way, you are not unwavering in your thoughts on your purpose.
I’m sure if you reflect on your life so far, you will find one or more examples of certain things you really wanted, and you knew exactly what that item was – the color; the smell; the size; how you will feel when the item arrived, etc. You knew this desired item just like you already had it. Then, on the other hand, there might have been another item you wanted – but you did not exactly attach much to this desire in terms of using all your senses to want it.
Chances are in the case of item 1, you began to see it everywhere you went, you began to notice it. And the more you saw it, the clearer it was to you. And I can bet you that you certainly got this item exactly as you had imagined/lived it, over the period you were thinking about it. You may have even got better than you dreamed. Meanwhile, item 2 may or may not have happened. In any case, the energy around those 2 items is definitely different. That is how you get clarity on your purpose and then focus on it.
#3. Focus on one thing at a time: There is tremendous power and kick to focusing on one thing! The One Thing is a great book that not only shares many illustrations on the power of one thing but it also provides a guide/system to help you achieve that. This year, I chose to really focus on one thing at a time. I did this in both my personal life and at work.
This was one singular action that supported many of the accomplishments I had this challenging year. Like I mentioned earlier, focusing on one thing is really a simple action but I found it very challenging. I still struggle sometimes with this because it is just a challenge to pick one thing from the many exciting things around(including the distractions). I remember clearly when I had to call myself out and get serious with practicing the one thing this year.
I am an avid learner. My love for learning means that almost everything is a learning opportunity. So with the pandemic came many learning opportunities- literally and figuratively. Wow! There were so many free courses being offered from – well- everywhere and everyone. I suddenly found myself registering and consuming so much information that I was getting burnt out. Everything was so good but there was just no way I could live a normal life taking one course after the other; starting new work and personal projects (because with more learning new ideas are sparked); so I had to pause the “madness” at some point.
I went back to the drawing board, looked at my intentions and purpose as set earlier, and used that to decide on one thing that if I engaged in at any point in time would hit so many other strides and goals in my life. This was and still is a struggle but sticking to the process has led to many identifiable accomplishments not just in my life but with the impact I am having as well on my family and friends.
As I start my year-end ritual of reflecting on the year’s journey while envisioning the coming year, I am excited to work on my vision board. With the 3 simple steps above, I excelled this year and will continue to excel in the coming year.
Coasting along can be fun, until you find yourself where you do not want to be. You will be of more service to yourself and others by making good use of your talents. By setting your intention, being crystal clear and focusing on one thing at a time you will excel and accomplish a lot.
Are you ready to excel effortlessly?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Thanks for reading!
Blessings
Great post Ifeoma! I am challenged by your conclusions illustrated by the one talent person. The way you described ‘coasting’ is very true, especially how it leads to atrophy. One question though: how did you select one thing and stay focused? Where there times new opportunities came up that rivaled or exceeded your one thing, and how did you handle it?
Thanks, Joy for reading this post. “Coasting” can definitely lead to the progressive decline of skills. When I used to work more frequently with financial data, I was abreast of advanced excel features and then I stopped learning at some point because I still did a good job with excel. I found out at some point I was doing myself a disservice the day I was trying to automate a process by designing an excel template. So though I don’t need to use a lot of features in excel in my current job, I still find ways to use the tool to work.
Selecting one thing and staying focused for me starts with my bigger vision and goals. Sometimes, it’s selecting the one thing I must do at work each day to reach my goal at the end of the week. One personal example though was when I decided to reduce the financial stress I had with my credit cards. My husband and I use two credit cards and we had no strategy on how we charged items on these cards.
So, we decided that our monthly credit score will be our focus. Having it steady depended on making sure our balance was never more than 30% of the total credit we had (e.g, a credit limit of $8000 means you should not carry more than $2400 on your credit card to not have a negative impact on your credit score). We identified this because, though we paid these cards on time, we never knew how much was going to be on any card at each point and we had to remember which payment was coming up and when – all the juggling.
1. We decided to charge all our automated utility bill payments through one card which gave us cashback. We then left some small subscription bills like Netflix and Spotify on the credit card that gives us travel points (we found out we needed lots of buying to get enough points ever for flying anywhere :).
2. We arranged fixed payment schedules with all the service providers – including the timing of billing and monthly cost (called budget billing by the utility providers we use)
3. Set up automatic monthly payments for the credit card bills for each of these cards – recurring amount each month (because we know with certainty how much each bill costs).
By choosing to monitor our monthly credit score (some banks and credit card companies provide this every month from Transunion), we have automated most of our monthly budgeting, focused on our values, and ultimately eliminated the stress of juggling monthly bill payments.