Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have plenty of time. Time to do the things that matter is elusive.
Over the course of my life, I have observed this: We don’t take enough calculated risks, we stay loaded down in unpleasant situations too long and we do not work on ourselves for improvement.
Calculated Risks
I admire people who take a lot of risks. I also admire people who stay in their job for an entire lifetime.
I worked with a man who had worked for the local city government from age 18 to age 48, a total of 30 years in basically the same department, in the same city. Admirable. He sacrificed quite a bit to climb the government bureaucracy ladder including going through a few rough marriages and having some kids who lost contact with him due to his undaunted drive to succeed in that field. When we worked together, he had retired from the city and was taking a less-stressful job at my place of employment while enjoying the retirement income from 30 years of city work.
He and his wife made tons of plans to visit and travel now that he was retired from his super stressful job.
1 year after retirement he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.
Another friend of mine, who I also worked with in the same company and who worked with my friend mentioned-above, he came to me one day and said he was going to resign. This guy was 27-years-old and didn’t have another job lined up.
He and his wife had bought a pull-behind camper and they went on the road for about 12-months to have a go as a professional disc-golf player. He got some small sponsorships and they lived a very simple and lean lifestyle while traveling all over the country doing what he loved to do.
After a year on the road, they sold their camper and settled back into a more traditional daily work schedule.
I admire both of those men. I really do. I come from a generation where working for the same company your whole life was THE WAY – THE ONLY WAY to gain respect. Jumping from one thing to the next was frowned upon and it eventually caught up with you.
But I can’t help but look at my friend and his sweet widow and think, I bet they would have preferred to have taken a few more risks.
My professional disc-golf buddy has no regrets. He won some prize money, got sponsored enough to have the nicest equipment and had an experience that cannot be taken from him. They had some incredible laughs, some bad tournaments that tested his resolve and some terrible weather that tested their marriage in that tiny camper. But oh, what a memory. I love sitting with them and listening to all their stories from that 1 year where they just took off and threw caution to the wind.
Calculated Risks are almost always worth it.
Calculated – This means not haphazard and not so impulsive that failure would be life-altering.
I often tell my own kids, “don’t take risks, take CALCULATED risks.”
My son, Levi, is a trained gymnast. He can flip and fly with the best of them. He will often go rock-jumping with friends. As a parent, you can’t help but feel a bit nervous knowing the potential for injury. However, in an effort to teach them and allow them to enjoy life, I simple get in his ear and say, “Don’t take risks, take CALCULATED risks.”
For him, a backflip from 50 feet is a calculated risk. For him, jumping from 75 feet where the bottom of the water is not quite as deep as you would prefer, that is an unnecessary risk. Failure at that could be life-altering.
I get it, skydiving could be life-altering, too.
Defining “calculated risk” is a moving target for sure.
Stuck
Another thing that others do that keeps them from expressing their full potential is staying in a terrible situation. A toxic friendship, a terrible job, a car that is unreliable, etc….
Some situations, I confess, may not be so easy to get out of. The potential list of those are too numerous to explore, but I do understand that simply leaving a bad situation is certainly easier said than done.
However, it is also easier to leave a terrible job than many people think. A terrible, narcissistic boss is not going to reverse his ways and become kind and thoughtful. Find another job.
A friend that is negative and hateful and a taker and not a giver, is most likely always going to be that way. Create space, move on. The sunrise doesn’t last all day. You must move towards action.
An overweight, chronic pain-filled body will not fix itself. You have to move to action and make some very unpleasant decisions to eventually arrive at a more pleasant destination.
My son, Max, owns a home in North Carolina and he rents rooms out to help cover the mortgage.
He had interviewed a candidate for a room and the guy seemed great. Second interview went well also.
When he moved in, however, his furniture and vehicle reeked of illegal drugs, most notably marijuana but also included some other forms of drugs and drug paraphernalia.
My son was not home when the guy moved in, but the other two roommates began texting him. It was a little difficult to get a handle on the situation but in the end, there was a decision to make. Either live with the unpleasant situation that has been created or have the very difficult decision to ask him to move back out. I am grateful for him that he was willing to have that conversation. Who knows how much trouble that could have created and the longer it was allowed to go on the worse it would have gotten.
Personal development/self-improvement
The whole idea of getting better, little by little would be something most people would agree is important. But YEARS go by without action. Why? The sunrise doesn’t last all day! Your window to learn a new skill, start a hobby, take up a new sport, is closing a small amount each day, so why do we wait? Why do we sit?
We get lulled by the redundancy of life into thinking that life is long. We seem to think, for no real good reason, that we have tons of time. We don’t. Our time on this earth is really the equivalent to a vapor. Whoosh. Its gone.
Grab life by the horns and don’t let go. Give your ancestors some stories to tell about you. Enjoy the sunsets and sunrises. They don’t last forever.
