Here we are, cheating life

A great friend from my hotelier days once experienced a mishap in his family which almost became a tragedy. Some years back his toddler son took a tumble head-first from the balcony of their third floor apartment to the ground floor a few months shy of his 3rd birthday. See, this boy and his older brother loved nothing better than waving their Dad off as he walked to the bus stop a few hundred yards from their gate on his way to work, and they did this from their balcony in the company of the house help. On this fateful morning my friend had boarded his bus to work and the maid went back into the house ahead of the boys, leaving them on the balcony. As fate would have it the younger one decided to clamber over the steel bars, lost his balance and toppled over to fall outside the boundary wall of their apartment block.

A passerby knocked on the gate to notify the guard that a child was lying lifeless on the ground and could he have come from one of their houses? My friend was frantically called a few minutes later, cutting short his trip to rush home and take his son to hospital.?

You have encountered those fellows in the corporate space, the ones you cannot coax a response from about something that is their duty unless you copy their superior on an email. The quote of the extra mile having no traffic? They are happy to stick in the gridlock. But when they don’t scale the corporate ladder the blame is on everyone and everything else except themselves. Because they can’t take responsibility for their actions, they also can’t do anything about their situation. Woe be unto you as a Boss when you fall for their sweet words and hire them; you end up doing their work daily to save your face, while they drift through life rolling from one role to the next, one company to the other with empty passion. Others have no desire to take on more responsibilities because that will wreck their daily comforts of playing small, having settled for a life that is less than the one they are capable of living. How did we get to this zombie state so fast?

The corporate world is teeming with them. They see no honor in putting in a good and honest day’s work. After all, the enterprise makes so much money and they ‘see’ so little of it. Because somehow the enterprise should owe them as it is the enterprise’s fault that they have stagnated in life. The only way to avoid this death in youth is chasing purpose before passion, grasping the WHY before the WHAT. This way, no matter how small your wins along the way are, you find a way to leverage your position; what you have in your hand. You have a high school diploma? Leverage your position! You know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy? Leverage your position! You get an article featured on some unknown blog? Leverage your position! You have $100 between you and poverty? Leverage your position!

Sadly, most of us can't stop looking to the other side of the fence. We fail to realize the brilliant possibilities currently available to us and waste the present of the present; simply bad stewardship. There are people we already know who have information we need. Others who have material or network capital we can use. Yet others who can connect us with people we should know. Instead of sitting in the corner cramming the book of Lamentations and wishing for more, how about you utilize what you already have? Until you do, more won't help you. Actually, it will only continue hurting you until you learn to earn something for yourself. It's easy to want other people to do it for you. But real success comes when you take ownership of your life. No one else cares more about your success (or health, or relationships, or time) than you do.

Your current position is ripe with abundant opportunity. Leverage it. Once you gain another inch of position, leverage it for all it's worth. Don't wish for more; wish you were better and go be better. Soon enough, you'll find yourself in incredible positions and collaborating with your heroes. Stephen C. Hogan says you can't have a million-dollar dream with a minimum-wage work ethic; absolutely no way. Success, whatever your definition of it, was and still is based on choice. It’s based on having and maintaining a motivation worth fighting for. It's based on believing what others might call a fantasy. It's based on leveraging your position and maintaining the momentum of every step you take. A whole lot of people spend their entire lives climbing the ladder of success only to find once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall and they are stuck, frustrated and exhausted.

The successful game of life will be played from the end and worked backwards. Rather than thinking about what's plausible, or what's expected, or what makes sense, start with what you want. Then put in the building blocks of dedicated daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly behaviors that will facilitate that. Because there are very few overnight successes and many many many up-all-night successes. Just ask Jim Carrey, an erstwhile broke, struggling and sorry comedian based in Toronto.

See, in 1985, Carrey made a crazy bet on himself: He wrote himself a cheque of the stupendous amount of $10 million for “acting services rendered,” dated it 10 years in the future, and kept it in his wallet as he set out to earn it. In November 1995, Carrey found out he had been cast in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” for the absolute figure of $10 million. Was this the law of attraction? The power of positive thinking? I believe it was the fire that the physical, written cheque generated in him as it sat in his wallet for 10 years while he worked his behind off, that did the trick. He won the game first, then played. So can you.

As Sir John Hargrave the champ of mind hacking puts it, “Until it’s on paper, it’s vapor.” The obvious-yet-often-underutilized practice of writing down our ideas, thoughts, and resolutions is a game-changer. Writing is a gateway behind the world of mind and the world of matter. It’s how thoughts become things, how an idea gets from our heads into our hands.

The tragedy with the English school system of which I am a product is that I learnt that 10 little ducks (and not ducklings) went swimming one day over the hills and far away, but nobody told us what kept happening to the little things such that one by one whenever mother duck said quack-quack, they whittled away to nothing. How sad is that, not only for the mother duck but also for us little singers who never grasped any grit, perseverance or hope from the melody; only the very critical skill of counting backwards.

‘It’s never that serious’ allows us to get away with lethargy, mediocrity and half-measures, or emphasizing on plan B when A was still workable; a strong plan B almost always means a wishy-washy plan A. It does have its place though, that never-that-serious refrain; when it comes to social media likes, keeping up with the Joneses, and a myriad of situations that typically force one to be someone else other than themselves.

Someone aptly mused that living is like trying to cultivate grapes on the slopes of a non-extinct volcano. Yet there is an alternative to risk. We can hang back, not give our hearts, not put our weight behind what we do, never fully commit or care too much. That way we’ll never lose or be hurt. But our lives pass anyway, we die anyway, sooner or later. We endure a near-life experience. So what’s gained by such caution?

Nothing. Nothing at all. No grapes, no wine, no fine times.

R. L. Sharpe grasped it even better: "Princes and kings, and clowns that caper in sawdust rings, and common people like you and I, are builders for eternity. Each is given a bag of tools, a shapeless mass, a book of rules; and each must make in life, a stumbling block or a stepping stone."

For my friend whose son who tumbled from their 3rd floor balcony, that was an exacting NDE (near-death-experience). For many of us who almost lit our spark to ignite our dream, every day is a near-life-experience; we neither want to modify the dream nor magnify the skill. Thankfully the boy made it through the procedures of fixing a metal plate where his skull had fractured, and he made a full recovery sans-plate. The family still reflects on that harrowing period with nervous laughter.

There are many textbook definitions of cheating death, and this is one of them. Majority of us sadly, are cheating life daily.