The People Who Are Holding You Back Mean Well
Sometimes the people who sabotage your success are the ones closest to you…
There’s a funny thing that happens when you decide to chase your dreams.
People try to talk you out of it.
Sometimes, I don’t even think they notice they are doing this. They assume that their own self-imposed limitations are universal principles that bind everyone.
Chances are that most of the people that you love have settled for mediocrity in many areas of their life. That’s not a knock on them. The chances are overwhelming that you have settled for mediocrity in many areas of your life. I can 100% assure you that I have settled for mediocrity in many areas of my life.
Mediocrity is the default path, and as the default, it’s the most densely populated.
In a lot of ways there’s nothing wrong with mediocrity. In our extremely privileged era, it can be quite comfortable.
But if you’re reading posts about life lessons on Medium, my guess is that you want something more. My guess is that you have the itch, the desire to do something uncommon, difficult, and worthwhile with your life.
I’m with you.
I want to escape the rat race. I want to do extended travel with my family before my kids grow up.
These goals are certainly possible, but are uncommon and difficult.
Being uncommon and difficult doesn’t make something not worth doing. If anything, it makes it more worthwhile.
But not everyone is in a position to see things that way.
There are powerful biological and sociological factors that cause people to play it safe. To settle for spending decades in a stressful and unfulfilling job where they hope for 3% yearly raises and spend every week counting down to Saturday.
This is what everyone does. Keep your head down and play along. You don’t want to go off charting an uncommon course, people will think you are weird. And if you fail, they’ll judge you.
This is never the message that’s explicitly communicated, but it’s going to be implicit in the reactions of many of your friends and family. You are beginning to get over the psychological barriers that are holding you back, but they haven’t gotten over theirs, and without knowing it, they will try to pass theirs on to you.
My Experience Not Creating a Udemy Course
Let me tell you an interesting story about a time when I was struggling with money. It was 2015, my second child had just been born, and money was uncomfortably tight.
It was at this time that the idea of making money online first came onto my radar. The first thing that I came across was not blogging or YouTube or Kindle books, but a site for online courses called Udemy.
Udemy lets you create and upload an online course, which it will promote for you. Any sales that you make promoting it yourself result in you taking home the full amount of the course (minus a transaction fee), and any sales that Udemy makes from promoting it are split 50/50.
Could I have escaped the rat race by creating classes in Udemy? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll never know, because I never went through with it.
As I was beginning to get excited about the idea, I explained what I was thinking to someone as we went on a walk together. They didn’t tell me not to do it, but the responded with lots of caution and no enthusiasm.
I know this person wants the best for me, and I think they were just trying to keep me from getting my hopes up.
I can’t say that their reaction was the entire reason I didn’t go through with it. I wasn’t ready. Earlier I had Googled some variation of “can you really make money with Udemy?”
Just so you know, if you go looking for a reason not to do something it’s almost certain that you’ll find it.
Last year I heard that a friend from college released a course on Udemy and saw instant success, banking $4,000 in his first month. I might have not had such exceptional results, but I sure could have built a lot of momentum between now and then.
I’m not bitter. The lesson was valuable. There are no guarantees. To pursue your dreams you’ll need to try things that might not work, and you’ll need to start before you seem ready.
How To Tell People About Your Dreams
You definitely want to let the people you love in on your plans and dreams, but sometimes you might need to be careful how you do it.
I call my strategy for telling people about what I’m up to “The Delay.”
It goes like this:
- Decide what you want
- Make any amount of measurable progress
- Tell people.
This was in large part inspired from this wise quote from Tim Ferriss’s classic book The 4-Hour Workweek:
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started, but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.
Once you are moving, people are forced to take your intentions seriously.
If you lead with “what would you think if I…” you’ll probably get a long list of the obstacles.
And if you want to be successful, you need to learn to focus on the opportunities, not the obstacles.
Obstacles aren’t nearly as problematic as opportunities are valuable.
This is the eleventh in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.
