Avoid the Fiftieth Percentile
Imagine a starry-eyed young couple gazing at their new baby. The mother turns to the father and says, “Oh John, I hope he grows up to be average.”
Hard to believe, isn’t it? We don’t start out with the idea that we’ll live a fiftieth percentile life. And yet, it happens.
You know the fiftieth percentile people. They don’t seem to have any special skills or interests. Every day and every week and every month are pretty much like the last. The seasons change, but they don’t.
That can be you. Or you can live above the fiftieth percentile. All you have to do is keep learning.
You can pick a single area. My wife loves to cook. My friend Vince loves woodworking. Dan loves to go skydiving. They do a lot of it. They read about it. They talk about it.
Or you can emulate a person I know well. His passion is learning. The subject doesn’t seem important. So every ninety days he moves to something different. So far he’s studied the music of Beethoven, Wellesley’s Army, the art of the German Expressionists and much more.
The trick is to make a conscious effort to improve. My wife makes notes in her cookbooks about what works well and what she might want to try. Vince chooses his next project to learn a specific skill, like making ornamental inlays in his cabinets. Dan writes books about his passion. The guy with the passion for learning selects a new subject every three months.
You can connect your passion to your career, of course. A famous sales trainer I know studies the classic sales books that he collects. He may have the world’s largest sales library.
Life above the fiftieth percentile is about injecting passion into your days. It’s about loving something that you do well. It’s about creating occasions for that elusive “flow” experience. It’s about being better at something than just about everyone else on the planet.
November 15th, 2009 at 5:21 am
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