Almost everyone writing, speaking, or participating in personal development is trying too hard. Our culture is infused with an ethic of being the best, raising the bar, endlessly achieving more. What ever happened to good enough?
I just read a short book called The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett, M.D. It’s appropriately very short–you can read it in 30 minutes, after which you feel you accomplished something…something very small.
While nearly everyone has the potential to improve their lives, often times our idealistic standards keep us from doing anything, or even make us more unhappy than not having them. Because the neighbor is a raw foods evangelist claiming “cooked food is poison,” we don’t even bother eating a serving of vegetables at dinner, reasoning “it’s too much work to be healthy.” Yet we feel like crap–not because of the food we’re eating, but because of the thought that we should be eating better! If we’d simply lower our standards to the bare minimum to meet our real needs, we’d find it’s incredibly easy to improve our lives in substantial ways.
Here are 3 ways to lower your standards for greater happiness and real achievement (I’d write more, but that’s enough for now):
- Exercise 20 minutes a day, max. Go for a walk, do some pushups and bodyweight squats, and stretch comfortably. Don’t let yourself do more! Do you really need to be more fit than this? Get fit over a year or more’s time, not in a 12-week blitz.
- Get Rich Slowly.
- Find work you love by working less. Do something you enjoy in the extra time you’d be putting in at the office. Find at least 10-30 minutes a day to have fun or do something creative. By developing your passions, you’re less likely to burn out, and more likely to learn something fun that you could also get paid for.
- Less courage, more consistency. I often recommend to clients that they do something each day that is at a level 2-3 of courage out of 10, and avoid doing things that require an 8-10 of courage whenever possible. Reserve your adrenal glands for life and death emergencies!
Ha, I gave you 4 points. That’s a tip called underpromise, overdeliver. It’s easier to go the extra mile when you only promised you’d run one mile than if you promised a marathon. This is something I’m really working on personally.
The things that I’ve made the most significant progress on in my life have often been areas in which I set minimum standards and worked on them over long periods of time. For instance, when I had social anxiety, I would attempt to make eye contact and smile with a couple people a day until that felt comfortable. Sometimes I got too wound up and tried to make huge leaps in progress, but I inevitably crashed.
What can you achieve less at today?
p.s. I thought about putting a photo in this post, but it doesn’t really need one. Plus, I put a lot of work into the Precision Change podcast, which is where more of my strengths and interests lie anyway.