What disappoints me most about your situation is all the time you’ve wasted. I think all the junctures you’ve come to—all those strange and difficult forks in the road that forced you to choose whether to go on or to quit right there, maybe even to die.
What I can’t understand is why you never availed yourself of the many opportunities you had to quit.
When Was The Last Time You Squandered An Opportunity To Quit?
Guys, Josh here with a quick meditation about staying the course.
Look, the facts are in and remain indisputable: those who stay the course and pursue their dreams are the other side of the same coin as those who quit the course and gave up along the way.
I want to make a case against the person who persevered and achieved her goals, no matter what they might have achieved; no matter how high they reached in life; now matter how overwhelmingly the accolades that swirl around them drown the humbler voices of mediocrity; despite all this, I say that such a person is a failure.
She had innumerable opportunities to quit, to give up, to flake out. And what did she do? She squandered every opportunity.
She looked at these sterling opportunities to abandon ship and said to herself—or shouted it to everyone around her, more likely—“I don’t give a damn for quitters, I’m not going down with this ship, I’m going to stick it out, come hell or high water.”
That, friend, is the swan song of the defeated. Defeated by the notion that they should continue on the hard road.
Over and over these opportunities to quit warned them that nothing good was going to come from “pushing on”, as these so-called achievers said of themselves.
The fact is, when you look at the other side of the coin, those who appear to be achievers are in fact losers and failures.
Would it not be better for them to have seen the remarkable opportunities before them to quit and to take advantage of them? By missing this opportunity, they missed the path of mediocrity. Now they are overwhelmed with success, and what good is that?
What’s so great about mediocrity?
Success is fickle, so is fortune: one day you’re up, the next you’re down.
But what’s so great about mediocrity is that it bypasses these up-and-down-cycles that the successful have to face, with their usual stoic resolve.
The mediocre have achieved something that might almost be called greatness. They have achieved mediocrity, and they did so in the face of innumerable opportunities thrown into their laps, almost pushed upon them, to achieve, to choose to do, be, and become something else.
I, for one, think it’s a shame and a disgrace that in America we have people who have spent so much time ignoring and neglecting every wonderful opportunity the American Dream affords us to quit.
Think of the blood and tears that have been shed in the name of the status quo, all the calls to “not be much more than others” lest your drive to succeed ruffle the otherwise placid feathers of your neighbor and the larger world.
No, thank you, friend: we can do well without high achievement.
What we need are those brave souls who daily choose the low road of mediocrity.
And no matter what siren song of achievement sticks its well-manicured finger in their faces, these brave souls ride on and roll on and carry on taking advantage of every opportunity to quit.
I, for one, think this is just about the last word on the American dream.
All I can say is that most people I have met haven’t yet understood that true heroism and achievement means taking advantage of every opportunity to quit.
And they should take advantage of these opportunities because of the wonderful and humane safety nets that American society provides for such motivated under-achievers.
They have earned these safety net opportunities. Daily they are faced with many opportunities. Daily they must turn them down. Daily the temptation must overwhelm them: yet they remain strong. The least we can do is to care for them.
The Last Gasp: Don’t Be A Loser, Take Every Opportunity To Quit
I, for one, don’t have a clue how they achieve this, but I will tell you one thing:
I don’t want to look back at my life, many years from now, and say, “Well, I had plenty of opportunities to quit, but I squandered them all. What a louse I was, what a loser!”
Then I’ll breathe my last—take that final breath, inhale, exhale, then pass on to some other world where I have to spend eternity in the company of those who squandered opportunities to quit, just like I did. Sure, we can regale each other with tales of this and that success—
I can’t help but think that a tear will form in my eye, and looking into the bright sunshine of that place, I’ll wonder where and why and how I went wrong. Maybe there will be an answer somewhere up there; or maybe there won’t.
And I’ll never know unless I take the opportunity to quit.
