Rage Against the Ordinary: How To Save The World If I Have to Do Dishes?
Take this scenario: You are inspired. You want to change the world. Perhaps you already have an idea. Perhaps you are just waiting for something (you know that “signal”) until you can get ready to go. You are on the internet every day, reading news stories, learning about the success and daring leadership of other social innovators. That will be YOU one day, following your calling, maybe even becoming famous!
But then you realize it’s Sunday and your house is a mess. You haven’t cleaned up in a while, you haven’t taken out the trash, you haven’t cleaned the bathroom, you haven’t done much of anything actually, come to think of it. Why would you? Every moment counts! Every moment that you spend mopping or doing boring chores is a moment you cannot indulge in reading, e-mailing, and doing all those things that extraordinary people tend to do, right?
Did I forget to mention that you also have a day-job that starts tomorrow on that dreadful Monday and that means you have to wait every day for nightfall before you can come home and hit the internet again? Subtract the time in commute, the time you have to spend with the wife/husband and kids, maybe time for working out, eating dinner, washing clothes, etc. Before you know it’s very late already and you need to go to bed so you can wake up on time tomorrow to be on time for the office or class. But before you do this, you notice you are completely out of clean dishes and unless you do something now you won’t have a cereal bowl to eat out of tomorrow (and neither will your spouse and family).
For some of you, it sounds like Sophie’s Choice: wasting precious time with boring, ordinary work, that could otherwise be spent with EXTRA-ordinary work (to the betterment of humanity, etc.)… or not having dishes and go hungry tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, Monday is edging ever closer and closer, while your despair grows.
Is this you? Do you suffer from “rage against the ordinary”? Today, I am pondering how to deal with this quite common condition among ambitious people like you.
