If you've come in search of hilarity, mirth, and entertainment today, you best look elsewhere. Because today I'm sharing some old-school, self-help, get-yer-shit-together love.
I've got a buddy (surprising I know) who is always just about to turn his life (career, body, relationships, finances, living situation) around. I've spoken about him once before. Always at the threshold of something amazing. Always about to re-invent himself. Never actually doing anything — but always about to. Always got a plan — never actually doing anything with it — but always got one. He's the plan man.
Talks a great game but never gets off the bench. By choice. Got all the answers. In theory. If life was a theory, he'd be a champion. Wants great, but chooses crap, keeping in mind that doing nothing is a choice.
Saw him yesterday. We had that conversation. The same one we have every year. The "I've realised a few things about myself lately, I know I've wasted a lot of time and I know you don' believe me Craig, but it's gonna be different this time" conversation.
It was like groundhog day. And I was Bill Murray. With biceps. All that talent and all those brains — if only he'd put 'em to use. It's like owning a Ferrari but never taking it out of the garage. So much potential, so many possibilities and yet he leaves the super-car in the garage and "drives" a thirty-year-old Toyota.
If only he'd stop reading, hoping, planning, researching (sitting on the couch), thinking (procrastinating), talking (making more excuses), and actually do something (for more than a week), he could do, create and be — amazing. Because he's a smart, talented guy who's wasting his potential. And time.
If only he'd stop waiting for the planets to align and an angel to visit him in his sleep with instructions from the Almighty — if only.
Some of us are going to wake up tomorrow (seemingly) and it will be 2012. Five years will have passed and August 2007 will seem like yesterday — and not because we have an amazing memory, but because nothing will have changed in our life. We will have done nothing new or different. Despite the fact that we desperately want new and different.
Some of us will still be doing the same things, the same way, in the same situations and circumstances and still having the same issues and the same conversations with the same people and struggling with the same problems five years from now. But for some of us, it won't be the same.
Article comments
1 - klondikekitty
Thank you so very much, Craig, for that very healthy and motivational kick in the ass!! Fortunately, I HAVE "gotten to that point," as you so aptly put it, and I am changing my situation NOW -- Believe me when I say that it is not a popular decision; people are telling me I will fail, be unhappy for the rest of my life, and wish I had never done this!! However, I figure I have nowhere to go but UP from here, and I am going for it!! When I realized several months ago that I was complaining about the very same problems and issues I had been complaining about for the last five years, I decided it was something I should look at -- Of course, I hemmed and hawed, and sat on the fence for awhile (should I or shouldn't I?? Yes or no??) but it's happening, and the times, they are achanging, as Dylan so aptly wrote!! Just wanted to say thank you very much, your post did more to spur me on in my new quest than anything I have heard from anybody in the last three months!!
P.S. By the way, you were incorrect about there being a lack of hilarity, mirth and entertainment in this post, I thought it was extremely humorous, albeit very inspiring!! Thanks so much for being the call-it-as-I-see-it guy once more!!!
2 - Belle 2
So you're saying the "change fairy" isn't real? My life is wonderful except for one thing that I have been spinning my wheels on for the past ten years. I do get in my own way and I only have myself to blame, although I have come up with every excuse in the book. Gee, I wonder if my friends call me the plan girl behind my back, because I do sound like your buddy.
Thanks Craig, you really have me thinking!!! Now if I can just get myself up off of this computer chair. I see so much of myself in your article that I'm actually embarrassed. Could that be the spark that actually gets me to take action? Hmmmm...
3 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Are you sure your name isn't Robert Ringer? He writes like this also...