Beyond the Grind: How to Do Work That Matters, Travel the World For Free, and Escape the Daily Grind Before It's Too Late... by Dave Rogenmoser & Chris Hull

Author:Dave Rogenmoser & Chris Hull
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-03-09T04:00:00+00:00

The Enemy of Initiative

I’ll be the first to say that initiative is exhausting. Chris and I both held jobs after college where we were the ones initiating contact with people 95% of the time. Hardly anyone initiated back. If we sat at home, no one was going to call us. No one was going to poke their head in and say “Hey.” Nothing was going to get done without us stepping up and making it happen.

Every morning I had to make a conscious decision that only I would ever know about. I had to decide, “Am I going to take initiative today, or am I going to be passive and watch the world go by?” I hate to say it, but I definitely chose passivity more often than I’d like, and I’m still paying for it today. Passivity is never free. It’s easy, but it isn’t free. It has an incredibly high price tag that can be measured in opportunity cost. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines opportunity cost as "the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.”

Whoa. Let’s consider that again. “The loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.”

This means that all of those times when I just didn’t make the call and hoped someone would call me, the times I waited around because I didn’t have the "perfect" idea - those had a cost. I took a loss, when potential gain was available. Thinking back to that really hits me hard. Laziness and passivity don't seem like a big deal in the moment, but they are incredibly costly. Passivity is always so much more attractive than initiative in the moment.

Think about your life now. What are the biggest opportunities you've missed out on lately? If you’d taken initiative would you have a different job than you have now? Would you be going to a better school than you are now? Would you have a close friend that you’ve now lost touch with? Would you have better health than you do? Would you have a small business started by now?

I don’t list all of those things to beat you up. If you are beating yourself up right now and feeling shame - stop. That won’t help. That’s part of the problem. I list those things to inspire you. Mistakes aren’t a bad thing. Mistakes not learned from are the problem.

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