The 7 Idiosyncrasies of Moderately Successful People

Publishers balked at my
version of this book.  

Perhaps you are one of those people who likes to go out and buy self-help books, or go to seminars, or take courses at the community college to better your skills; I on the other hand, am the type that likes to get increasingly frustrated and potentially electrocuted because I didn’t read the manual.  This failure to do things by the book has often been my downfall.  One of seven deadly downfalls, which I, along with many other moderately successful people suffer from. 

7.  Too Independent.  Maybe it’s that good ole’ American ideology, “Don’t tread on me,” but I don’t like people telling me how to do things.    Tweaking things is one thing, but there’s a big difference between coaching and controlling.  When I worked for a fortune 500 company, the middle managers would say things like, “Don’t tell them the interest rate is 27.9%, tell them it’s 0% if you pay off the balance within 28 days.”  “Well, sir, that sounds a little deceitful to me…” I would say, and that’s when I stopped being a rising star in the company, and became the guy who got transferred to different departments every other quarter.  “If you could just shut up long enough, close off all your feelings, natural instincts, moral qualms, and intellectual need to know, you could really go somewhere with this company,” they might as well say.  Sorry, no can do.

Yeah, I'm going to need you to fill out a TPS report about the memo
 we got on Swingline staplers; can you come in this Saturday?

6.  Too Family Oriented.  Every mediocrely successful person I know is a good parent.  Too good.  Like their holistic, overly-involved, homeopathic, breastfeed, sympathetic, kind but firm approach to rearing kids is the new gospel of parenting.  If we weren’t already overexposed to their methodology of parenting perfection, we also get to watch their kids grow and succeed online through billions, literally, billions of cute pictures.  Sometimes it makes me want to yack, and then I think, what’s the alternative?  Parents that don’t care?  I was a school teacher at a low income school for five years, and of the almost 1000 students who I had the pleasure of teaching, probably only fifty parents ever came into parent/teacher conferences.  I was in a convenience store the other day, and an obese barefoot eight-year-old and her three-year old sister stood in front of me, holding an Oregon Trail Card (food stamps) a 2 liter of Pepsi, and each had a beef jerky stick.  They entered the card number, like they had done this a thousand times before, and then casually walked across the busy street without holding hands, actually forcing traffic to slow for them.  I got back in the car and cried for the predetermined future of suffering these kids will have.   Parenting is harder than any job I have ever had.  And I’m sure if I had a nanny raising my kids, or if I sent them down to the corner market for pepperoni sticks every time they annoyed me, I could get a lot more accomplished, but as it is, I’m a decent parent and it detracts from my career. 

            
5.  Too Time Deficient.  Raising kids is a full time job, but to the moderately successful person, it is just one, of the hundreds of things we do in a day.  Between making healthy food snacks and meals, hurrying them off to school, fighting traffic, actually working, doing errands on the way home, some of us don’t have a moments rest until we sit down at dinner.  Sometimes that can be at 8:00, and the kids should be in bed.  Then we try and communicate with friends or family online or on the phone, hope there are no emergencies or late bills that didn’t get paid, and before you know it, it’s midnight and you still haven’t replaced the D battery in the smoke alarm whose incessant but intermittent beep can wait another day.   Hopefully your sanity is fire retardant. 

4.  Too educated.  It seems like everyone has a degree nowadays.  The gas attendant at Costco, the waiter at PF Changs, the guy dancing with a Little Caesars sign, all have advanced degrees in fields nobody cares about.  My best friend has a sociology degree, and I often joke, “The only thing that’s good for, is to know how angry you should be at the injustice of it all.”  The jobs aren’t there for our degrees, so the mildly successful finds work elsewhere, hoping, dreaming for a chance to put his/her learnings to practice.  So we work, and complain about it, but don’t have enough time or resources to actually make anyone notice (especially the student loan collectors who will gladly put you on deferment, but not actually listen to your issues).  The worst aspect of it all, is the overly educated will see company newsletters and notice all the typos and grammatical errors, or listen to managers speak who have no public speaking skills, or see data with easily changeable outcomes for the better, and then be told by their superiors, “Somebody threw up on aisle six, could you clean that up? Thanks.” 

           
3.  Too entertained.  Rather than start grassroots movements to change the problems, like our parents' and grandparents' generations of the 60’s and 70’s, the current working generations find meaning in entertainment.  Counter culture guru Timothy Leary coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” in the late 1960s. Leary later said that the “PC [personal computer] was the LSD of the 1990s.”  Unarguably, the PC has lead to much more productivity than even the greatest acid-inspired creativity spell (yes, even Yellow Submarine), but has also been just as addictive and isolating.  Instead of hippies getting together for love-ins, overworked exhausted people are searching for love on Match.com.  Or they are losing hours, days, and weeks to virtual gaming worlds.  If gaming isn’t a vice, there are still the movies and television and music.  And then there is the actively showing off crowd, the brave braggarts who take a weekend off to climb Mt. Hood, or bike across state lines.  And then they pretend it’s no big deal when they ask about your weekend, “Oh, you stayed up late to watch the Game Of Thrones finale? I spent the evening in an ice bath after running my third marathon this year.”  But whether their eyes are blood shot from a 30-hour World of Warcraft marathon, a trip down bong-water  memory lane, or from swimming in the ocean in an Ironman triathlon, they aren’t ready or willing to give the same kind of attention to the workforce that would make them MVP of their job. 

Mom...I'm bored.  There's nothing to do!!

2.  Too socially connected.  I would argue that one reason the poor are poor, is because they don’t know how to interact nicely with other humans (just watch an old Jerry Springer episode, or a current UFC fight); and many of the rich are rich, because they don’t care about other people.  But the moderately successful are both socially skilled and usually show genuine empathy towards other human beings.  They take days off work to stay with a sick parent, spouse, or child at the hospital.  They find time in the summer to go on group camping trips, family reunions, and rent beach houses with friends.  The mediocre worker would gladly trade overtime for unpaid vacation time.  And maybe spend that whole vacation at home, liking other people’s active statuses on Facebook. 

Orange and blue, grey and green, they are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little avatars of the cyber world.  

1.  Too Nice.  The moderately successful doesn’t like doing the dirty work.  When I was a big-box store trainer, I was asked to let two employees go (the passive version of firing them).  It wasn’t why I took the position, and it really affected my soul.  The inability to be generals, dictating the game-plan, knowing that each directive will cost hundreds of human lives, is holding us all back.  Being one of the bunch, actively mourning each time a loved one falls in the battlefield of life, keeps us from advancing up the chain of command. 

And you thought you'd never see a Ziggy cartoon ever again.
RIP Tom Wilson.  

To sum up, the moderately successful are the way they are, because they care about others too much; want to enjoy their free time with friends and family or actively pursuing individual lifelong dreams; Are overly knowledgeable, but without enough time or resources to actively change the world; And too independent to ever join forces with a movement to actually cause change in the world. 

The only steps to riches and fame necessary are: to sell their integrity to the highest bidder; stop socializing and finding active enjoyment in life in exchange for more hours at work; take a passive role in parenting; get mean; and stop learning universal truths through higher learning and replace them with whatever the company’s hard truths are.  

Maybe it's not so bad to be average after all.