When you stop feeling challenged – maybe it’s time for an attitude change?  There are people who like to sit at a certain level (be it their job, career, personal development, relationship depth, shoe collection size, style, whatever) and there are people who continually push for more.  Sometimes the push is subconscious, because these are the people with FIRE (as my boss likes to say) and PASSION (as my sister likes to say) and DRIVE (as I like to say).  Sometimes the push is from a superior and/or external source (like our parents, a mentor, our boss, our shareholders, our children).  

When everything becomes a robotic task, with minimal value or personal satisfaction, it’s time to stop and re-think what you’re doing and why.  I know and see so many examples of people who simply work for work’s sake and the monetary benefits.  But if that’s almost a guarantee, why not make more of it?  ATTITUDE.  That’s right.  It’s the attitude that will give you so much more depth, satisfaction and growth.  It’s more like people who sit in the standard distribution of the population.  I almost see it as the same distribution as SAT or GMAT results.  You’re sitting in a percentile in comparison to the rest of the world.  Where do you want to be?

There are those who are happy where they are.  They don’t have fire and prefer it that way because fire just complicates things.  They are content with their level of income and career and personal development and whatever happens to be important to them.  They just want to live their lives as they are.  Then, OK, because you still need people to fall into that 70 percentile and these are them.  The content lot.  There’s nothing wrong with falling into this category – but it’s actually very broad because being content in one area doesn’t mean you’re content in another.

There are those who aren’t happy with where they are.  These guys form 2 groups:  The ones who attack life with a purpose and consciously make an effort to steer it towards happiness and the ones who sit and complain that the cards that were played to them suck and will continue to suck regardless of what decision they make or how they bluff (think of poker).  Because even the effort of bluffing will fail, why try?  Then maybe it’s time to get some lessons on bluffing or learn from the guy who does it best.  It boils down to ATTITUDE.  Do you want to make the effort?  Do you want to try over and over and over?  Because true success doesn’t fall in your lap.  Even the most successful entrepreneurs and business people have failures.  You just don’t hear about them because these things aren’t as glamourous or feel good as success stories (and of course, the failing parties usually don’t broadcast failures to the world).  If you have nothing else, you can definitely have attitude.  In fact, developing a mind set is something that is free!  It’s not easy,  but not impossible.  Impossible is just the bad attitude fighting with the good attitude.  A good analogy for this is a foreign organism in your body.  When a virus attacks, it sends out an army of micro-organic soldiers to beat you up physically, but our handy immune system will immediately and quickly react to the intruder by sending its own set of soldiers to destroy and virtually eliminate the foreigners.  How come mind set can’t take the same approach?  That again, is ATTITUDE.  

Then, there are those who are happy where they are, but yearn for more.   They always want to be moving forward and take every opportunity as a growth or learning opportunity.  And they like to see the glass as half full (even if it’s only a quarter full).  These are the people I love to be around.  Optimism breeds friendship faster than pessimism.  Even in dire situations, they search for solutions and way outs.  That is good and healthy.  They go outside of their comfort zone.  They realize their hurdles.  They want more.  These are the types of people we need more of in the world today – especially in times of crisis.  You’d also be surprised how crisis changes peoples’ mind sets and people can swing in any direction, but those with natural fire and passion, see beyond that and still move forward.  Like a damn MAC truck with no brakes.  These are the elite top percentile of value seeking individuals and the membership changes all the time.

You can actually be one person and fall into all three categories.  You’re happy and content with where you are in your personal life, but bitch and complain about your job and how there’s nothing you can do about moving into a management role (because you can’t believe they are hiring outside when you’re right there and so ready to move up!) and have so much fire to start your own business that you’ll try over and over and over with different business partners and ideas.  But in general though, attitude is reflected everywhere – at home, work, and in relationships.  People who lean towards positive attitudes will do so in most arenas of their life and vice versa.  Attitude is also contagious, that’s why it’s great to be around people who have the RIGHT ATTITUDE.  Like is also drawn to like – completely not your magnetic polar theories – and will actually feed off each other in either upwards or downwards spirals.  That’s why people who group together to go on vacations are usually all excited at the same time.   It’s because one person’s excitement will radiate to someone else and be radiated back to them, so the more you talk about how great the trip will be, the more hyped you become.  Which is great!  While a bitching session about your company’s crap bonus last year is literally an all-round bitching session and then nothing productive comes out of it, except maybe you feel better because you know other people are feeding the same negative sentiments (tsk tsk).  I’m not saying that venting is bad – it’s just counter productive when there are no results.

So how do we move from one level to the next?  Wait – do you even want to move from one level to the next?  It all starts with recognition.  Understanding where you are today and where you want to be eventually is critical.  You don’t always need to know exactly where you want to be, but develping an attitude towards moving forward is good.  A colleague of mine says that she will continually read, self research, question and challenge the line of business that we’re in.  That is good attitude.  She comes from a very technical background and knows that she needs more business acumen and understanding in order to better serve her customers.  This is partially why I love my job so much.  It’s constant growth and I find challenges at every turn.  It’s not like that everyday, but most days it is.  Some challenges are so hard that I almost want to steer away from it because the goal is a tiny speck in the horizon, but when I rethink it and puff up my chest, I say “BRING IT”.  Some people need more motivation than others, but even to those who CAN be motivated, I applaud that.  At least there is hope.  You don’t need to invent the next nano chips or become the next Google APAC President (which by the way is a vacant seat right now at the time of post), but at least you’re moving forward and not becoming stale bread.  I’m totally motivated right now and want to tackle my home projects – NOW!  I just need a way to sustain this motivation and drive.  A good way to move in small steps is to set mini goals for yourself everyday.  The more you do it, the more it becomes a habit.  It could be as small as committing to cleaning out your sock drawer only.  It’s segmented, it’s small, it’s doable.  Or it could be something like practicing presentation skills by doing a self 2 minute introduction in front of the mirror 5 times.  That only takes 10 minutes of your time, but over a period of time, it helps.

Remember.  Fire.  Passion.  Drive.  It’s all relative, but find it – no matter how small.  I like to think it makes life more interesting.