Brian Johnson argues against settling for average, which he calls the best of the worst and worst of the best. He draws on a fable from coach Brian Cain and Eric Butterworth's wisdom to make the case for incremental improvement toward excellence, or Arete.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus 1. In our last several plus 1s, we've been having fun hanging out with world class mental toughness and peak performance coach Brian Cain. And trust me, any time spent with Kaner is going to be fun. He's easily one of the most inspiring human beings on the planet and you can't help but feel energized just being in his presence. So today we're going to talk about one of the lines in his little fable on the 10 Pillars of Mental performance mastery that jumped out at me and tattooed itself on my consciousness. It's about being average. Now, Coach Kenny is the guide in that fable. He's coaching a burned out executive. He tells him, I quote, you are like most people, Coach Kenny said, and we call that average. Like I said, I hate the word average. It means you're the best of the worst and the worst of the best. It's a terrible place to live. To which I replied, oh snap, average. It's the best of the worst and the worst of the best stuck right there in the middle of the rugged mountain we call mediocrity. Check out that plus one. Not where we want to hang out. Now, Brian has coach Kenny say, you are giving the world your B or C game and you don't even know it because you have never been trained on how to give your A game. And then he says, the world needs you at your best. You can't be normal. You must be elite. And if you don't have a plan, how are you going to get better? The problem is when you stop getting better, you start getting bitter. And nobody likes being around people who are bitter all the time. Now, lest you think that wisdom is just some rah rah pom pom waving goodness from an overly ambitious peak performance coach, how about this parallel wisdom from one of the 20th century's great spiritual teachers, Eric Butterworth. As we've discussed, Butterworth was Maya Angelou's spiritual teacher. And apparently Oprah considers Discover the power within you as one of her all time favorite books. So here's how Butterworth puts it. In one of my all time favorite books, Spiritual Economics, he tells us, and I quote, why be an average person? All the great achievements of history have been made by strong individuals who refused to consult statistics or listen to those who could prove convincingly that what they wanted to do and in fact ultimately did do, was completely impossible. End quote, average. It's the best of the worst and the worst of the best. As Sylvester Stallone tells his son in Rocky iv. Check out a scene I linked to which I consider to be one of the most inspiring scenes ever. The that's not you. You're better than that. Let's commit to getting just a little bit better today in service to something bigger than ourselves as we remind ourselves that the process of becoming the best, most heroic version of ourselves is supposed to be challenging, and that the only antidote to mediocrity is excellence. Remember the moment we live with, Arete. We are heroic. Let's do that today.
