Matthew Hussey argues that saying "I'm fine" keeps you average. He offers three fixes: stop waiting for crisis to change, outwork everyone by 10 percent consistently, and drop the act by admitting you're not perfect. His proof: he paid $6,000 for a leadership program despite his success.
We are almost halfway through this year. And if you are anything like me, that freaks you out because there is still so much more you want to achieve before the year is up. Now, I know that people follow this channel for growth, but I have noticed something in people's attitude to growth that scares me. It scares me because it's going to stop them from living the extraordinary life that they actually want. Recently, I heard of a phone call. between one of my retreat specialists in my company and someone who was applying to come on the retreat. Now, for those of you that don't know, twice a year, I run a six day program called the Retreat, where we go for massive transformations with people, massive growth. This woman said on the phone, I want to come to the retreat. I just don't know if I messed up enough. Now, she was half joking. But it implied a really dangerous assumption that a lot of people make that in order to really focus on my growth, to do something drastic to improve my life, I need to have something really wrong with my life. There needs to be something from my past that's still causing me trauma. There needs to be something drastic that's happened in the present that has really thrown me off course and I need to get back on track. I think this is a huge problem. It's the problem of I'm Fine. I'm fine is the problem for most people. It's that they're coasting right now because they don't have a big problem in their lives. In this video, I want to give you three antidotes to the I'm fine life. Number one, don't wait for the dip. Now, what this means is for most people, if you really look at how they take action, they take action when there's something wrong. So, their life is fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, then a big problem hits that takes a dip in their happiness. So, it could be that some past trauma revisits them or comes back to haunt them. Or it could be that they lose a job or that this is a breakup. Something happens in their life that takes them from feeling fine to feeling lousy, depressed, sad, anxious, being at a crossroads. And all of a sudden, in that dip comes the impetus for action. But what happens is they take action so that they can get back to being fine and then when they feel fine again they stop taking action. This is a recipe for an average life. Now, this dip can actually be powerful, right? It can get us to do something which is why sometimes the things going wrong in our life is an amazing catalyst for us doing something. Because the far more dangerous state is when we live a life where our happiness or our feelings of comfort just do this. Jameson will call this the fine line. It's pretty good. The fine line. The fine line is when we just coast and we can tell everyone our life's okay, but it's never extraordinary. It's not great. We're not experiencing life at the intensity that we want. We know because we see it in other people that there's a level of happiness of joy, of fulfillment, of reward that other people, or at least a small group of people seem to have access to that we don't. The problem in life isn't always that we have a problem. The reason I pursued this career was not to help people go from messed up to okay. It was to help people be better every single day, regardless of where their starting point is. So the first antidote to the I'm fine mindset is to not wait for the dip, but improve things even when you're in a season that's okay. Remember, there is a fine line between being okay and wasting your potential. Which brings us to antidote number two. Give 10% more than everybody else because everybody else, almost everybody else is going for average. They're going for normal. That's what makes average average. It's what most people do by definition. We have to give 10% more than anyone else would in every area of our lives. And I see this everywhere. I'll hear someone talk about marriage and they'll say, well, when you've been in a marriage for as long as I have, the passion begins to wane and you know, you don't really feel the same way about your partner anymore and it gets boring and blah, blah, blah. I think that's your marriage. Don't tell me, don't sell me on your reality of what marriage is, right? Because your reality of marriage isn't gonna be my reality of marriage. Most marriages is so easy to see how they could be 10% better, how someone could be 10% better listener, how someone could be 10% more giving, how someone could talk 10% less and not let their ego get in the way in every argument. How someone could be 10% more focused on the needs of their partner. It's not that difficult. It's not that hard to see how most people could be 10% better in their careers, could give 10% more, could be better than their peers. But most people don't. I heard the comedian Adam Carolla say once, not everybody has the potential for greatness, but everybody has the potential for toughness. And toughness is that extra 10%. It is a trick that is available to everyone on this earth if they're actually prepared to use it. So the last antidote to the I'm fine life is to take off the disguise. I believe that every single one of us has a disguise that we wear. And your disguise is the part of your life that makes it look to everybody else like you have it all together. It could be our work, my work's going well, I'm okay. It could be our relationship, I'm in a relationship, I'm okay. Bottom line, your disguise is the area of your life that you show everybody to make it look like you have it all together. But the truth is, none of us have it all together, not in every area. There is low hanging fruit everywhere in our life if we're willing to take a step back, get humble, and look at where we can improve. This year, I've enrolled in a four day $6,000 leadership program. Now, why am I doing that? there are people on my team who compliment me on being a great leader, but I know I'm not as good as I could be. So for me, it's about taking off my disguise of being a great leader and going back to being a student and being humble and saying, how can I improve? Because I know I'm not where I want to be. And there's the difference. This isn't about a race with anyone else. It's about you being really brutally honest with yourself about whether you are living at the intensity. that you want to live at. So if you want to go back to being a student now this year and not settle in the way that so many people do for a lukewarm life, but to go for great, I want to urge you to do that today. If you want to do it with me, I have the retreat program. I'm going to leave a link right here. I have spent 10 years designing this process to be one that gets people to a life of greatness. gets people to extraordinary and not by anyone else's standards, but by theirs. Click the link. I will see you on the inside and as always, I will see you in next week's video.
