Being Realistic Is the Most Common Road to Mediocrity

Wednesday’s Wisdom:  “Set your goals high and don’t stop til you get there.”—Bo Jackson

Sure you have heard that you should make your goals realistic, that you should make your goals doable.  The question is, how do you know if something is doable if you don’t try it?  Will Smith has said that “Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity.” 

Set your goals so high that they seem ridiculous.  Break these goals up into smaller doable milestone sizes and go for it.  Don’t worry if you don’t reach your goal the first time trying.  Reward yourself each time you reach one of your milestone goals.  Give yourself large rewards for each time you reach a large milestone, a medium reward for each time you reach a medium milestone and a small reward for each time you reach a small milestone.

Forgive yourself often.  Don’t beat yourself up if you set your goals so high that you don’t reach them in your first or second try.  So what if you did not graduate from Harvard as a celebrated neurosurgeon.   If you set your goal that high you will most certainly at least graduate from college and start graduate school.  Reward yourself for accomplishing what you do accomplish.

Don’t be afraid to set your goals so high that they might seem unrealistic.  Is it realistic that you could go into a room, turn on a switch and have light?  Thank God Thomas Edison continued to work on what may have seemed to others to be an unrealistic goal.  Is it realistic that a boy who was cut from his high school basketball team could become one of the greatest basketball players of all time?  Thank God Michael Jordan kept pushing regardless of how the odds appeared.

Being realistic is not doing yourself any favors.  Sure, realistic goals are more comfortable.  It is always easiest to travel the road of the least resistance.  However you will rarely reach your fullest potential by setting goals this way.  The way to reach your fullest potential is to push past the goal of doing what is average and to embrace what might even seem to be crazy.  It is those people that push past average that make up the movers and the shakers of this world.  It is those people who push past the ordinary to become the extraordinary. 

What are your goals?  Do you find yourself telling yourself to “be realistic?”  Ignore that notion and push forward to set your goals so high that you have no choice but to become the extraordinary.  You don’t know what you are capable of unless you try.

Enjoy this Michael Jordan video and see what aspiring far past what seems realistic can do.