We drink our own kool-aid: we believe our own press. Especially about our accomplishments, we have trouble distinguishing fiction from reality, but in reality, we have work to do.
In our minds we are (let’s be honest) superstars, we just haven’t had our lucky break yet. We haven’t met the right person, read the right book, taken the right trip, hired the right employee, found the right team. We all believe the best in ourselves and instead of accepting ownership of our flaws and inaction, we shift the blame onto something (or someone) else.
That something else is our silver bullet.
It’s the one thing that would fix it all, or so we tell ourselves. If only we had a lot of money, the right boss, the right job, the right spouse, the right life…if only. Those dreamers waste their lives and believe their lives are wasted—all because they don’t have their magic, silver bullet.
Gen Z has a name for these people: snowflakes. They are flakey, disconnected from reality, weak, sensitive, and easily offended. Historically they were known as frail, fragile, and flimsy, not leaders or someone to be counted on. Certainly a far cry from the “salt of the earth” group, or the “backbones of society.”
But strong, great people are only created through difficulty, through hard work, often for insignificant and non-correlated gain. There is no price put on character, and yet it used to be a fundamental value worth working all your life for.
There is a modern trend in business that adapts the definition of greatness to accommodate the snowflakes among us. Instead of greatness being defined by “doing great things,” it’s becoming defined by what we think or how we feel.
But no one has ever won a Pulitzer Prize by merely thinking about greatness—they had to actually do the work.
Sometimes grown, strong adults fall prey to the snowflake mentality, and it undermines the business of life. The following is a short list of possible symptoms:
Self-justifying instead of taking ownership.
Giving excuses and trying them on for size, selling them to yourself before you sell them to others.
Settling for mediocre instead of doubling down and working twice as hard, justifying your settling with the word “impossible.”
Creating a perfect mental world but living in an imbalanced real one (this happens in combination with serial over-thinking and haunts idealistic types with the scorn of hypocrisy.)
Judging others by their flaws and who they are instead of by their strengths and what they can contribute.
At the end of the day, life is very simple.
What matters isn’t what you say about yourself, but what others say about you.
What matters isn’t what you think, but how you use what you think to drive what you do.
What matters isn’t the silver bullet, but whether or not you are taking ownership.
Shakespeare said, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
Greatness comes from action, and action comes from problem-solving.
Good thing our world is chock-full of problems.