Go where it’s not Crowded
By: Rupen Paul
Tags: The Extra Mile, Discipline, Commitment, Grind, Dedication

I like graduation ceremonies. I like to look at my life as a series of phases, which I finish and then move on to what lies next. When you read biographies of successful people, you always see a constant evolution of the protagonist. If you want your today to be the same as yesterday, then you have to do just what you did yesterday.

If you want this year to be different, then you just cannot do what you did last year. In other words, if you plan on having a life that is different, a life where you escape the traditional route of a monotonous unsatisfying work schedule, a life where you want to avoid lukewarm relationships with uninspiring people, you have to be prepared to go out into the cold-uncertain darkness and make something happen out of it. The majority of people are afraid of the darkness and the cold. For the rest, it’s a constant effort of doing what we need to do and a little more, to get closer to where we want to.

This is a constant effort and this is what we need to keep in mind. Why should we keep this in mind? because most people work only when it matters and then rest on their laurels. We study really hard so that we pass our exams to get employment and then we look for any opportunity not to study. We workout sometimes only before an event so that we look good on that event and then we get soft. In short once we get what we want, we just take it easy and never get back to the grind.

Even in comedy, it’s easy to relax after a point. A lot of comedians across the world settle down. Once you write an hour of jokes that kill, you sometimes end up doing that hour for the rest of your life. You get paid decently, you get to tour, you get to work with other comedians and somehow you get stable. You can even take another stable job and do comedy at nights for the rest of your life and still die being a comedian but a question that you might want to ask yourself is how would you like to contribute and to what extent would you like to contribute.

If you plan on contributing to a larger set of people around you, like your community, your country or the world then you would not work like you are only taking care of just you and your family. For this you need to set yourself apart. You need to do what others are not willing to do in going the extra mile. In my gym there’a a line on the wall that reads — ‘Go the Extra Mile, it’s never crowded there’. Maybe you can look at life at just what you could do to survive well or maybe you can look at life at how you’re going to attempt to be super extra-ordinary.

I recently saw a video of a former coach of the Late Kobe Bryant recount that one day he got a call from Kobe at 3 am. The call went like this — “hey coach, are you awake?”. The coach said ‘I was asleep but what’s keeping you up?’. Kobe said, ‘just wanted to know if you could help me with some conditioning’. The coach was more than happy to help Kobe. Why would anyone wake up that early when it’s not necessary? but it was all those efforts of going the extra mile that compounded into making Kobe World Class.

So let’s do our constant part of being extraordinary. David Goggins said, ‘It’s easy to be common among uncommon people but what we need to do is to be uncommon among uncommon people’.