“Everything in moderation” is a saying that I grew up hearing all the time.
I used to translate it as “Be dull. Be mediocre. Be restrained.”, which in the 1980s was not cool. The 80s were about big hair, big cars and big money. Big egos living in big houses and bigging it up at every opportunity. Opportunity was everywhere, on a massive scale (if the newspapers were to be believed) and everyone wanted to be a millionaire. It was the furthest thing from a decade of ‘moderation’ than you could possibly imagine.
But that was only because our imaginations weren’t big enough. We couldn’t have imagined the last decade. The 2010s and now the 2020s. Now being a millionaire is easy. You just have to have kept hold of one of those big houses from the 80s and you’re sorted. Now everyone wants to be a BILLIONAIRE. For fucks sake, that’s another three zeros! One thousand times bigger!!! In just 30 years!
Every kid playing Sunday league football wants to play in the Premiership. Hundreds of thousands of kids all wanting one of roughly 550 squad places in the Premiership. Every team has one or two whose parents and coaches believe can ‘go all the way’, yet almost all of them will fail. That’s a sad fact. But it’s a fact.
Similarly to earn a modest £50,000 a year from YouTube you need around 2,000,000 monthly views of your content. Easier said than done.
Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t chase their dreams. I firmly believe that there are opportunities everywhere and that if you want something enough then you can achieve it. But I’m also a realist. For every premier league footballer there are around 24,000 who didn’t make it. For every billionaire there are roughly 3.3 million people who aren’t. It is possible to achieve this level of success, but the odds are long. And it’s not just that. The work involved to make the cut is phenomenal. So hard, in fact, that however much we dream about it, most of us just aren’t cut out for that level of sustained effort.
So most settle for less.
And the world will tell you that’s sad. The world will tell you that you didn’t realise your potential. That you missed what you could have been.
Well the world doesn’t know shit!
I’ll tell you that that you can have everything you need to be happy and more. I’ll tell you that EVERYONE can achieve that. And it takes a lot less than a footballer salary or a billion pounds!
Ignore what the world tells you. I’ll tell you that if you work out what is enough and then work out what you have to do to get it is much easier than you think.
You don’t need to be burnt out. You don’t need to be stressed. You can be comfortable, happy and live the life you want to.
You just have to work out what is ENOUGH.