Complacency is your biggest enemy. Here’s how to avoid it.
With everyone staying home (hopefully) right now it can be very easy to binge-watch Netflix, browse through Instagram, and watch TikToks. We all know this isn’t the best way to be spending our time, and yet we do it anyway. We’re satisfied with the way things are and we don’t want to challenge that. In other words, we’re complacent.
Complacency has been the biggest roadblock to human productivity for years. The reason climate change is even an issue is that people aren’t willing to take action. The reason most people don’t reach the goals they set is that they aren’t willing to step outside their comfort zones. It’s 10x easier to just keep doing what you’re doing right now, and that’s why complacency is so common. That’s why there are so many problems in the world. People are just waiting for someone else to solve them.
When you think about it, this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the most impactful people of all time made an impact by refusing to comply with the status quo. If people didn’t try to break the cycle of complacency, we wouldn’t have companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. And on top of that, we wouldn’t have the civil rights movement, the women’s right to vote movement, the environmental movement, etc. The desire to escape complacency creates productivity and positive change.
Nobody’s going to solve your problems for you, and yet we always seem to talk about “they”. Got a massive pandemic putting the world on lockdown? They’ll figure it out. Got people suffering in third-world countries? They’ll help them. Got a charity that desperately needs the help of its community? They’ll find people to help them. Who. Is. They? “They” are all of us. We as a society need to solve these problems.
So, how do you escape complacency? How do you go out and make a difference? Simple, question everything. Don’t accept anything that exists right now, because chances are, it can be improved. And once you find that thing, that one thing that you know you can make an impact on, do it. Take action. Start that company, learn that programming language, build that application, because nobody’s going to do it for you.
The best way to measure complacency is stagnancy. If you’re not doing anything, you’re settling for what you have right now. Be consistent. The result of avoiding complacency is productivity, and productivity leads to impact. Anti-complacency is the prerequisite to making an impact, and impact is made when driven people don’t like the way things are.
This mindset is especially important considering the situation we’re in right now. Now’s the time to act. Now’s the time to make an impact in your community, whether that be educating the people around you about COVID-19 or finding a cure, there’s always something you can do to make the situation better. We’re in a situation right now that’s unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. We can’t just wait for someone else to take action.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to COVID-19. The world as a whole needs anti-complacent people. The most impactful people of this century are going to be the ones who are dissatisfied with the current state of technology, education, poverty, the environment, etc. By optimizing for anti-complacency, we’re optimizing for solving some of the world’s biggest problems.
So, instead of browsing through Netflix or going on TikTok, build something meaningful instead. Pick up a new skill, make an impact on your community, and most of all, break away from complacency.
