What Have You Become?

I guess it was a couple weeks ago now that Saturday Night Live ran a sketch that has had me thinking. The idea was a game show, asking each of the contestants "What Have You Become?" Three contestants, who had all been told they’d had great potential when they were younger, had never done anything with it as they grew older.

In fact, they’d all become pretty disappointing.

After introducing each contestant, the host would then ask What have you become? forcing each of them to re-evaluate their life choices, often causing them to break down in tears at the realization that they had done nothing with the potential they’d had 20 years before.

I don't want to be that guy. The guy who could have done something significant with their life, but failed to take the necessary risks to arrive at that place. Yet I find myself going down that path. Where I opt for safe. Ordinary instead of extraordinary.

So how do you break out of it? How do you do something meaningful with your life? How do you make a dent in the universe? How do I avoid becoming the 'wicked and lazy servant'?

Same way you eat an elephant, one step at a time.

Maybe you're feeling stuck, going through the monotony of the day-to-day. Let's try to make a change. Let's start to take some steps out of the muck and start to move towards doing something significant.

Read a book
Send an email
Write a business plan
Have coffee with someone who's in the place you want to be

To quote Dave Matthews and the sing that has resonated with me the last couple weeks:
To change the world,
Start with one step.
However small,
The first step is hardest of all