I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. I’ve written about him before. I don’t exactly have him on a pedestal…I realize that he had faults, just like everybody else. But there are aspects of what he accomplished that speak to me. Several of his catchphrases surface in my words. One that arises amongst members of the Hectic Family is “insanely great”. We’ve used it to describe how we want to be viewed, and how we achieve goals. It’s a fairly common…a member of the family sets out on an adventure, and another one asks how they’re going to “exceed our expectations”. It’s our way of asking how the results will be “insanely great”.

Recently I  was thinking about the idea of being insanely great. A lot of other things were bouncing around in my head, but I kept gravitating back to this idea. I then asked myself the question: Am I being insanely great.

I concluded I’m not. I listed lots of reason: Time, responsibilities, energy levels. You name it, I brought it out, shook off the dust, and examined the reasons in the light of day. In the end, I realized they were excuses.

I dug deeper to understand why I was making excuses. For several hours, I thought about what was going on. I realized I’m not only failing to achieve insanely great status, but if I don’t shake things up I’m going to end up something much worse. I’ll be:

     Insanely Average

That scared me. A lot. I’ve always been an over-achiever. In school I was always at the top of the class. I took a job in a competitive field and rose rapidly through the ranks. I set out from that job and had a pretty good run as a solopreneur when that word was still 20 years from being coined.

We started a family and I did a good job of raising the kids. Because of my wife’s demanding schedule, I adapted my lifestyle to be the primary caregiver, transportation, and cheerleader for the kids. Along the way, we everything with gusto. We continually asked each other “how did you exceed expectations today?”. Leaving out whose expectations they were…the idea was (and still is) to exceed someone’s expectations. Especially your own.

Somewhere along the line, the family stopped asking that question of me. It’s frightening to realize that I even stopped asking the question of myself. For years I’ve barely been meeting my own expectations. It seems nobody has expectations for me. I’m just support for everybody else. I do what’s necessary, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had sufficiently high expectations that anyone would bother to ask how I’m doing. The only time it ever comes up is when I fail. Forgetting to pick up a kid after school, missing a bill payment, failing to deliver something, returning library books late, letting the family run out of milk. Failing at the lowest common denominator of expectations will lead to a mini-revolt in the Hectic Family. Yet even then, someone will state “Dad has a lot of things on his plate”.

It’s an excuse…not a reason!

The worst thing about that excuse…it clearly shows how low the bar has been set. Honestly, do you know anybody who doesn’t have a lot of things on there plate? Do you know anybody who isn’t busy? It’s like saying “he’s breathing”. Everybody has a lot on their plates. Maybe it’s silly stuff that shouldn’t be there. Maybe it’s the kind of activities that take a lot of time, but don’t generate results. In the end, our plates are full and we’re all busy.

Being busy means I’m average. Extra-ordinary. When I came to that realization, it scared me. It shook me to my core.

I don’t want to be insanely average.

My biggest fear would be to see this on my headstone:

Fear can do two things, it can cause you to freeze or it can motivate you to move. Naming this fear has provided motivation to move from where I am. I realize, there have been a lot of wins lately, but I also know that I’m not setting the bar high enough. In fact, I’ve let everybody else ratchet the bar so low that anybody can clear it. Yet I’m not anybody. I’ve got gifts and talents that I’ve allowed to languish. Everyday tasks and activities have become all I accomplish. I haven’t managed to really push past the routine of daily living. Like the proverbial hamster on a wheel, I’m spinning in place but going nowhere.

I don’t want to continue to exist in the realm of extra-ordinary, I want to be extraordinary. I want to have high expectations for myself and then go beyond them. I want those around me to expect a lot from me, and then stun them with my ability to exceed their expectations.

It’s not just about wanting though. It’s about doing. The next ten days are going to be our usual whirlwind of local activities, medium distance travel (at least for the Midwest US), and a combination airline flight-drive. School is getting near the end of the year, so our schedules are absolutely crazy. There is practically no routine one day to the next. But that’s our lives. We’ve made our choices, now it’s time to fit everything that I want to accomplish into the spaces.

Over the next ten days I’m embarking on a journey to exceed my own expectations. I’m going to seize the opportunity of my hectic life to transform my expectations of myself into something greater. Something worth being remembered for.

     Something Insanely Great!