One of my favorite quotes comes from Jada Pinkett Smith. It goes something like this. “Everybody wants to be a lion until it comes time to do lion stuff.”
We all want to succeed in one way or another. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I know few people who wouldn’t love to have a couple dozen million dollars. See, most people want to be a lion. But lion shit isn’t for the faint of heart.
Seriously. Lions don’t gracefully gather acorns from the ground for their dinner. They savagely hunt down, kill, dismember, and eat the raw flesh of other potentially fast and fierce animals. They protect their territory from a plethora of unwanted guests. They vie for pack leadership. And they scare the shit out of other animals in the jungle.
In short? It ain’t easy being a lion. The way I see it is: Bigger animal = Bigger problems.
As Jada Pinkett Smith insinuated, people want to be crowned king of the jungle without earning the title.
You can rarely earn success without going the extra mile to outwork, outrun, outmaneuver, or outthink the other animals (or people) in the jungle of life. And how do we do that? Well, many ways. But the most obvious is often the most difficult.
We simply do what we know we should do.
Y’all - WE KNOW!
We live in the information age. You can’t tell me you can’t figure out how to make money online, lose ten pounds, write your first book, create a nonprofit, or do anything else under the ever-loving sun. You can learn to cross-stitch an iPhone case on the internet for heck’s sake.
I’ll say it again. In bold. - WE ALL KNOW (or can easily find out) WHAT WE SHOULD DO.
We just don’t do it. We want to be a lion, but when it comes to doing lion stuff like working for a few more hours after your kids go to bed, we decide to gather acorns instead of zebras. We think that Future Us will definitely be the king of the jungle, but Present Us? Not so much.
I usually write about productivity, but the first part of productivity is the discipline to take advantage of those moments when you know you should be working toward your goal. Now, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t rest. Because we know when we should rest.
Because we know what we should do.
We just need to do it.
How do you become a lion? By making one lion decision at a time.
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I hope you all have a fantastic week. Here’s a happy photo of me and my kid at Huntington Gardens to hopefully make you smile.
Love,
Michelle
I like the the photo. :) Thanks, Michelle! Have an awesome day/year!