Over this past week, I noticed on multiple occasions the
amount of people that I come across that tend to complain…a lot! So I had to add a #14 to
the list of last week’s 13 Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing.
14. Don’t complain.
a.
No one likes a complainer, if something isn’t how you want it change it
That being said, we have all had points in life where we
can remember complaining about something, be it traffic, a long line at a
store, a coworker, the weather, whatever it is, most of us probably already
complained about something today. We
have all been guilty of it at some point.
I know we’ve talked about shifting our perspective, but what we all need
to do is suffer to allow for that shift to completely happen permanently.
Here’s a dose of that
perspective the next time you find yourself thinking about complaining. It’s the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton. He was an arctic explorer who on a voyage to
traverse Antarctica from end to end through the South Pole got stuck in the ice
100 miles off shore before they could land.
His ship The Endurance was ground to a halt in the Winter of 1915. He now found himself and his men stranded in
the ice with months before it would be warm enough to melt and release the ship. 10 months in the ship was crushed by the
shifting ice. That’s not a typo, 10
months! Makes 15 minutes in traffic
with the AC and radio not too bad…right?
They would hunt seals and penguins
to survive as their rations ran low, and it even reached a point where they had to
kill their sled dogs to live. Dude ate
his dogs without hesitation in an effort to save his men. That’s someone who is hungry, not that person
that says they are starving in the mall food court. Just when it couldn’t get worse for them the
giant ice slab they were calling home drifted into warmer waters and began to
melt out from under them. They crammed
into the remaining life boats and were able to navigate to the Elephant Islands
150 miles away. It'd been almost 500 days since they'd been on land...
It turned out the uninhabited
island wasn’t any better than the ice slab they were on previously. So in a last ditch effort to survive,
Shackleton and a few of his crew navigated 800 miles to South Georgia
Island. Somehow they were able to
navigate their way through the frigid rough seas and made it. However, they were on the wrong side of the
island and had to march across mountains and glaciers for a day and a half to
reach civilization. Without stopping. Knowing that with their level of exhaustion and extreme cold, if they fell asleep, they'd never wake back up. What’s on the other
side of Mountains? More mountains! Talk about not wasting time complaining about
the situation and doing everything he could think of to save his crew. Which he did. Every single one of them. Pretty sure nothing in his life was ever
worth complaining about after that.
So stop. Make a commitment to yourself to not complain
the next time you’re tired during a workout.
You’re going to live; you’re not stuck in an Antarctica winter eating
dogs to survive. Push yourself beyond
your comfort zone, that’s where the great things happen in this life, that’s
where you get stronger, that’s where you harness your fear and use it to your
advantage. If it’s something that makes
you uncomfortable, it’s probably the thing that you need to be doing.
In the end what I want is for
all of us to maximize our lives and realize our true potential to allow us to
live that memorable life that we have to
work hard and fight for. It’s time to
stop complaining and time to TANK UP and get after this opportunity that is
waiting right in front of us.
G
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Email: thetankupway@gmail.com
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