Don’t get stuck in a rut

Not stuck in a rut.

When you stop growing, life becomes stagnant and dull. However, if you keep growing as a person, life is exciting just like when you were a kid. When you open yourself to new experiences, when you actively seek to learn something new every day, you’ll be living life on your toes. You’ll make discoveries that open your eyes to new passions and opportunities. You’ll learn from your new experiences, even the hard experiences, and you’ll always be growing. You will be developing and improving your personality, your integrity, your trade, and your character.

The truth of the matter is you can never stand still in life. You either move in the right direction or push yourself to grow and improve; or, you can sit back, do nothing and move in the other direction, down the path of stagnation towards a slow and mind-numbing end while the world moves on around you. It seems like an easy choice, right?

When you stop growing, you lose the spunk for life. You stop being happy and excited, and that is not the right attitude for success. The world is continually growing around us, so it’s essential that we grow too. In our age of microprocessors, computers, and satellites, technology doubles every year. The workforce is getting more educated around us. The competition is getting better and better. For us to be successful, we have to be up to speed with the current times. We need to know the current customs of business and ways of interacting with people. We need to arm ourselves with new knowledge and skills. Otherwise, the world will grow without us and we’ll become disconnected. We’ll become a dinosaur, and we all know what happened to the dinosaurs: they became extinct.

Obviously, no one wakes up in the morning and says, “Today, I’m going to quit growing. I want to slowly fade out, become irrelevant, and become a miserable observer in life.” And yet, that’s exactly what becomes of so many people in our world. They quit growing, the get stuck in a rut, and become stagnant. So what happened?

There are two paths that lead to becoming stagnant. The first is the least common, and it’s the path you travel by not being humble enough. Some people reach a point in their life where they think they know everything they need to know. They feel like they’re good enough and they don’t need to grow anymore. Yikes! This is the exact wrong attitude to have. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true: the more we learn, the more we should realize how much more there is to learn. If you consciously quit growing because you think you’re good enough, then your ego has gotten in the way. Push it aside and be more humble. Realize you’ve got a lot more learning to do, a lot more growing to do, because if you don’t, the world is going to blow right by you.

The second path to stagnation is the more common one. It’s the one that sneaks up on us. Many people do their job day in and day out, they get caught up into a pattern, and suddenly they stop expanding, they stop growing. This is how life becomes stale and leads to a slow death.

Even the best of us can get stuck in a rut. We must not allow excuses to prevent us from growing. Always be open-minded, willing to try something new, and eager to learn. When you have that kind of mind set, you’ll have a new lease on life, newfound freedom, and a fire inside of you that keeps you young, keeps you moving, and keeps you motivated.

Don’t get stuck in a rut! Never stop growing, life is fun and exciting.

Giovanna Garcia
Imperfect Action is better than No Action

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