Why Should We All Hit Rock Bottom

What if I told you that hitting rock bottom is not negative but something that we should all experience.

Something that you actually require in order to be successful. In any aspect of your life.

Now, I don’t mean that you should jump into smoking crack and draining your bank account just to see what happens. Please don’t do that.

And I’m not going to give you the cliche phrases like When you hit rock bottom, there is nowhere to go but up.

Nah.

I’m going to explain how, in practise, hitting rock bottom can to change the trajectory of your life and why the fact that things are “alright” is actually ruining it.

An Essential Ingredient?

When listening to any start up success stories and entrepreneurs who are running an established business, they all have one thing in common.

When talking about their journey, there always seems to be a point where they say that they were down to last few hundred dollars or that they’ve sold their house or had to borrow money from their parents to survive.

Of course, it is easy for them to narrate these moments as turning points in their career. Because it all makes sense in retrospect. And every rise seems more impressive when it is a rise from the ashes.

Remember that this wasn’t the case while it was happening. They didn’t know that it would turn into a success story. They only knew that it was all they got.

The burning down doesn’t sound that appealing though. But what if there’s not other way of becoming a Phoenix?

The Common Back Story To Success

The most successful athletes have a similar back story. More often than not, their chosen sport was the only chance they had in life.

A lot of NBA players saw a basketball sponsorship as the only way to escape the hustle on the streets.

Lionel Messi was diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency as a kid and his club refused to pay for the treatment.

Usain Bolt, one of the greatest Olympians of all time, was raised in poor conditions in small town in Jamaica.

From these examples, the rock bottom, the difficult situations do not seem like an obstacle but something that is necessary to achieve great things.

And maybe, the feeling of having nothing to lose gives you more courage to risk everything you have. And maybe we need to experience what we really don’t want in order to start pursuing what we really want.

Is it an essential ingredient?

The Age Of Fake Overnight Success

We live in an age with too much information out there and our attention span too short.

That’s why the world is full of click-bait story titles to capture our attention. “How I made my first million dollars within 6 months”. Sounds familiar?

As a result, that’s what people want and are searching for, the titles like “how to get abs in 4 weeks”, “how I lost 10 kilograms in one month” are essential if you want to get a click.

Even now, during the lockdown, people want extraordinary results in a short span of time. I’m sure there’ll be people out there posting stories like “How I became fluent in Spanish during the lockdown”.

Our society is driven by productivity and results. And they want the results fast. Ideally without any work.

The Spotlight

The problem is that when internet is saturated with highlight stories, there is no space for hard work in the spotlight.

This creates a vicious cycle. Because the market demands the quick-fix success stories, no stories about hard work make it to the title page. And because we are not exposed to them, we expect a quick-fix success story ourselves.

This causes various problems. Not only are people not willing to put in extra effort, because they are genuinely not aware that it is required to do so, but also, if they don’t get the results as quickly as the title page promised, they quickly give up.

“I’ve tried writing for a few weeks but no one was reading my stories. I guess it isn’t for me.”

Did you know Bukowski was 51 years old when he published his first novel? He was at the very rock bottom for quite a while.

That’s the stories we need to be hearing more about.

With expectations set too high, attention span too short, little patience and unwillingness to work hard, we are not really setting ourselves for success very well, are we?

But don’t fall into trap of saying that this is the society’s fault. This is not the high school anymore and nobody cares whether a dog ate your homework or your printer run out of ink.

Don’t try to find out who’s to blame for the fact that you are not happy with your life. In the school of life, the excuses don’t matter.

The Comfortable Mediocrity

The problem is, the lives of most of us don’t really suck. They’re alright.

Maybe you’re telling yourself that you don’t hate your job, you just don’t love it. It’s alright.

Maybe the relationship is not burning you with desire. But it’s alright.

Maybe the flat you live in is not terrible or anything special. It’s just alright. It will do.

You somehow get through the Monday to Friday grind, get drunk on Saturday and save up for a nice holiday at the end of the year. It’s alright.

But that’s the problem.

Because most of our lives are comfortably mediocre, we are not forced to change anything.

Because change is painful and stressful and risky. So why would you risk being comfortable if the life you have is okay?

Imagine being on your deathbed and being asked about your job, your relationship and your life.

Would you really want to reply, “it was okay”?

If you were asked why didn’t you change anything, do you really want to say “because it was alright”?

Is this what we are silently settling for?

Isn’t it heartbreaking how many people settle for relationships and jobs that create no fire inside their soul?

Did you come to this world to be mediocre?

Reframe The Lows

This is why, when people encounter a near-death situation, it sets them off to completely change their life. Because they’ve realised that the life they’ve lived until then was just “alright”.

And that scares them even more than dying.

Of course, the rock bottom thing sounds like quite an extreme situation. Maybe not a lot of us are going to encounter that.

But this can be applied to all of the lows that happen in your life. Rather than feeling sorry for yourself, see it as a direction.

Being unhappy is extremely useful because it helps you figure out what it is that you need in order to be happy.

Maybe you need to run out of breath when playing with your niece to realise you need to get fit to improve your health.

Maybe you need to be disgusted by yourself during your one-night stands in order to change.

Maybe you’ll be down to your last 100 dollars before you transform your life.

Maybe you need to be packing hand sanitizer for 40 hours a week to actually start working on your dreams.

Anyway, I digress.

Give Me Another Rock Bottom

I am not advising you to look for a rock bottom situation, I really don’t want you to lose everything just for the sake of it.

All I want to say is, that the next time you encounter it, embrace it, take it as a unique opportunity.

And the evidence says it’s a good start of your own success story.

I cheer for hard work, I cheer for effort, I am a fan of people who work on what they love even though there is no guaranteed reward on the horizon.

…

Many people might find themselves in a pretty low situation during lockdown.

Reframe it in your head and see it as a blessing.

And start your own success story.