The Cost of Doing Nothing

What if I told you that big changes can be easier to tackle then small ones, and that mastering your reinvention is all about the fine-tuning?

When things aren't that terrible they don't always get your attention. They’re the little deficiencies we've become complacent with. But beware! It’s the complacency of the status quo that can drag you down, just like a single germ that begins as a minor infection. It’s not really bothering you all that much, but if you don’t deal with it—get rid of it—it turns into real, sometimes debilitating, illness.

A Sea Change can begin with a micro change

that has compounding effects…

…like interest in a bank account you forgot about that has, over time, turned into a fortune.

We know change can feel necessary when big things happen. If you lose your job you're going to have to embrace the tedious process of finding a new job. That's the obvious big change.

You're going to put effort into updating your resume, talking to people and brushing up your skills, maybe even breaking out the iron for that interview. The job loss has created an emergent need to manage your change.

But what about the insidious small things that we overlook, something thought to be insignificant that you've learned to just deal with? Maybe it's an unhappy work environment, or a sore neck that just won’t go away. It's not that big of a deal. Sometimes it gets stiff and you pop a pill and put some heat on it, but hey, that's life right?

We tend to believe small things don’t have any negative compounding effects. What may have been a small injury that doesn't require any major intervention can slowly limit our radius of movement. Eventually, it cheats us out of better posture, accelerating the aging process by causing us to stop challenging ourselves, in-turn reducing participation and lowering our quality of life.

This includes all the negative behaviors that aren't necessarily going to kill us tomorrow but can slowly add up and potentially rob us of our fuller future. You may not join into activities as freely, instead choosing to stay in. Or you may not choose to accelerate your career. Hey, you're happy to have a job, right? It could be worse. In the meantime, someone else is working your dream job because you’ve lost your get-up-and-go.

What is the cost of doing nothing? What value is your better physical and mental and emotional health worth to you? What is your price tag for fulfillment and finding your purpose? The ae quo has a way of hypnotizing us into complacency, so in exchange for doing nothing we pay with our time, our wellbeing, and our lost opportunities.

The big events make change more transparent, but the status quo can be an insidious poison to our growth.