"We choose to be great". Yeah! I love this quote from Elon Musk.
Ever since I was a kid, I always wondered why most of the people around me are unsuccessful. It looked like successful people sacrifice so many things to be successful but on the other side people around me are sacrificing so much to be ordinary. Why do most of us fear being successful? That seems so counterintuitive but I can say it´s pretty common from my own experiences.
So, to answer the question let me give some points from my personal experience that I think is valid for this discussion.
1. Expectation Vs Reality: As young people, we used to have so many big dreams but most of them faded away pretty much when we are adults, why? Well, one of the reasons may be when we had those dreams, we always consider an ideal world, a world where everything will go as planned. But as you might guess this never happens. And most of us can't take those adversities and give up. That is also one of the reasons why in most jobs, recruiters seek experienced people. One of the reasons being they are more familiar with the adversities and likely to find ways to get out of them.
2. Not knowing the Why: Author Simon Sinek in his famous book 'Start with why: how Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action' states the importance of having a strong reason to follow one's ambition. But for most of us, we decide our goals based on others' expectations of us or blindly following someone. And if we don't enjoy that journey of pursuing then it is so tough to continue with that. That is exactly what happens to most of us. If you are doing something you absolutely love, you tend to exceed in that job than your peers no matter how good they are; as they give extra effort to even get along with their job.
3. Looser mindset: Most of us have a low-achieving mindset, I don't know because of personal experience or whether it is embedded into us by the environment we were brought up in. Therefore we create this looser mindset even before starting to play the game. From my personal experience, I can say when I was telling my big ambitions to my parents they were somewhat negative about it. They are like: we are middle-class families those dreams are not for us, they are unachievable. So, it is really tough to continue with your big goals when your closest ones are not with you at such a young age. And I must say I am not trying to make my parents like any villains or something. They love me a lot. It's just they don't want to see me heartbroken if I fail to live my expectation. But the world is a cruel place. You will face adversities or struggles one way or another. A song perfectly fits with this point: 'Famous' by French Montana. This song is about him and his grandmother who raised him. The song explores when he wanted to become a singer and for that, he left his home country, how his grandmother wished that he would fail and come back to his native place so that she could love him the most.
4. Fear of being apart: Most of us want to be part of a group, right? We develop this habit as kids. No one wants to feel left out! Especially when you have a special bond with that group, like a friends' circle. For most of us, friendships defined us. So, so many times we try to get almost the same level of job as our friends so that they don't treat us differently. I know it may seem so wrong but I feel this is indeed a point. Just recently I saw a '60 minutes' interview of the "first man" Neil Armstrong where he was talking about the moon landing experience. He told that when he came back his peers starts to treat him differently than before and he was not particularly happy about it as he could not interact with them as raw and real s before. Now, this can be a little extreme example but if this makes people like Armstrong uncomfortable then it can surely be whole more troublesome for common people especially if they have a lack of confidence and fear of being unique.
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