“It will take too much work to achieve my goals.”
“It will take too long to achieve my goals.”
“I should just be happy with where I’m at in life.”
“Only special people are able to have great success.”
“Only privileged people are able to have great success.”
“I can’t go for that goal because I’m afraid I’ll mess up and lose everything.”
“I can’t go for that goal because it’s too risky and I have too much to do now.”
Everyone has their own excuses of why they aren’t as successful as they feel they should be and why they have not strived for the goals and the lives they wanted to have.
When people don’t achieve the goals they wanted to achieve, they make up a reason for why they fell short. In other words, they try to rationalize why they’re not living the lives they wanted to live and not achieving the success and gaining the recognition they thought they would get.
As a result, they start to feel as if they’re unworthy and unable to achieve the goals they originally had wanted, feeling the task is too difficult and/or too risky to go after.
They start to settle for what they have, telling themselves that they should be satisfied with what they have in life, that successful people have special advantages and abilities that enabled them to achieve the success they have, advantages and abilities that they don’t have.
According to TIME’s 2017 Harris Poll Survey of American Happiness, just 1 in 3 Americans said they were “happy.” That means that not even close to half of Americans are happy. In fact, the highest-ever percentage of Americans who were happy according to this poll was 35% in 2008 and 2009, barely over 1 in 3 Americans.