The Suck: The Two-Headed Source of Your Obstacles in Life

Last week it struck again.

I was in Ontario for a family get-together and spent a couple of days in Toronto. One of my best friends from university lives there. I hadn’t seen him in three years and he just had his first kid. But rather than visit him and meet his daughter, I drove right by. Why? Because I neglected to take the initiative to contact him early enough to make a plan. So rather than create a memorable moment that would strengthen our relationship, we exchanged forgettable WhatsApp messages. 

Yet another mediocre blow. 

The True Terror

Every year, millions die of mediocrity, left lifeless by attacks like the one that hit me. Memories un-made. Adventures unlived. Dreams unattempted. Legacies un-etched. Superpowers un-unleashed.

Excruciating clarity strikes at the end. The painkiller of self-justification isn’t strong enough to dull the extreme regret, so the mediocrity sufferers beg to rewind and try again. Fight harder this time. And they warn those of us who still have a chance. 

We’ve all heard the warnings, if not in person, in movies and books. We briefly feel their pain and terror. But we’d rather not dwell on it. We’ll worry later.

Why do we let this happen? Lots of reasons. But the better question is, What?

Stop Fighting the Symptoms

Do you know what you’re fighting against? What tricks you into thinking, “Ah, don’t worry about this now. You’re busy. Let’s just delete this email and… read more”? 

You suffer the symptoms of its machinations: disinterest, fatigue, lingering pain, poor health, loneliness, unfulfillment, boredom, forgetableness. 

But what’s the cause? What’s the supervillain holding us back from living super extraordinary lives?

Face Your Enemy

“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

Charles Baudelaire

Our supervillain doesn’t overtly terrorize us from a remote island fortress. It hides inside us, wrapping us in its warm embrace, leading you to believe it’s on our side. Our problem lies elsewhere. So instead of trying to stop it, we aid and abet its evil ways.

We rarely glimpse in its direction. When we do, it deftly covers itself up, distracting us with other targets of blame: misfortune, jerks, genetics, stories—anything but looking it square in the eye. 

When you don’t know what you’re fighting, you can’t win. When you can’t name it, you can’t muster the motivation to fight.

But if we can name it and focus our efforts against it, maybe we can live a little less mediocrely. “The obstacle is the way,” so how do we make a beeline toward the greatest obstacle of them all? How do we identify this supervillain in its full, glorious horribleness? 

The Hunt Begins

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu

Start by figuring out what it’s stopping us from getting: 

What do we want? 

I believe we want to optimize for energy. That’s our juice. Our vitality. We want to radiate contagiously. 

To do so, we have to engineer our lives. Remove energy “leaks” and add “pumps.” Fill our lives with anti-regrets — actions that have lasting positive impacts on one’s life. This will lead us to harness whatever (not-so-)superpowers we have to selfish-less-ly fulfill our inner values. Patrick O’Shaughnessy defines a ‘life’s work’ as “A lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who we are.” And we want our life’s work to inspire. To feel like superheroes. 

Unmasking the Villain

“You’ll never find the solution if you don’t see the problem.”

Gilbert K. Chesterton

So what weapons does our arch-enemy use to stop us from getting what we want?

Our nemesis:

• Attracts us onto our couches.
• Convinces us to read more newsletters like this before taking action. 
• Sticks us to the status quo by warning of risks involved with untangling and unleashing your core self. 
• Scares us away from entering the caves we fear that hold the treasures we seek. 

The common enemy here? 

Complacency. 

But that’s just the lesser half of it.

The Plot Thickens

Even if we resist Complacency to take action, our nemesis tricks us into fighting the wrong flows, venturing into the wrong caves, and wasting our energy.

Our nemesis:

• Distorts our perception of what’s admirable, compelling us to chase status, wealth, and happiness instead of venturing down paths that attract greater rewards.
• Conceals our abilities, Dunning-Kruger-ing us into overestimating weaknesses and imposter-syndroming us out of exploiting strengths.
• Tricks us into overvaluing hollow prizes and undevaluing the benefits of fulfilling our values.
• Drags us down from taking a broader perspective of life, making us impatiently stress over trivialities that make our life stories incoherent and unexciting. 
• Exaggerates our predicted pains of breaking free from the unspectacular status quo, trapping us in the festering ‘Not-So-Bad’ paradox.
• Injects our brains with the cement of certainty, hardening over time until nothing new can penetrate. 

What’s at the source of these malicious mental manipulations? 

Delusion.

The Suck Emerges

Complacency and Delusion form the two heads of a two-headed monster:

I call it, The Suck. 

The Suck’s Complacency lures you in with a warm hug of familiarity, allowing bad habits to engrain into your brain deeper than butt grooves in your favorite couch. Delusion simultaneously straps beer goggle blinders onto your face, puts a funhouse mirror in front of you, and drags you down dead ends while feeding you appealing excuses to conceal the truth. 

Want to meet with your friend in Toronto? 

Complacency tells you you don’t have to message him just now and wait till the last moment to organize something with him. Then delusion reassures you that when it doesn’t happen, it’s no big deal.

Want to find a way to keep enjoying perpetual summers, even as the kids get older? 

Complacency tells you to let Future Chris worry about it. Delusion obfuscates the reality that no time will be easier than the present to explore alternatives.

Want to grow your business into something financially and impactfully meaningful? 

Complacency tells you to keep writing the same way, and that doing anything different would take away from time with my kids and health. Delusion tells you that your ideas are amazing and it’s only a matter of time before your A Star Is Born style break. 

I can go on and on identifying Suck attacks. And I will. Because I’m not gonna let The Suck have it easy shriveling my comfort zone into a black hole of mediocrity. 

Every (Not-So-)Superhero Needs a Supervillain

“The important thing about a problem is not its solution, but the strength we gain in finding the solution.”

Seneca

Maybe you think “The Suck” is a juvenile name. That this whole supervillain idea’s silly.

Maybe that’s exactly what The Suck wants you to think.

Giving The Suck a name, better yet an identity, makes it feel less abstract, more concrete. This helps me identify more effective problem-fighting strategies. Sure, millennia of evolution to prioritize survival over thrive-al has hardwired The Suck inside me. But by externalizing my enemy I can confront it. Making The Suck part of my narrative gives me a sense of purpose and agency.

Every (not-so-)superhero needs a supervillain. Mine’s The Suck. I can’t beat it, but I can choose to enjoy trying. And by fighting it, maybe I won’t die of mediocrity.

You?

Fight The Suck Systematically

Since The Suck is ingrained inside us, we need an external weapon to fight it. A system. 

Over the past ten years, I’ve been designing a system. It doesn’t fully protect me from The Suck, but it’s so valuable to me that you couldn’t pay me to abandon it.

Now I’m helping others implement their own Suck-resisting systems with Systematic Brilliance. Here’s a step-by-step overview of the approach. You can implement it on your own, as I did. But if you’d like a kickstart, a structure and templates to follow, external anti-delusion and anti-complacency perspective, and to accelerate your implementation with lessons from my decade of experience, consider signing up for 1-on-1 coaching with Systematic Brilliance.

Thanks For Reading

Keep doing un-sucky things,

Chris

PS – Here’s a model depicting how The Suck conspires to keep us from fulfilling our potential through the forces of Complaceny and Reality (guide here):