Clickbait.

I’m tired.

I’m tired of thumbing through Instagram and Facebook and wanting everyone else’s lives.

I’m tired of seeing clickbait ads about “making money,” “getting out of debt,” and “this one simple trick got rid of belly fat for good!” and being tempted to take the bait.

I’m tired of thinking of all the ways I should change, but never making the first move to change.

Because change is scary and that first move might be the first move toward failure. Fear is safe. It is also a lie. It promises safety with the assurance that we shouldn’t do anything too bold, too crazy, too outlandish or we could wind up in a bad position. We could wind up losing everything.

Some days I think I would rather risk it all and lose it all trying rather than lose it all slowly and over time as my momentum fades. Change is happening all around us and within us, regardless of whether or not we decide to stay safe. We are either moving toward success or failure. Risk is a part of success. There is not always an easy road toward that with a fancy clickbait title. There is work, discipline, and resilience. There is understanding the mission and striving toward it. There is a difficult path and a lot of easy looking paths to distract us.

And some guru will claim to show you the easy path to

loosing weight

making money

quitting your job

being happy

and they are all liars. Of course, there are tricks to working smarter and not harder, but it still means work. I love people like Jon Acuff and Dave Ramsey because they challenge people to be intentional about their goals, to be smart about their work, and to find the “cheat codes” to make it easier. But they never write that there is an easy route to dreams. All goals requires work, we just need to know how to be good at it. It takes hard work to start something new or to finish a project. It takes time to get out of debt and it requires intentionality. Losing weight means staying active daily but also being disciplined in your diet.

It is more than a 30 day fix. It is a shift in attitude. It happens in the moment you are tired of the mediocre existence in which you live where your entertainment and angst go hand in hand through social media. It is the shift that takes place when you realize that you don’t want to feel the burning jealousy that wells up in your heart when you see someone else’s vacation photos and start to believe that their filtered life is a reality. I want to live my life unfiltered. I want to live my life in a way that makes me satisfied. I want to look at other people’s lives and be happy for them because I am so confident and overjoyed in my own.

I don’t want to sink to the level of weeding my way through one more clickbait article about making money. I don’t want to spend another moment talking about how my diet starts tomorrow. I am done thumbing through hundreds of Instagram posts only to find myself shaky and heartbroken like an alcoholic that drank way too much and snapped back to reality only to feel nothing again.

I want adventure. I want success. I want to do the hard work so I can enjoy the fruits of that work. I’m tired of mediocrity.

But I’m not too tired to change it.