Not Killing It

The entrepreneur you follow online is killing it.

The content creator you watch has been killing it too.

One of your former clients has been killing it.

And maybe you want to be killing it too.

But maybe what all these people have been doing is the opposite. Or maybe they have been deliberate about killing it, and still, you should probably do the opposite.

—

The side-effect of wanting progress is that, in the name of focus, you might kill other aspects of your practice to get to where you want to go.

Your relationships might dwindle. Your heart might harden. You’ll stop getting the benefit of the doubt from the people around you. You’ll have success but you’ll be alone. Alone at the top, but alone regardless.

You’ll have killed it, literally, and by ‘it’, I mean the things that might matter more.

So those who proclaim to be ‘killing it’ are showing us their hand, and if you pay attention, it won’t be a hand you’d want to pick from.

—

So is there any way to get progress, to exert effort, while not sacrificing the bits that matter?

Let’s look at the opposite of ‘killing it’.

Giving life is the opposite. And life does require effort.

You can create an environment where others around you get to make progress before you do.
That takes effort, but it gives life.

You can slow down to offer active listening to a person who suffers.
That takes effort, but it gives life.

You can honour costly commitments that are inconvenient.
That takes effort, but it gives life.

You can lean toward doing the scary option this one time.
That takes effort, but it gives life.

If you pay attention to other kinds of people who seemed to have made a lot of progress, the ones you really want to emulate, you might find that that’s exactly the kind of framework they focused on. They’ll be the first to admit that they don’t like that ‘killing it’ expression anymore than you do.