Give Me An E!

Have you ever met someone who is rarely excited? You ask how life is and the response is the verbal equivalent of a shrug. You are tempted to shake his/her shoulders and check for a pulse. You want to shout, “It’s your life. If you don’t get excited about it then no one else will!” Maybe you haven’t met anyone like that. Maybe that someone is you. If it is, we have work to do.

While I would argue that being alive is reason enough, some of us erroneously believe that if our lives aren’t exciting—which is a relative term—then we have no reason to be excited. That is planning backwards. It is impossible to build an exciting life without first ushering excitement into your life. In other words, you can’t live an exciting life if you aren’t first excited about your life.

Do you look at others and think, ‘Man, if I had a life like that then I’d be excited’? Why wait until then? Prior to your favorite athletes, singers, actors, or whoever reached that lifestyle they had some ho-hum days. It may have taken years of working a job they weren’t crazy about, years of pressing through a performing arts school, or countless auditions and rejections before you knew their names. Yet, they did not quit. You know why? Because they were excited about what was possible. They were excited about their future. They were excited before the call came in to say that their lives would change. They had an internal anticipation of more, bigger, and better, and that anticipation was enough to lead them to take action. They didn’t wait until their lives got exciting; they made their lives exciting. Their exciting external life was first initiated by an exciting internal life—not the other way around.

If you think your life is lacking excitement maybe it’s really an issue with your level of internal energy. Excitement has to start from within. You can’t wait for something to fall in your lap in order for you to get excited and enthusiastic about your own life. An excitement defibrillator will not miraculously descend upon you. Take charge of your future by getting excited about your life!