Chapter 6
6
RAISING THE BAR
How to do hard things that go beyond what’s expected or required
Sarah, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Olympic College in Washington, vividly recalls the day she received her worst grade ever on an English paper. It came back from the teacher covered with scribbled comments. At the end the teacher had added a devastating note—and an opportunity. The note said this: There is much room for improvement, Sarah, should you choose to revise.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the grade that hurt. Not at all, Sarah says. It was something much bigger: a painful realization that she had been sliding by, measuring her work only by the grades and not by more important criteria like, Have I done my best? or, Am I actually learning?
Sarah sheepishly told us, “I’d written papers before and knew that they showed a lack of understanding, and yet I still made good grades.” But her English professor saw that Sarah was getting by with little effort. “She had read my paper carefully and identified what was lacking. But she’d also seen my potential.”
How did Sarah fall into the rut of delivering only the bare minimum in her classes?
“When I first got to school, I actually felt relieved by the low expectations,” Sarah explained. “I could hold down my job, do the minimum amount of homework, and still make good grades.” But it had come at a cost. She’d become complacent.
As painful as the experience was, Sarah is still grateful that one professor saw through her game—and raised the bar.
Sarah accepted the challenge and chose to revise. At first she doubted her ability, but after a few hours of reworking, she realized her new draft was really improved. “Once I revised my paper and saw how much better I did when challenged, the light went on. I realized that I hadn’t actually been learning anything before.”
That day Sarah realized that if she truly wanted to be prepared for life, she’d have to take responsibility for her own education. If she measured success only by other people’s standards of what was acceptable, she would never reach her true potential. She would need to set her own bar high and then do her best to exceed it.
“You’d think that just doing an assignment and fulfilling a professor’s expectations would produce a quality learning experience,” she said. “But in my case it didn’t. After a year at college and ten professors, I’ve realized that at least half of them didn’t expect enough of me.”
THE TRAP OF “JUST DO YOUR BEST”
Can you relate to Sarah’s story? It’s easy to be content with less than our best, especially when our halfhearted efforts seem to satisfy everyone around us. And being “good enough” can turn into a special hazard. Those who could do a lot better or tackle a much bigger challenge seldom do so when they’re already “good enough” by other people’s standards.
What about you? Maybe you’ve procrastinated on a school project because you knew you could stay up late the night before the deadline and throw something together. Or maybe you’ve accepted your place in the middle of the pack even though you know that’s not where you belong. In many ways you can deliver less than 100 percent and still get away with it—on a team, in youth group, at work, at home, in your personal and spiritual life.
In this chapter, we’ll look at one of the most important but challenging steps you can take to beat the tide of low expectations: reject complacency and choose to do hard things that go above and beyond what’s required or expected of you.
This choice goes right to the heart of what it means to be a rebelutionary. Without a doubt, pushing yourself to do more than is asked, expected, or required is nearly always a lonely choice. It can set you apart from friends, co-workers, other Christians, even family. As we’ll see, the desire to do your best—even when no one around you requires it—takes a special kind of character. It puts you at odds with the accepted culture, which says “Just do your best” but means something very different.
Think about it. This common phrase, “Just do your best,” actually encourages the opposite. When someone says, “Just do your best,” are you inspired to reach for more? Or does it feel like permission to just get by? We say, “Hey, I did my best.” But did we really? More likely what we mean is, “Hey, I gave it a shot, and that’ll have to be good enough.”
Believe it or not, the “good enough” and “just do your best” mind-sets actually stem from the enemy we met in the second chapter: the Myth of Adolescence.
MEET MR. COMPLACENCY
The Myth of Adolescence tries to get you in one of two ways. The first is to flat-out brainwash you with low expectations. If that doesn’t work, it happily paints you as an exception. In this case, being an exception means that compared to the irresponsibility, immaturity, and incompetence expected from teenagers, you are officially “above average.”
Wow! A gold star for you!
But wait a minute. Being labeled an exception when you’re barely even trying quickly turns into a trap of its own. You can become like Sarah, floating along on your above-average status in a river of meager requirements. Your gold star reduces the chances that you’ll ever live up to your actual potential.
Before long you’ll become blinded by complacency, which is defined as a smug feeling of satisfaction with who you are and what you’ve done. Recognize that feeling? We do. We like that feeling, honestly. But we’re learning that smug satisfaction leads to genuine disappointment before long.
Here’s why. Like pride, complacency thrives when hidden behind rationalizations (“Hey, I did my best…”). Obviously this means that the majority of complacent people don’t think they have a problem. And as many wise men throughout history have observed, the most dangerous enemy is the one we fail to recognize. Since you don’t think you have a problem—How could you? You’re above average!—you’re an easy victim for a lot of sweet-sounding lies.
Imagine if complacency were a person in your life. Mr. Complacency would come up beside you, admire that shiny gold star of yours, and then whisper smugness-inducing flattery like:
• “People think you’re so great. Lucky you—you’ve got it made without even trying.”
• “Everything is going just fine. Why accept a new challenge where you might fail?”
• “You’re okay just the way you are. Why work to improve yourself?”
• “Compared to some people—cough—you’re not that bad!”
• “From what I hear, Thomas Edison and Bill Gates never got a gold star.”
Listen to Mr. Complacency long enough and he’ll convince you that what you really, really need is a nap.
But don’t kid yourself. The cost of complacency is real, and it can be tragic. We slide into habits of mediocrity and excuse making. Life gets boring, and we’re not sure why. We know, or at least suspect, that there’s a lot more we could do or be. But floating along, there’s no way to be sure. Might as well take another nap.
The daily periodical Bits & Pieces shares this chilling picture of what’s really happening:
Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a drain on the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things as they might be. “Good enough” becomes today’s watchword and tomorrow’s standard.
Complacency makes people fear the unknown, mistrust the untried, and abhor the new. Like water, complacent people follow the easiest course—downhill. They draw false strength from looking back.
Proverbs 1:32 is even clearer: “The complacency of fools destroys them.”
Over time, refusing to reach higher, try harder, and risk more robs us of the glorious purpose and wonderful future God has created us for.
If we’re fortunate, one day we’ll get a wake-up call like Sarah’s—a jolt that makes us see how our real life is drifting by—and we’ll decide to reach for more.
Hopefully a lot more.
THREE STRATEGIES FOR STEPPING HIGHER
We recommend that rebelutionaries do three hard things that go above and beyond what our culture expects and take us closer to what God expects:
1. Do what’s hard for you.
2. Be known for what you do (more than for what you don’t).
3. Pursue excellence, not excuses.
Do What’s Hard for You
Remember Heidi, the county campaign coordinator in our Alabama Supreme Court race? She jumped into something that, for her, was terrifying—talking on the phone, especially to strangers. For a lot of teens, being on the phone is like breathing or eating pizza: can’t do without it, don’t think much about it when it’s happening. But not for Heidi. That’s what we mean here when we say do what’s hard for you. A rebelutionary takes the time to identify the areas where he or she could accomplish more by stepping across the line of what comes easily and coming out from behind past accomplishments, complacency, and low expectations.
Mark is homeschooled, but he plays basketball with the varsity team at the local high school. Mark is one of the top scorers in the division, and basketball has been his life ever since he can remember. He spends hours at the gym almost every day, not including official practices, shooting hundreds of free throws, running drills, and extending the range of his jump shot. If you ask anyone who knows Mark whether he does hard things, they’ll say yes—and Mark knows it. But the truth is, he uses his athletic reputation as an excuse to not spend as much time on a lot of things that don’t come as naturally to him—like reading difficult books and helping his family out around the house.
If Mark were honest with himself, he’d admit that he has allowed other important areas of his life to drift too low on his priority list or has even dismissed them entirely. All of us have the tendency to emphasize our strong points and then use them as an excuse to neglect our weaker points—and that’s Mark’s game. We would all like to pick just the strongest areas of our lives and say, “This is me. Ignore everything else. This is who I am.” But if we want to live as rebelutionaries, we can’t afford that luxury.
Take Heather, another teen we met during the Alabama campaigns. All she wanted people to see was her leadership position in a national youth organization. As a gifted young person in a culture of low expectations, Heather could easily stand out and gain attention for doing relatively little compared to her potential. Since most people were impressed with her, she had become pretty impressed with herself.
“I started reading your blog,” Heather wrote us a few months after we’d returned home to Oregon. “One of the first things that caught my attention was your emphasis on not becoming complacent in our ‘excellence’—that it’s not enough to impress a society with remarkably low expectations; it’s not enough to be a standout in a sea of mediocrity.”
With this realization, Heather began to focus, not on things that were impressive to others, but on things that actually challenged her and caused her to grow. For Heather this meant focusing on reaching out to others and being faithful in the small things not many people see. The rest of her letter is a beautiful example of how doing what’s hard for you can pull you out of complacency and spark radical growth:
I began to focus on doing harder things than I had ever done before. I refocused on mentorship and “how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24, NIV). I changed my password on my work computer to a variation of “do hard things” as a daily reminder to start the day brainstorming for at least one comfort zone–stretching thing I could do.
In the midst of these changes, I also read John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life. My thoughts throughout the day would take the shape of the question, What hard thing can I do today that will have an eternal impact for the sake of the gospel?
One answer the Lord gave me was to start a monthly e-newsletter for [the] office where I work. It will include announcements, birthday recognitions, recipes, jokes, holiday celebration ideas, and a bold presentation of the gospel. I’ve also had the opportunity to give a clear presentation of the gospel to two of my co-workers.
At church I’ve been personally reaching out to people that I wouldn’t have reached out to otherwise, and when I talk to my friends, I’ve been trying to direct the conversation to more substantial matters. At home I’ve sought to do hard things—even things as simple as staying calm when before I would have gotten upset, or volunteering for an extra task around the house.
Has “do hard things” changed my life? Yes, it has. The Lord has used the Rebelution to jolt me out of my complacent self-satisfaction and give me a new vision for what it means to inspire others to excellence in Christ.
Be Known for What You Do (More than for What You Don’t)
Lindsey is in her second year of high school—her first at a private Christian school. Even among other Christian teens at school and church, Lindsey is the “good girl” who seemingly never does anything wrong. She won’t watch R-rated movies, wears a promise ring her dad gave her on her thirteenth birthday, and won’t even date (or “court,” as she puts it) until she’s ready to get married. It doesn’t make her highly popular among some of her peers, but she cares more about what the adults in her life think. And they praise her constantly—usually while they bemoan all the “bad stuff” other teens today are involved in.
She loves it when she gets compliments for being such a “wonderful girl,” but when Lindsey is honest, she knows she’s become exceptional for what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t attend wild parties, cause trouble, or want a tattoo. But what does she do? Is the Christian life all about avoiding “bad stuff” or is it about doing “good, hard stuff” for God? Deep down Lindsey knows the answer, but she’s already praised for being such a godly girl. Isn’t that enough?
Bre, a high-school senior from Indiana, experienced low expectations firsthand. She, along with other young people, had participated in some community service projects and afterward gave a report to her church. Following the service she overheard a man saying, “Aren’t you glad these kids aren’t out smoking pot or drinking?”
“That comment just broke my heart,” Bre wrote to us, “because there truly is a level of mediocrity that has infiltrated not just our culture, but our churches as well.” Being considered a good teen only requires that we don’t do bad stuff like taking drugs, drinking, and partying. But is it enough to be known for the negative things we don’t do, or should we also be known for the positive and difficult things that we do?
God’s Word is clear. Our culture’s standard of simply not doing bad stuff is really no standard at all. Psalm 1:1 tells us, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” A lot of people, though, seem to quit reading there and miss the next verse: “But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
Our culture seems to hear the don’ts but miss the dos.
Charles Spurgeon, the great preacher of the nineteenth century, commented, “Perhaps some of you can claim a sort of negative purity, because you do not walk in the way of the ungodly; but let me ask you—Is your delight in the law of God? Do you study God’s Word? Do you make it the man of your right hand—your best companion and hourly guide?” If not, Spurgeon said, the blessing of Psalm 1 does not belong to you.
To live by God’s standards for young people and to enjoy the blessing He promises, we must get beyond simply avoiding bad stuff. To see this we need only look at the theme verse of the Rebelution, 1 Timothy 4:12: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity” (NIV). We’re not just supposed to avoid sinning; we’re supposed to pursue righteousness in a way that others will want to imitate.
Jason, a twentysomething from Florida, understands this principle well. He e-mailed us shortly after we started our blog and explained that he’d recently grown complacent with his life, just working his job and getting by. “Not that a steady working life isn’t God’s plan for some,” Jason said, “but I was feeling empty and knew that God had more abundant plans for me. I knew He had some hard things for me to do.”
Jason realized that though he wasn’t headed in the wrong direction, he wasn’t exactly headed in the right direction either. He told us that now he’s planning to switch gears and attend law school with the goal of advocating for pro-life groups.
For Jason, doing hard things meant pursuing challenges that would cause him to grow. It meant going beyond what others required of him so he could become more effective in the Lord’s service. He wasn’t content to merely survive; he wanted to thrive.
Pursue Excellence, Not Excuses
Mary is a junior in high school. A strong Christian, she proudly puts to rest the idea that Christians are stupid and unpopular by being head of her class and co-captain of the cheerleading squad. Her parents, teachers, and youth pastor all have big plans for her, and Mary has big plans for herself. But because things come easily for her, she’s become comfortable with her “standout” status. She doesn’t have to tell herself she’s great because other people will do it for her, even when she hasn’t done anything particularly difficult. She’s above average without even trying, so she sees no reason to push herself.
Mary has fallen prey to the curse that low expectations place on talented people. She has gotten stuck doing what comes easily because even things that are easy for her are impressive to others. In her mind, she has already arrived—yet she has never explored the true extent of her potential.
Shortly after we started The Rebelution blog, we received the following letter, which addresses the complacency Mary has slipped into and then points the way out:
The real danger for youths intent on rebelution is that these smarter-than-the-average-bear kudos can become the new and easy standard.
Unfortunately, we often get praise for things that weren’t particularly difficult to achieve. If we focus on the props and the encouragement of those who have low expectations for us, we become mediocre.
It can be challenging to set our sights on excellence, particularly when we’re hearing that we’re already there. One of life’s greatest lessons, which we all must learn, could be expressed in the phrase “That was nothing. Watch this.” Challenge yourself and others to call the normal things normal and save that word excellent for things that really are.
Since we got this letter, we’ve received several others from teens complaining about getting corny awards at school like the Celebration of Excellence for Leadership. All they’d done was turn in their homework and pay attention in class while everyone else goofed off. “It’s sad how little I had to do to earn this award,” wrote one girl.
Just like Mary, we can get so caught up in being the godliest person in our youth group or in earning the Celebration of Excellence for Leadership award that we lose sight of God’s standards. We fall short of our true potential because we aimed only to be bigger than the next fish in our small pond.
The students who have written to us recognized this and weren’t about to hijack their futures just because they’d managed to exceed mediocre standards. They realized that God’s standard is not for us to be the godliest person in a youth group filled with halfhearted Christians, but to “be holy” because He is holy (1 Peter 1:16). God’s standard is not for us to be our teacher’s best helper, but to be a “servant of all” (Mark 9:35).
God set His standards this high so that we won’t make the mistake of aiming low. He made them unreachable so that we would never have an excuse to stop growing.
We can identify complacency in our lives by asking ourselves the following hard questions and then answering them honestly:
• What areas of my life do I not care about that I know I should care about?
• In what areas have I fallen short of God’s standards and my own potential?
• In what areas have I settled for just getting by when I know I could do better if I really tried?
• In what areas have I decided that things “will always be this way” without ever putting in the kind of effort that really changes things?
These questions are difficult because no one else can answer them for you. Only you know how much better you could be if you really tried, and if you’ve never really tried, then even you might not know.
Take Wenslyn Reyes for example. Ever since she was little, she’s been involved in the ministry of the Chinese/English church she attends in the Philippines. Now eighteen, Wenslyn is the youngest worship pianist, the youngest pulpit translator, and the youngest study group leader in the church. Everyone considers her somewhat of a prodigy, and she is praised constantly.
“I may not be the best translator or accompanist I could be,” Wenslyn writes us, “but I am so good for my age—as everyone likes to put it—that I’m often tempted to be content with my ‘prodigy’ status.”
The “do hard things” message has challenged Wenslyn to become a better steward of her talents by exploring her full potential. She now realizes that God has allowed her to start ministry early so that she can go further in the long run. Instead of just aiming to be “good for her age,” Wenslyn has committed to improving herself to be all God has gifted her to be.
“‘Do hard things’ means fighting for greater levels of excellence because there is always something harder to do,” she writes us. “It is never a matter of arriving; it is a constant battle for growth.”
Complacency is rendered helpless when confronted with this kind of mind-set, because it depends on us losing steam, becoming satisfied, and feeling as if we have already arrived. Wenslyn’s goal is growth—not just impressing other people.
A commitment to growth kills complacency.
For another strong shot of inspiration, jump back with us a hundred and fifty years to the story of a young man who didn’t seem to have much going for him except mediocrity and limitations. Then—like Sarah, Heather, Jason, and Wenslyn—he decided to rethink what he’d been considering good enough and reach for something more.
The world is still benefiting from what happened next.
FROM WIMP TO WORLD-CHANGER
As a young teenager, Theodore Roosevelt didn’t strike anyone as the kind of person who would become one of America’s greatest presidents. From the time he was a toddler, severe asthma overshadowed everything he did. He was considered too delicate for school and too weak to stand up to other boys. On doctor’s orders his father and mother rushed him to seashore resorts and mountain cabins in hopes that changes of air would help him breathe. The sickly boy seemed unlikely to survive childhood—let alone amount to anything if he did.
Of course, we all know that Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt did more than survive. In a way that few men have matched, he thrived. In the eyes of his fellow Americans, he went on to reach the stature of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, his face forever immortalized with theirs on the side of Mount Rushmore.
More than any of his contemporaries, Roosevelt led America into the twentieth century. He was a cowboy on the western frontier, a police commissioner in New York City, a military hero in the Spanish-American War, and the governor of New York. He was the first president to fly in an airplane, to be submerged in a submarine, to have a telephone in his home, or to own a car. He was the first president to champion conservation and pass laws to protect the environment. He was the first president to leave American soil while in office. And in 1906 he became the first American Nobel laureate, awarded the Nobel peace prize for almost single-handedly negotiating a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War.
How did a severely nearsighted, asthmatic kid who wasn’t expected to live past his twenty-first birthday go on to experience a life of such incredible accomplishment? The short answer is that as a teenager, Roosevelt chose to go beyond what was easy by reaching for what seemed impossible.
Shortly before his twelfth birthday, his father took him aside and challenged him to dedicate himself to the “hard drudgery” of building himself a strong body. Convinced and determined, young Roosevelt gave himself to it, spending hours each day lifting weights, hammering punching bags, and straining at pull-up bars. His sisters would later write that one of their most vivid childhood memories was the sight of their brother struggling between the horizontal bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”
This was the beginning of the transformation—more than just physical—that would shape the rest of his life. Decades later, with conviction birthed in the “hard drudgery” of his teen years, Roosevelt said that the highest form of success would go only to the man who “does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil.”
Theodore Roosevelt learned the most important lesson of his life as a teenager. It was a lesson that informed and made possible everything he did from that point on: “do hard things.” Listen to what he said about what he called “the strenuous life”:
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
Of course, nowadays we don’t talk the way Roosevelt did. But what would happen if we embraced the values he did—of reaching above and beyond what comes easy? And what would happen if a new generation of teens lived that way?
Start now.