Week 20 - "There's No Such Thing as Getting Ahead" - Rainesford Stauffer

Much of the inspiration for this week's publication comes from "There's No Such Thing as Getting Ahead" by Rainesford Stauffer. I highly suggest checking her piece out. I've linked it below!

Jun 19, 2023

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to get ahead. I’d like to say it started while I was in elementary school where I’d take online summer math courses to prepare for the upcoming school year. These classes were my way of getting ahead of my classmates and preparing for what lay ahead. As I progressed through school, I continues to seek accelerated learning programs that allowed me to learn more advanced topics.

The pursuit of getting ahead took on various forms. I started skipping classes through placement tests, started my college essays before anyone else, and even started looking for internships before my freshman year had even begun. Even now I notice myself constantly looking for future opportunities.

And although each one of these opportunities has contributed to my current success, I can’t help but wonder how this drive to get ahead is going to continue to plague me.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with seeking advancement, especially when it aligns with your genuine interests. In fact, I think pursuing passions outside of designated time is an admirable pursuit. However, I believe my (and many others) problem(s) lie in the fact that we don’t see an end to getting ahead.

No matter how far we get, there seems to be no point where we can’t move forward faster. There will always be more things we can and will want to do. But it’s fascinating when we step back and realize that in our pursuit of staying ahead, we feel like we’re falling behind. Somehow, we completely remove the concept of a middle ground where we can simply exist in the present moment.

Much of the problem starts with the way we define “ahead”. Rainesford Stauffer puts it best:

“All around us are ideas of the “right” timeline on which to do anything: to graduate college (always, and in a consecutive four years), to find our calling (which better be what we majored in), to get married, to start saving for retirement (always five years earlier than whenever you actually started), to have children (and number of years between children)—an ever-expanding list that spans the professional and personal.”1

Through the traditional timelines society is built on, we receive a baseline from which we can find ways to get ahead. Graduate college in 4 years? What if we can manage it in 3? Start saving for retirement only when you have a job? What if we set aside some graduation money and start now?

Irrespective of what it is we “should” do, we can always do more, faster.

But this isn’t a bad thing. There are always those who are interested in pushing the boundaries to get ahead. Realistically, we have many of these same individuals to thank for where we are today. Individuals like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison who were obsessed with redefining the curve of what was possible.

However, most of us aren’t like Jobs or Edison. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to be like them , just that sometimes, we should think about stepping back to think about where we’re heading.

When we’re trying to get ahead of where we believe we should be, we’ll never reach the proverbial finish line. It’ll always inch forward just beyond our grasps. The only way to truly appreciate our work and enjoy the pursuit is to step back and make sure we’re content with what we’re doing and leave ourselves open to this very moment.

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