The very best

Mediocrity.  Focus on this word, know it, remember it's scent, it's taste, it's feel.  Cauterize it into your mind, feel it's sting.  Mediocrity, ladies and gents, is the enemy.  As a species, we are capable of unimaginable things.  Each one of us is in possession of skills that we can cultivate and sharpen to achieve an almost paragon status. 

Yes, you read correctly, every single person.  Fatties, morons, slackers, everybody.  The one thing that the movers and shakers have that these lack luster bags of flesh don't is this: the inability to settle for "okay".  Think about it, the rockstars, famous actors, CEO's, professional athletes, super secret squirrel guys, nothing has been given to these folks.  Sure, some of them might have started off with more than the rest of us, but that doesn't mean that everything on the way up was easy.  Athletes like Jolie Gentry have a biological advantage, but that doesn't mean that they didn't work their asses off to push that advantage all the way to superiority.  Jolie could have easily been content being a regular police officer in pretty decent shape.  But she wanted more.  Like so many before her, she refused to settle for mediocrity. 

What is it that drives humans to push themselves?  I don't think it's genetic.  I know some really successful people with douche bag offspring.  It could be a product of the environment they are raised in, but there are plenty of people that come out of inauspicious beginnings and go on to achieve amazing things.  The only thing that holds true across the board is that success is really fucking hard work. 

Once you break ground level, there are all sorts of things that will do their damnedest to keep you down with them.  Sycophants, or "looters" as Ayn Rand called them, will ride your work as high as they can without doing anything themselves.  In their own homes, the slack jawed masses despise the successful.  Someone rising above the circumstances that the rest of society uses as an excuse to give up forces them to look into the mirror and accept the fact that they could be you, if they weren't so fucking lazy.  Instead of getting off their asses and helping you or putting in some work themselves, they will offer you hollow words of encouragement while secretly hoping you fail. 

Fuck them.  I do my best to not associate with these people in the first place.  All of my friends, the people I surround myself with, are people I count as peers.  I've created my own personal Galt's Gulch of people working to be the best human beings that they can be.  It doesn't matter if they are an aspiring musician, dancer, artist, athlete, student, soldier, or neuro-scientist.  Together we work as hard as we can.  We are the producers, we keep the world turning.  We will never rest, we will never accept mediocrity.