Will You Paint Your Masterpiece?

I looked up to Mike as one might a superhero, though he never knew it. We first met in college, and I wondered at his magnetic charisma. He dressed like a GQ model, and girls swooned as he cruised past them in the halls. He received a full scholarship due to his tremendous brain power, a force he seemed to employ with little effort. Years before Twitter, Mike was racking up followers everywhere he went. If colleges had superlatives, Mike would have been a shoo-in for “most likely to succeed.”

You won’t find Mike in any of America’s great boardrooms today. If you wanted to meet him, you’d have to travel to Cocoa Beach, Florida. He picks up work when he can, but he never takes on so much that it prevents him from surfing most days. When I asked where he lives today, I was shocked to hear him talk about switching between his car and his friends’ apartments. The super-hero I once thought would conquer the world ended up a beach bum.

We all know a Mike. You’ve seen him in a thousand faces with a hundred names. Mike is your 37-year-old child who still lives in your basement and has little ambition outside of playing video games. The high school valedictorian you once admired who dropped out of college and now can’t seem to hold down a job is a Mike. The spirit of Mike lives in your friend who displays exceptional creativity or intelligence but wanders aimlessly through life without ambition.

Viewed from the outside, those people have everything going for them. They’re well liked, graduate at the top of the class, and have an exceptional network. The years pass, and they blow everyone away—not by how much they achieve but by how little. What happened? Why didn’t they ever rise to the level of their ability?

If anyone could answer those questions, I figured it was Jim Collins. The New York Times bestselling author of books including Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice, Collins has studied the science of advancement as much as anyone. When I had the opportunity to ask him one question, I wanted to know why people like Mike seem destined for greatness but settle for mediocrity.

KC: Ambitious people and the way they tick fascinate me. I am equally curious as to why so many people lead average lives. Why do so many people never make the choice to pursue greatness?

JC: When I taught entrepreneurship and small business at Stanford Business School a number of years ago, I was always challenging my students to go out and carve a great path for themselves. I think there are two ways to approach life. You can try to do a paint-by-numbers kit, which means that you stay within the lines and end up with a nice picture, but you’re not going to have a masterpiece. The only way to have a masterpiece is to ultimately try to paint a masterpiece on a blank canvas, your canvas.

I would challenge my students on this idea of not doing a paint-by-numbers approach to life but to go out and try to paint a masterpiece. Don’t just try to have an entrepreneurial company, try to build a great company from the ground up because it’s worthy to build something great for its own sake. Why did Beethoven make the Fifth Symphony so great? Because he could. I mean in the end, that’s the answer.

I remember one conversation where a guy came to me and said, “I really heard what you said in the class, and I wanted to think about starting a company or doing something on my own. But I decided I’m too risk averse, so I’ve decided to take a job with a large, established company.”

My students were not risk averse, they were actually taking on more risk. In a number of cases they went to work for large, seemingly stable companies that were poorly managed and ended up going through economic calamity. All of a sudden they were blown out of the water by a political or economic shake-up and lost their job and twelve years working there. That’s risky.

People are not risk averse, they’re ambiguity averse. What really scares people is not the risk, it’s the blank canvas. It’s the ambiguity of carving our own path, trying to do something truly distinctive that is inherently unnerving to many of us. If you go and do something on your own, what do you do tomorrow? There is no set timeline, there’s no sense of what’s going to come next or how you’re going to do it or what things are going to look like the next month or the month after. It’s very, very ambiguous. It’s opaque. It’s the blank canvas. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not that people are risk averse, they are averse to ambiguity.

What most people attribute to risk aversion, Collins says, is actually due to fear of uncertainty. Individuals who suffer from it would rather live in the security of the mundane than launch out into a more promising, more ambiguous future. By choosing not to leap, they fail to achieve what might be possible otherwise, but at least they know their daily schedule and bank account balance and occupational trajectory. They are Linus, content to drag the security blanket of a humdrum life.

But we must not be too hard on the Mikes in our lives, for there is at least a little Mike in us all. All of us have stood paralyzed at the end of a diving board while we wondered what lies just beneath the water’s surface. Who among us is not afraid of the unknown? Who has never balked at making a decision because of an uncertain outcome?

The real tragedy for the Mikes of this world is not failure to achieve but rather failure to learn. Life’s most profound lessons are captured along the uncharted path, but those who never walk it miss out. As we forsake uncertainty and pursue our greatest passions, we begin to realize that we’re learning about life, others, and ourselves along the way. When an artist lays his brush down for the final time, he often realizes that the act of painting is as beautiful as the masterpiece itself. So, to every Mike in the world and even the one inside us all: pick up your brush, and start painting.

What are you waiting to paint? Tell us in the comments below.