Nothing Great Ever started with ‘meh’!
I find myself returning to the subject of attitude a lot in this blog.
An awful lot.
When I tweeted ‘Nothing good ever started with ‘meh’ with a meme saying ‘Rise Up and Attack The Day With Enthusiasm’ it got more than 1200 impressions on Sunday so it obviously hit a nerve, plenty of retweets and ‘likes’ were achieved and even when the tweet stopped getting activity the phrase kept swimming round in my head.
Nothing good ever started with ‘meh’.
Nothing good ever began with ‘meh’.
Then the final version ‘Nothing great ever started with ‘meh’ stuck with me and loads of other ideas formed around the concept because it’s true.
‘Meh’ is one of those vague new words that sums up the shrugging shoulders, downward look, vacant stare and general malaise of laziness that we sometimes feel. It also sums up one current way we view anything we’re not fussed about, don’t like or feel disconnected from. It’s like ‘I can’t be bothered’ in one brief word.
Another word I’ve come across in the past three years is Ceebs. This, as Connor from Bolton summed up for me, is the shortened version of CBA, which is itself a shortened version of ‘Can’t Be Arsed’ – how ironic eh?
Anyway, back to meh, and where my thinking went. Just as people sometimes have a repetitive, habitual mantra such as ‘I can’t’, ‘I’m tired’, ‘it’s boring’, so meh becomes an easy get-out clause for life.
- Meh saves you from thinking too much.
- Meh stops people troubling you for a real answer.
- Meh allows you to wallow a bit and disconnects you from your true feelings.
Just imagine if you got up every day with ‘meh’ as your first thought…it’s likely that you’d not be getting up on time and with ‘meh’ as your main thought, your attitude to the day would be less than positive, stuff would feel like hard work and your motivation to do anything would be compromised from the start!
Ask yourself if, every day, your first thought was ‘meh’, or ‘groan’ or ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I hate my job / school / life ‘ wouldn’t the rest of the day be MUCH harder to start and get anything done?
I’m a BIG fan of choosing the right attitude (after so many young years with the wrong one I know what I’m talking about) and I realized that the title of this article is so powerful ‘NOTHING great ever started with Meh’.
People will start things with the ’meh’ attitude but this really inhibits them from succeeding and having great 10/10 experiences. Why? Well if the start point is so far in the red that the day or activity starts at a minus 5 before you’ve even got going then you’re going uphill before you get out of bed.
Ok there’s a lot of metaphors in the particular sentence soup I just created but you get the picture – start with Meh and you’re giving yourself a false and unnecessarily tough start on whatever quests you set yourself.
Meh is just another example of the type of stinking thinking we pick up from friends, family and peers – check yourself, check your meh and check your attitude – you’ll thank yourself ‘meh’ny times over. Sorry, I’ll get my coat…