How to Break Free From the Shackles of Mediocrity
The full guide to living a rich and fulfilling life through self-mastery
Whenever I leave the house for the bustling centre of Accra, I find myself lost in thought, watching people go about their day. There are the early morning commuters queuing up at the lorry station for a minivan (trotro) to work. Drivers and their mates are working hard every day. Porters carry people’s belongings for money. Vendors and hawkers peddle their wares to anyone who passes by. And, of course, there are the beggars.
Everyone is hustling. Everyone is busy.
I’m always fascinated by the scene, and yet, I know for a fact that it’s not easy at all. As someone who lives in one of Ghana’s largest cities, I see poverty all around me. Everyone is struggling. Everyone is trying their best. The more I observe this phenomenon, the more I ponder over one simple question:
Why are we here?
That’s all I keep asking myself. Why the hell are we here? Are we just born to suffer through life until we die? Seriously, why are we here?
You’re born, you go to school (if you’re lucky), get a job, struggle through life trying to get your money right, settle down, start a family, raise your family, maybe even hate your family, continue to struggle, then die.
This is basically the formula of most people’s lives. But it can be much better or worse depending on factors beyond our control, like your zip code, health, household income, cultural norms, and so much more.
Life is beautiful. But it’s also unfair and can pretty much suck if you ended up drawing a shitty card like being born into poverty in a freaking poor country, or born with a congenital disease, or born into a toxic family.
And yet, despite all that, we try and live as best as we can. But let’s be real, it usually doesn’t feel that way. We go through life like a zombie, doing the things we have to do just to get through the day.
On the surface, you look calm and collected, as if nothing can shake you. You smile when you meet people. Do what’s expected of you at work. Come back home to enjoy a bit of entertainment. You look sane.
Inside, though, you’re screaming with frustration, wondering if this is all there is to life. Are you bound to live such a mediocre life forever? Is there more out there?
I felt this way, too. Growing up, so much greatness was expected of me simply because I was an extremely bright kid. Straight A’s. Top five of my class. Creative. And very well-behaved. Adults in my life simply believed that I was going to do something good with my life.
Hell, one time in high school, when I didn’t do too well on a test, my geography teacher told me that I was living way below my potential. I got a B, people. A fucking B.
So, I’ve felt the pressure to be great. The pressure to do something meaningful that impacts the world. And yet, through my own choices and many mistakes that I never learned from, my life went through a path that led me further away from this so-called greatness.
It still looked like the normal path most people were travelling, of course. But once in a while, I felt this tug in my chest that something was wrong. Terribly wrong. And yet, I convinced myself that it was okay. I was fine. Things would turn out well. I was still young and had a lot of time. Things would get better as I got older.
Yeah, well, I was full of shit. By the age of twenty-five, the realisation hit me like a bucket of ice water. I was living a life of mediocrity. My life was shit. All my choices and habits had led me to that situation, and worst of all, I was still indulging in those habits. I finally had to swallow a harsh truth — I was never going to turn my life around unless I actively made better choices that would transform it and break me out of the vicious cycle of mediocrity.
And thus began my journey of self-mastery.
To live to the fullest, you must do one thing above all else:
Master yourself.
This is why we’re on this Earth. You’re not here to go to college, become an employee or entrepreneur, get married, have children, or whatever it is society puts pressure on you to become. Yes, many of these things are important and make life more meaningful. But that’s not really why you’re here.
You’re here to become a master of your life. This is your purpose. And once you attain self-mastery, you’ll unlock a level of richness (health, wealth, relationships) most people only dream of.
You don’t have to be a millionaire or billionaire for this to happen. Having money isn’t a prerequisite to happiness. It helps, of course. But so many high-income people have relationship and health issues because they don’t have the time to enjoy their wealth.
You have two paths
Your life is yours, and you get to decide what to do with it. You can make one of two choices to live a rich and fulfilling life:
Accept where you are by being content with who you are and what you have. With this, there’s no need to change anything about yourself. You like where you are. You don’t feel the need to improve because you don’t think there’s anything wrong. You’re genuinely happy with your current situation. You’re happy with your job, income, relationships, and everything in life. True contentment leads to true happiness. This is a valid approach.
There are people out there who have found peace and true happiness with this path. Monks who have renounced worldly desires and feel content with how they live are good examples. They’ve trained themselves not to be burdened by the human condition of desire. I mean, they do desire contentment. But they don’t have to do much. If this works for you, then by all means go after that.
Unfortunately, many people lie to themselves that they are content with their lives. Deep down, they feel there’s more to life. They’re only lying to themselves about their situation because they don’t want to put in the work to actually change. So, they pretend they’re fine. This ironically makes them even more miserable. And yet, they do nothing about it.
The second choice is to accept that your life sucks and needs improvement. But you must understand that your life didn’t suddenly become the terrible way it is right now. Your choices and habits led you down that path. Which means that if you do indeed accept that something must be done, then you have to make better choices that will lead you to a richer, more fulfilling life. And you do that by taking the path of self-mastery.
The path of self-mastery
First, the good news. Self-mastery doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a lifelong process. This is good news because it relieves you of the pressure to instantly transform your life. If you’ve been trying to do something about your current situation, then you probably know that it’s not easy at all.
Usually, after a few weeks of trying to adopt better habits, you slack and get back to square one. And then it feels like you’ve wasted all your efforts. You begin to feel guilty, wondering if something is wrong with you for not being able to change.
Nothing is wrong with you. You’re just going about it the wrong way; you want to change as soon as possible.
While I admire your enthusiasm and am proud of you for taking the step to improve your life, you need to understand that this journey takes time — a lifetime, actually. You will never stop learning and mastering yourself until you die. Of course, as you improve, you will feel more in control of who you are, which reflects in your mindset, choices, relationships, finances, and so much more. The more you transform, the better your life becomes. However, you will always need further improvements, no matter how developed you become.
Keep this in mind. Self-mastery is not a one-time thing. It’s a lifestyle. You have all your life to do it. You just have to start very small, one step at a time, until momentum kicks in, and it becomes a part of your identity.
But first…
What is self-mastery?
You come into this world with one thing that fully belongs to you and no one else: yourself.
You are a combination of your mind, body, and spirit. All these belong to you. Irrespective of the circumstances of your birth, whether you’re born rich or poor, healthy or sick, in an abusive family or not, you own yourself.
It may not seem that way depending on your situation, but you do own yourself. No one does. You are responsible for yourself and how your life turns out. Of course, as a child, your parents are responsible for you. They brought you into this world and must direct you. Most often, you can’t do anything without their permission. Whatever they say goes. That’s normal. You’re a child; they know better.
However, once you reach a certain age (18 years at least), you regain autonomy over your life. You become fully responsible for yourself in terms of the choices you make, your habits, relationships, and so much more. At that point, you can no longer make excuses for how your life turned out. You can’t blame your parents, your teachers, your partners or anyone else.
It’s all on you.
Yes, you’re probably right that it’s their fault you’re in your predicament. But what are you going to do about it? It’s your responsibility now.
It is you. Yourself. Your life. So only you have to take control of all aspects of it. This is self-mastery.
It’s knowing that you are fully responsible for your life, irrespective of your past, taking the reins of your life and steering it in a direction that makes you live a better life.
Life is divided into four major quadrants: health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. Everything we do is related to the first three things. And the quality of these three determines our happiness. That’s all we’re doing.
We go to school so we can learn skills that will help us make money. We start businesses to make money. We learn a skill, a trade or a vocation to make money. Hell, people commit crimes to make money. Without money, life gets harder. This is the wealth quadrant of life.
Our health is equally important. Your body and mind need constant maintenance. You take care of your personal hygiene, groom yourself, eat, sleep, become active, go for regular checkups, take your medications, go to therapy, and create art to protect your physical and mental health.
And of course, your relationship with friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances plays a key role in the quality of your life.
All these quadrants feed into each other. Problems with wealth, like having money issues, can affect your relationships, say with your spouse and kids. This can lead to poor mental and physical health, which will also reduce your productivity at work, and thus reduce your income, and the cycle continues
I believe anyone can be happy right now, regardless of their situation. However, having good health, great relationships, and financial independence can indeed make you a happier person, too. These things don’t come cheap, and I’m not even talking about money. It takes a lot of commitment and self-discipline to escape mediocrity.
Life is hard, no matter who you are. But it gets harder if you’re a slave to yourself. I would know — I contemplated suicide once. But I’ve since then taken it upon myself to break free from that prison. And every waking moment is dedicated to mastering all aspects of my life.
This is how I do it:
1. Know thyself
There’s a reason you’re unhappy, and no one but yourself knows why. However, it takes a lot of awareness and self-reflection to get to the core of your problem. The thing is that most people don’t actually do this.
Yes, they know they’re unhappy and want better for themselves. And yet, because they lack awareness and self-reflection, they can’t tell why they are in their current situation. Most often, they end up blaming everyone for their problems, never looking into the mirror to see that the problem lies within themselves.
The first step to attaining mastery over your life is by first acknowledging that you are indeed a slave to yourself right now. You must look inward to find those things that are enslaving you — things you did to yourself for the most part. Audit your life. Journaling is an excellent way to get to the heart of the problem.
l Look at your current life: your health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. What is it like right now? Are you content with how things are? Do you loathe your life? Write it all down. Be as honest, raw, and vulnerable as you can. It’s meant for you only, so there’s no need to try and be clean or whatever. Just pour out your soul. Cry if you must. It’s the start of your healing process.
l Think back on your past life throughout your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood (depending on your age). Delve deeper and ask yourself what choices you made over the years that have finally accumulated into the life you currently live. You probably have never thought about this, and therefore don’t think you actively chose your life right now. I mean, no one intentionally chooses an unhappy life. But we do choose it unintentionally due to our choices. You need to uncover them. You can’t move forward if you don’t get this one right. Of course, some of the things that happen in your life are beyond your control. They’re not your fault, I understand. But they’re still your responsibility because it is your life. Write it all down. This might take more than a few days. Like I said, the whole process of self-mastery doesn’t happen overnight.
l But it’s not all doom and gloom. Despite how shitty your life might be, you’re a unique incredible person with a lot of creativity, skills, and talent. Maybe you’re not using these talents to develop yourself. But you have them. And some of them have helped you so far in making your life a little more bearable. Audit your skills. What are the things you’re good at? Charisma, patience, loyalty, focus, coding, writing, marketing and sales, drawing, music, and so much more. They can also be things you enjoyed as a kid and still love to do, but gave up on because life happened. You know yourself. You know what they are. This is the part of the process where you dig deep and bring them out. For me, that’s writing.
2. Envision your higher self
Once you’re intimate with your past and current self, it’s time to envision your higher self. Your higher self is your ideal future self. The person you want to become. That version of you who has better control of their wealth, health, and relationships is your higher self.
Now, mind you, your higher self is not perfect. Because remember that self-mastery never ends. Even if you become the person you’ve always wanted to become, you will still need to keep improving. At that point, your problems might be very different from your current self, but they’re still problems. And yes, they’ll need to be solved. That’s the way of life.
We constantly evolve, and that will never change, no matter how great we are.
So what’s the purpose of the higher self, then?
It serves as a yardstick for measuring your progress. You need a goal to aspire towards. And your higher self is the best thing you can do to climb higher and get to that goal.
Think of your current self as level 1 and your higher self as level infinity (because it never ends).
Your entire self-mastery journey rests on the premise that you are going to gain experience and skills throughout your life to pass level 1 until level infinity (when you die). The more levels you pass, the more your life improves. When you get to maybe level 50, and you look back at level one, you’ll realise how much you’ve changed, even though you’re still the same person.
These are the steps to follow when envisioning your higher self:
Start with an anti-vision
Your anti-vision is the opposite of your vision in life. I recommend you start with this because it’s easier to come up with the things you don’t want rather than the things you want. What do you not want for your future ideal self?
For me, I don’t want to be poor, I don’t want to be stuck doing a job I hate, I don’t want to be unhealthy because of all my poor choices, and I also don’t want to be a prisoner of toxic relationships that affect my mental and physical health. Above all, I don’t want to be in a situation where I can’t use my creativity as a writer simply because I’m in survival mode all the time. These are literally things I wrote in my journal a while back when I began my own path of self-mastery.
Come up with your vision
Now that you know what you don’t want, flip them, and there’s your vision. But you can even go deeper by talking about the goals you hope to achieve in the next decade or so. You’re allowed to be as ambitious as possible with this. It’s your higher self after all, so be outrageous. Be bold. My most outrageous vision is to become a philanthropist. This is who I envision as my higher self. Of course, I haven’t reached there yet. But it’s firmly engraved in the crevices of my mind. And I’m working actively on getting to that level someday, one step at a time.
3. Take action
Imagine your life as a video game. You’re currently a level zero player, living a life of mediocrity. You have a ton of bad habits, make terrible choices, and are just miserable. And then one day, you decide you’ve had enough and want to change.
The moment you decide that there’s more to life than this, your mind goes through a flip where all you do is crave change. Your higher self is calling out to you. You don’t know it yet, but you feel it stirring within you. This transitions you from a level zero player to a level one player.
Most people are at level zero, and they never get to level one. But you’re here now. Congratulations.
But hold on.
Your experience bar for level one is empty. You must fill it up to get to level 2, where your life is a little bit better than before. To do that, you must first know yourself, then envision your higher self.
Going through this process fills your experience bar to half. That’s awesome. You’re getting somewhere. But to get to the next level, you must fill that experience bar. This is where taking action comes in.
Knowing yourself and envisioning your higher self are no doubt very important steps in the process of self-mastery. You need them. However, if you never take action, it’s all a waste of time. You’ll only stay trapped as a level one player, or worse, you’ll fall back to level zero.
Taking action is about doing the things that will actually change your life. Make small but consistent choices that yield positive returns in the long run. These choices become habits, and habits drive your life.
It all starts in your mind
I did say that your choices over the years have created your current life. But choices don’t come out of a vacuum. Our choices are driven by our perception of the world — our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. These things determine not only what you do, but why you do it.
If you’re making poor choices, you have values and beliefs driving them. For example, if you believe that you aren’t worthy of love and respect, you’ll choose to stay with partners who devalue you.
If all you care about is instant gratification, you’ll be extremely bad at managing time and money. This attitude will wreck every aspect of your life. Especially your health.
Growing up, I was bad at math. So, for the longest time, well into my adulthood, this cemented into a toxic mindset: I was just bad at numbers.
I accepted that I couldn’t study math and logic-related courses at the university because I was bad at numbers. I couldn’t be an entrepreneur because I was bad at numbers. I will never be financially free because I was bad at numbers.
So lethal was this mindset that I even struggled with counting money… because I was bad at numbers.
This wasn’t the only limiting belief I had. There were so many of them. And all of them led me down a rabbit hole of struggle and pain. I made my choices based on these beliefs, which eventually made my life harder.
Many people leave this way. Poor choices are a result of a poor mindset. You can’t make better choices without changing your bad mindset. It won’t work. It’s like building on a weak foundation. Your mind is your foundation. If it’s weak, everything will come toppling down.
If you want a life that doesn’t easily come down, you must strengthen your mind. Take one limiting belief at a time and change it. It doesn’t happen overnight. Trust me, you’ll feel a lot of friction. That’s just how it is. You aren’t used to that kind of mindset, so it feels weird. Whenever you catch yourself thinking negatively, switch immediately. The more you practice, the easier it gets until it becomes your default setting.
Today, when I look back at the mindset of my past self, I want to vomit. I feel so disgusted that I wonder what I was thinking at the time. But the only way I got rid of these limiting beliefs was by deliberate practice. Become a watchdog of your thoughts and feelings. It’s not easy. You will fail a lot of times. But as soon as you become aware of slipping into your old mentality, correct yourself. Your mindset will grow stronger and stronger the more you strive to change it.
Make better choices
As you shed your old ways of thinking and adopt better values and beliefs, you begin to feel conflicted with yourself when you try to make the same poor choices. When I realised that I wasn’t really bad at numbers, just too lazy to work harder at it, everything changed.
It was much later in life, after graduating from the university, that I started making this mindset shift. I was good at every subject but math. Ironically, I excelled in subjects like integrated science, geography, and economics — all of which have a ton of calculations and numbers. In fact, my favourite part of geography is the practical aspect that involves a lot of calculations. So, how the hell am I bad at numbers? It made no sense.
That was when I said to myself that maybe I was full of shit. I actively made the switch from thinking I was bad at numbers to thinking that I was not that bad, and I could probably even get better.
With this flip in mindset, every choice I was making based on the old mindset suddenly didn’t make sense. When I went to buy something and paid for it, my mind used to switch off, because I couldn’t for the life of me calculate the total and come up with my change or whatever. I expected the vendor to do all that for me. And if she made a mistake and gave me less than I was supposed to get, I wouldn’t even know about it because my mind refused to calculate stuff.
But once I believed that I was not bad at numbers, I made the effort to start calculating. It was slow at first, and I would make a lot of mistakes. But I continued doing it until the numbers part of my brain got stronger. And suddenly, I was adding larger numbers from my mind. After buying a long list of things, even before the vendor tells me the total, I’d already calculated the whole thing. This was unfathomable for me a few years ago.
It may sound like a small thing, but it’s had a lot of impact on my life.
The biggest impact is the fact that I no longer believe I can’t be an entrepreneur. I started a business after my national service. Sure, it failed. But it was something, and I was proud of myself for taking that step and learning from it. The only reason I even ventured into starting that business in the first place was because I genuinely began to accept that I was capable of doing it. All I had to do was practice. I’ve failed in three more businesses after that. And yet, each one taught me something new, made me better, and has led me to this stage of actively building a writing business.
My point is that if you want to make better choices, build the foundation — your mind. Adopt the identity of whoever you want to be, and you’ll be forced to make choices that reinforce that identity.
This is how I was finally able to commit to my writing.
Learn from your mistakes and keep trying
I’ll be the first to admit that none of these things is easy. But it’s worth the effort.
You will make mistakes. It’s inevitable. But what separates you from the masses is that you learn from those mistakes and try again. Failure is feedback. You use it to do better.
Your mind and body are going to rebel against you when you try to change your mindset and make better choices. But you just have to try again. And again. And again. You’ll get frustrated, but don’t let it stop you.
The only way you can increase your experience bar is by making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. This is how you go from level one to two to three, and so on.
As you increase your level of self-mastery, you get closer and closer to your higher self. The gap might never be bridged. But you will be much happier as you improve.
Final thoughts
Now, what level am I?
I’ll say level 2.5. I’m still a long way from my higher self. And yet, I’m so much happier today than I was in level 1.
This is what truly matters. By continuing to take action, making mistakes, and learning from them, all the quadrants (health, wealth, relationships, and happiness) will also improve, leading to a richer and more fulfilling life.
If you feel like your life is out of balance, and you’re thinking that there’s more out there, I’m here to tell you that you’re not crazy. There really is more to life. One that is rich and full of meaning.
All you have to do is reach for and become who you’re truly meant to be.
Godspeed.
Why am I feeling attacked this morning??? Torshie, stop pulling me from every direction! Stop dragging me! Stop screaming