Put Subway Out of Business

I want to be better. I want you to be better. What if every conversation and interaction began with this assumption?

I want our Presidential candidates to be better. Electing a US president isn’t at all like a football game between rivals. Grow up. I want the news to be better journalism, and for viewers to demand it. I want us to be more complicated than “liberal” and “conservative.”  I want my taste in music to extend beyond the Top 40. I want you to demand that maybe the world is bigger than PF Changs and Marvel movies. I want our police to be better, and the same for our citizens. I want cab companies to be better and if they won’t, I want Uber to bury them. The commercial grocery store needs to die, or be better. I want our teachers to be better, and our students to want the same.

I want people to think critically. And for goodness sake, we need to realize that fake shit on the internet is fake. I mean, really? You thought that was real security camera footage in HD? And, those fake conservative news sites are writing articles for conservatives to love and liberals to hate. The same is true of the liberal sites and the racial sites and the conspiracy sites. So calm down, because when you share things that make you seem right, you look simple and I want you to be better than that.

You are better than that. Or, at least I want you to be.

Our standards are bullshit and we need to be ruthless in our demands. Hell, be demanding! Demand that your food be better. How is Little Ceasers still in business? Put Subway out of business. Don’t buy shitty clothes. Don’t reward people that make shitty coffee with your money. Your taste in food, music, fashion, and hobbies cannot possibly be shared by 100 million people. Be fucking better than Bed Bath and Beyond. That place is a nightmare.

I want to evolve. I want to be different in five years, ten years, thirty years. I want you to learn and grow, too. You’ve got to push me and show me new ways of thinking. I’ll do the same for you.

If we started from this perspective that we all just want to be better, I (and anyone else for that matter) can receive critique, failure, and coarse remarks as good news. For someone looking to improve, these seemingly unfortunate occurrences are simply helpful information to improve. Conversely, if you’d rather be right, then life is going to be full of opposition and bad news. You’ll squirm from feedback. You’ll be closed to growth and closed to communication. You’ll spend so much time making your point that you won’t have enough time to learn. That, my friends, is an endless trap guaranteed to keep you stuck.

I want you to be better, and I want you to want that for me, too.

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach