I was listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio show on Friday and someone called in “needing to be convinced to pay off his debt”. I thought, “Uh oh…this guy’s about to get hung up on” haha.

As the man explained his situation, he was a pharmacist, he had 20 years left on his student loan, he had a very low interest rate and was making about a $200 payment each month. It wasn’t breaking his bank but he wanted to keep the security of his cash flow instead of putting everything he had into paying off the debt. But this was his last debt to pay off and knew he also could knock it out in a year and a half if he really tried…

Dave’s response is what stuck with me.

He acknowledged that, based on his salary, this guys was doing “fine”. But he was also at a point where he should really be getting excited about knocking the debt out. Specifically, Dave said:

“It’s not like you like the payment…it’s just become tolerable. Sometimes the thing that keeps us from being excellent is not something that is ‘bad’, it’s something that is ‘okay’. And so we accept it. We tolerate it. And if you tolerate the ‘okay’, it keeps you from excellent. So don’t tolerate the ‘okay’…Can you limp along and keep it like a pet and eventually and get though it? Yeah, but that’s not the highest and best use of your life and your money.”

The thing I thought most interesting here is that if I swap out the word “payment” for anything else that has me stuck in a rut…it’s still 100% applicable.

I don’t want to strive for mediocrity.

For going with the flow.

Or the status quo.

I want to strive for the highest and best use of my life and my resources.