I recently patronized the good people at Southwest Airlines. It is interesting the kind of people you meet on an airplane. When you are packed so tightly together that you feel like you could meld with the other person with just a little more pressure, conversation is always a good way to get around that. I would definitely rather pay less for a flight then be comfortable but it gets intense sometimes.

I sat next to an interesting lady. She was from Salt Lake City, Utah. She used to work for Boeing until she was recently laid off. She was an assembly line worker. She described her old job to me and was pretty worried about going on a job hunt. She was going on vacation for thanksgiving before she had to go back home and deal with that.

She started talking about what a good job would pay. She was worried that she might not be able to get another job at the same level of pay as her old one. When she told me how much she got paid I was amazed. She was literally paid the exact same as I am now. A little less actually if you factor in my bonus.

This lady was probably in her mid 40’s. She had raised at least one child that she had told me about and was making less money than I am with barely a college degree and little experience. Why?

CNN reported that jobless claims fell for the first time in 14 months, but 10% of the working population is still unemployed. Bankruptcies are at their highest since 2005. Is society in general just falling apart? Is Corporate American talking all our money and giving us back nothing in return? Well I don’t think theatrics like that are the answer. I do have an interesting thought though.

The woman I spoke to on the airplane talked about the kinds of jobs she would look for. She talked about looking into working for a coal mine or going into another manufacturing job. These jobs wouldn’t pay any better than her last and would be just as likely to lay her off in bad times. When she starting mentioning jobs like that it kind of dawned on me. She was going to get into another job that paid the same. She would work there for a while and get laid off and then she would find another job that was exactly the same.

It was a horrible cycle.

I’m sure everyone has heard the term “The Cycle of Poverty”. I believe there is another that is much worse. The Cycle of Poverty can be broken by bringing in outside influence and helping bring people out of squalor. But what about when they are not in squalor? What about when they are just in mediocrity? I know that I don’t want to be 40 years old and still making the same level of pay I’m making now. I know that the only way for me to make sure that doesn’t happen is for me to do something about it. I have to innovate. I have to make a difference in the world. Making a faster car or find another way to lose someone’s life savings. But this woman didn’t think that way. She didn’t think she was better than a mediocre job at mediocre pay. She was trapped into a mind set that would see her 60 years old working in a plant until she was too decrepit to handle the parts she was making. This is the Cycle of Mediocrity. It’s why the poor stay poor and the rich get rich. It has to do with ambition. Ambition is the difference between a bad job and a bad career. One is a stepping stone and the other is your life.

We all make our own choices and have to live with them but how much of that is affected by our upbringing. When you are told your entire life that you will be a success does that make it come true? Or are we really masters of our own life?