The simplest question that I like to ask myself in the morning is “How can I make things better today?” It’s such a simple thing, but I wonder if this is really enough, if this can really be the core question that can guide me every day.
Imagine I woke up every day and asked myself “How can I make things better today?” I did that every day for the rest of my life: what would I be left with? Seems like it can probably take things in a good direction.
Of course, all the details of exactly how I make things better, and what are the things, and what can I do about them: I guess that’s where it gets into all the details.
But I like having as just this basic framework for how I imagine my day that simply I’m trying to end each day in a better position than I started.
So of course, time is passing, and you know, I’m not getting younger by the end of the day, so can’t turn that around, but out of everything that I do during the day, I can improve my position, and I can improve my state and the state around me at least a little bit every day.
And it seems like if anybody who follows this basic program, seems like following the basic program of every day asking “How can I make things better today?”, it seems like that has to lead to good things.
Maybe it can begin with asking how do I make things better? What’s one way? Now, of course it’s going to be many ways.
And yet again, a great advantage of simplicity, minimalism, is that we can reduce all the variables, all the things that are competing for attention, and just have a small list of very important things that can claim our attention, and then we can really focus on them.
But even if we’re far from simplicity, and our life is a big mess of complexity, it’s still possible to find something in the big mass of complexity that we can somehow improve.
Why is it that this is so difficult? I mean, it seems so obvious, but somehow for me, I never really thought this way.
I’m not sure what it is that’s different about this.
Maybe I was just too focused on trying to change something, trying to maybe escape from not even having to think about the way my life is.
You know, maybe I was too concerned about, you know, how I feel each day, and you know, I’ll let how I feel decide how I approach each day.
So some days I would feel like improving things, and maybe some days I would feel like destroying things.
So that is not very consistent.
But this is like so many of the things that I talk about in these videos: it just seems so obvious that I often wonder why do I even talk about them? But somehow I find it helpful to be able to spell out obvious things and just say them directly.
We have this chance with the time we have to make little adjustments every day to somehow make our lives just that little bit better.
And no matter how messed up our lives are, no matter how complicated, no matter what’s going on, we have this ability.
Even on some days, it may be simply a matter of maintenance.
Things are falling apart, and we have to hold them together.
Well, that maybe doesn’t feel like improvement, but some days just stopping things from getting worse is itself saving the day, and it’s as close as we can get to improvement.
And other days, where there don’t seem to be any major standout problems, just the usual baseline of problems, that’s where we really have a chance to be able to look at the whole situation, find some way that we can make some small change in it.
Even if we don’t really understand the full picture.
We don’t have to understand the full picture to make a little change.
Somewhere in the complex mass of our lives, there’s some little thing that we can improve today so it seems like there’s no better way to approach the day than to simply ask “How can I make something better today?” So I would be curious to hear how this works for you.
Do you find that this is a useful way to approach your day? And how do we actually go about this?
#dailyimprovement #makethingsbetter #dailyplan