Don't Make Every Day Count
/
Don’t Make Every Day Count
John Paul Derryberry
The average life span hovers around 80 years. This little fact allows for some quick math revealing that we have an average of 29,200 days on this planet orbiting a sun at super speeds in an ever-expanding universe. So for the love of everyone's sanity, process the math, understand how fragile life is, and do your best to stay out of the cliche trap of "make every day count":
It's mathematically impossible to make that happen.
People who say they do this are lying.
Anyone who attempts to do this burns out at age 42.
Trust me; I have been in the improving lives business for 18 years now. Whenever I'm anywhere, someone mutters the line: Make every day count; and I stop listening to them. Obviously, they have forgotten how life works.
Look, I get it. We often come to presentations hoping to hear how people have cracked the code to success. And a saying like make every day count seems like top-notch, sound advice. Yet it's just another example of how we send people, who want to improve, searching for something that doesn't exist. This vicious cycle creates stress on all of society. It has too many of us thinking: I'm not doing enough. I'm not a good enough spouse, parent, or worker. Frankly, this type of thinking fuels us to consume more presentations, books, lessons, or maximizing (fill in the catchy word here).
In reality, the more mathematically sound approach would be to make as many days count as you feel necessary to achieve your goals. And then figure out how to enjoy the other days you have because days that don't count are some of the best days of our lives. These days, if we are smart enough, we realize at a young enough age, are the days that may not count toward reaching our goals. But they fuel us up to get back to the grind of life. They remind us a day spent wasting time has just as much power as a day spent training as hard as we have ever trained.
And, outside of basic math, there are the stories our elders tell us all the time. And those stories rarely, if ever, fall under the make-every-day-count category. This goes for our career paths as well. Recently I sat with staff trying to figure out the next steps, and they commented, I bet you never detoured off your career path. You are an executive director at 39. I chuckled and said, I have been written up by every boss I have ever had. I was on academic probation all four years in college and didn't know I wanted to be an ED until about nine years ago. My path to this job is littered with days I made count, days I lost count, days I forgot to count, and days I miscounted.
The point of life is not to check off every item on our to-do list or to chase down every goal we have ever had. It's to spend the days we get appreciating where we are at, working to where we want to be, and doing our best to make this place a more compassionate world for ourselves and the next generation. We can achieve all of that without cliches, lower the stress of our culture, and less pressure would eventually translate into more days we could lose count of. And wouldn't that be a blissful place to find ourselves?