If you had to pick one metric, one standard, to measure the success of your day by. What would it be? I would pick getting in the game. Now what does that mean? To me that means working everyday towards your goals no matter how small should be the standard by which you measure the success or failure of each individual day. Like my previous post “You Are The Sum Of Your Actions” Each day is important. Each day is only as valuable as your actions make it.

I can’t accomplish everything in one day. I can’t make fundamental changes to myself in a week. A month is a blip on the path of self actualization. I can always justify to myself how my actions in one day, one week, one month do not actually matter. That immediate gratification switch isn't getting flipped. So I drop out of the game cause I'm not getting what I want in the short term. It's a battle of will, of creating inertia. Getting that boulder rolling. Sometimes uphill until you reach that tipping point where you can gain momentum and roll that sucker over the hump and down the otherside. Where you start gaining speed. Start gaining even more momentum. This requires more than a minor dedication of time. It requires adhering to a standard of action: getting in the game.

Our world is getting more and more virtual by the minute. We are spending more and more time on things that are, simply put, not real. We can base our identity on things that are literally not real. With the internet we can create a new persona. A new life that we can live vicariously through our interactions with other peoples personas. Stroking our egos so we don't have to face the fact that our real life is in fact a pathetic existence. Compared to our virtual ones anyway. I know as a kid myself, growing up in the early 2000’s. I spent a lot of time on video games. On fantasy worlds that made me feel better about myself. I knew I could never actually be the person I was being on the video game. But damn, that world was so much better than my real one. So I spent more and more time immersed in a world that didn't exist. Just to escape the one I was currently living in. Not everyone did this. But I’m starting to see a trend with younger men today. More and more are turning to that. Video gaming has become a massive business, and quite frankly, a sport. I hear guys talk about the stuff streamers did in games like they are real things. It's like talking about professional sports. I do it too. Because I actually really like video gaming. The problem however, lies in just how much time and energy is spent on things that are not real. It should not eclipse your real life.

“We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.”

— Aristotle

The things we do everyday compound over time. Who we are today, is the result of our habits tracing back years ago. The idea of change can be very daunting when looked at over a time span of years. But those years are broken up into months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Each little tick on that clock every single second, will turn into years. What we need to focus on, are those seemingly insignificant ticks. Life can be found in the details. Our entire lives are made up from those details. Sure, eating chips and soda once isn't going to make you fat and ruin your health. But if you ate that every day for a year, your health would suffer extremely. The reverse is true too. If you ate clean, followed a diet, and worked out for 30 mins every day. The compounding effect of that over the span of a year would change your physique drastically. Depositing that 50 bucks into your savings account every two weeks doesn't seem like much. However, if you set it up on a recurring basis and forgot about it for two years? $2600 in two years that you didn't even notice was accumulating. This is the power of the details.

“We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

I want to preface this with a memorable quote from fight club. I think it ties in very well to what I’ve felt in my own life. Identity crisis. I’ve always been envious of the people who found their calling early in life. I couldn't fathom how someone could pick something and say: “this is it, this is what I want to pursue for the rest of my life because I am that passionate about it.”. I’m not entirely sure where that comes from. I also know that those people are probably the exception, not the rule. Nonetheless, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. In fact, the above quote is a testament, to just how many people feel the same way because of Fight Club’s popularity.