The Standard: Getting in the Game

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 other side. 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.

Regardless of the long term goal, or how fast it's being reached, I need to get into the game on a daily basis. Completing the daily actions required to move ourselves forward. Not paying attention to that nagging voice of defeat that tells us these actions are not worth it cause the end goal is so far away. That self defeating feedback loop needs to be reprogrammed. This is where my standard of action comes into play. And it isn't a new thing. Take a look at any person who has gotten what they wanted out of life. They have broken their big sized goals into bite sized chunks and knocked them out. One little piece at a time. 

Getting into the game means simply doing the important work that will move you forward toward your long term goal. No matter how small. The goal each day is to be IN THE GAME.the standard is progress. I can take a look back at the last five years of my life and point at one thing as being the reason I am not as far ahead as I want to be. Consistency. The last five years of progress could have been done in one if I had just gotten my shit together and stayed disciplined in those daily actions. I see people around me who have what I want. I’m not talking about material things. I’m talking about things in their life that are improving. Their health, fitness, relationships etc. And you know what? Sometimes I get jealous. Like mad jealous. Pissed off that they have what I don’t. Sometimes I wallow in it. Sometimes I think life’s not fair. Well tough shit. Here's the truth: my actions have gotten me exactly what I deserve. Every single missed workout, every single chance to show up in a meaningful way for the people I love, every piece of garbage food or missed meals. Each one of those moments of weakness has sowed the seed of the field I reap today. 

This brings us to our next junction. Actions and consequences. Every action has a consequence. Good or bad. The type of action determines the type of consequence. This is the sort of mentality you can use to take control, to take responsibility for your life. Basically, over a long enough time span, good actions will have positive consequences. Eating well and training every day will get us a certain result. Eating junk and watching Netflix every night will get us a result as well, although in the opposite direction. Fairly self explanatory. The hard part is executing on these ideas. Hard but not complicated. Especially when the current mode of operation is the latter and not the former. I find I get into spots where even the idea of getting started on my goals is too daunting. I know this is because I let it get bad enough to the point where I haven't been taking action on my goals for so long that I'm used to just accepting mediocrity. I get used to the negative consequences of my actions. The funny thing is though, it always gets bad enough to where I know I need to get back on track. The pain of staying the same eventually overcomes the pain of change. Here lies a vicious circle however. The easy path is exactly that. Easy to take. Easy to fall victim to my natural urge to be content and sedentary. It's easy to throw up  my hands and say I will never be the person I want to be. That it's just not me. Thus the cycle begins anew. I’m sharing this cause it's the reality for me. I’m not going to sit behind this computer screen and say that I have all the answers and point my finger and say you should do X Y and Z. I haven't earned that kind of respect. I am going to share what gets me rolling again however.

One thing that has been going through my head recently is the opportunity cost of my actions. Opportunity cost is a concept that can be used with money. When you spend money on one thing you are not able to spend it on another. Spending 100 dollars on takeout costs you the opportunity to, let's say, spend it on a hobby you really love or use it to further a skill set. That 100 bucks of convenience cost you an opportunity. I’ve been trying to look at this concept and how it applies to my time. You can always make more money but you can't get more time. It is the ultimate finite resource, therefore the opportunity costs are far greater. The time I spend looking at things on my phone is costing me an opportunity. That 60 minutes could be used elsewhere more important. That 60 minutes literally cost me an opportunity that I will never get another chance at. That time is gone. Now does that mean I give up? Cause some of my time will be wasted and I can never get it back? The opportunity to use THAT time is gone. There is still an opportunity to use the time you have left.

I guess I could sum my whole article up into that. The opportunity cost of actions. Of time spent frivolously. I remember five years ago what place I was in, I also see the amount of time lost back then. It makes me feel regret. It makes me feel like I don’t deserve the win and I feel like that is the truth. I don’t deserve it, not until I’ve earned it. With that I’m going to wrap this up with saying:

Get in the game, don't waste the opportunity,