🕹️ Measure Life From Where You Started
The Sunday Night Review #163
Hey everyone,
It’s 7.03pm and I’m sitting outside on a beautiful evening in London.
This week has been a great week.
On Sunday last week, I read one of my favourite newsletters 0.1% Ideas by George Mack. In it he wrote these two sentences:
How to turn life into a fun video game: Measure things from where you started.
How to turn life into a terrible game: Measure things against an ever-changing ideal.
It struck a chord because I often fall into the trap of measuring my progress against an ever-changing ideal of my future self. It’s so easy to do, and so human, but it’s a lot nicer to be satisfied than dissatisfied.
So I decided to try turn my life into a video game and made a table with 4 columns. It looked something like this:
I chose these 3 columns because they felt simple and fun to measure. Of course, if you’re not interested in measuring your income year by year you can remove it, but for me it feels like a fun game to try make the number go up.
So I filled in the table and wrote a bit in each column, and at the end it was super fun to look at.
There’s almost always progress across a whole year, and it’s interesting to remind yourself of your problems in the past. I’ve started looking at it each day briefly before work.
This way I’m measuring my progress against where I started, rather than against a future self who’s impossibly successful. My table starts in 2019, because that’s when I left uni and when I feel my adult life really started.
So whenever I look at this table, I naturally think “wow look at how far I’ve come and how much has happened” and it helps me recognise that my problems today will also become a thing of the past.
“Measure your progress from where you started” is such a simple lesson, and one I’ve heard a few times before, but you often need to be reminded of things like this several times before it really sinks in (or maybe it’ll never sink in, and I’ll just need constant reminders).
Have an epic week!
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Tintin you are great. I feel like i am in a similar situation to the one you described in the interview with ali on youtube and i found your journey truly inspiring. I hope to have the courage you had to make decisions that can drive my life in the right direction. Keep posting!