In Search of The Perfect Day
Imagine a perfect day. Perhaps you spend it in the park, like Lou Reed. Or you might prefer a tropical beach, with a cocktail. Maybe you have a different perspective, and for you, it’s a super productive day in the office, then coming home to dinner with your family.
When it comes to perfect days, there’s no one-size-fits-all. They are different for each person. In fact, they even vary for us individually. I’ve had perfect days at work, but I’ve also experienced the more classic type: a day spent in relaxation on a tropical beach.
Whatever a perfect day means to you, you know one when you live one. But how often does this happen? And can we purposely create more of them? These are the questions I’ve started asking myself lately, and I want to find answers.
Why?
You might wonder why the search for the perfect day is necessary. I would turn it around: why would anyone not want to strive for a perfect day, every day? What could be more important than having the best possible day, every day?
How we spend our time affects the results we get, whether that’s in work, study, or life in general. And almost all of us struggle with this to varying degrees. Some lack motivation, others get distracted, again others work too much. Ultimately it always comes down to this question:
Did you have a good day?
One hour by itself doesn’t make or break a day. You can waste away an hour and still have a great day. Or you can have an extremely happy or productive hour yet end up with a lousy day overall.
The hour is where you win a battle, the day is where you win the war. Seneca, the ancient philosopher and one of the original Stoics, already understood this two millennia ago. In Letters from a Stoic, he wrote:
“Count each separate day as a separate life. He who has thus prepared himself, he whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.”
But another writer and philosopher, the American David Henry Thoreau, probably phrased it best:
“To affect the quality of the day, that’s the highest of arts.”
Think about it. If you can improve the quality of your day, your life will be more fulfilling. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. It’s simple because the objective is clear, it’s complicated because it’s a daunting task. How do we do it? Where do we start? And how do you even know if you had a perfect day?
Who?
If you’re perfectly happy with your days, I salute you. And if you think good is good enough, then there’s no need to search for perfect.
Perfect is a lot to ask for, so let’s acknowledge right away that we will often fail at our goal. Scoring each day with a ten is not going to happen. But we should put the bar high. If we set the goal to perfect, at least we’ll often end up at good. It’s like one of my favorite sayings from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:
“One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. One who he thinks he is one of the worst husbands may be a good one if he is always trying to be a good husband with a single-hearted effort.”
So it is with our days. He who aims for perfect will likely end up with fulfilling days most of the time. He who doesn’t aim for anything will pass his days unnoticed, until one day he realizes most of them are gone.
How?
This post is not a “how to have a perfect day in five steps” prescription. While such articles can provide some inspiration, they create the illusion that making the most of your days is easy. It’s not.
To be able to have more perfect days you’ll have to search deep inside yourself. Having “five steps to a perfect day” is the outcome of knowing yourself, the endpoint of a journey, not the beginning. Such a list should be based on your values, your desires, your strengths, and your weaknesses.
This journey is in fact never-ending. Everything evolves: your skills, your work, your personal life, technology, the world at large. As such, your definition of a perfect day will change as well. This search is a lifelong mission. The joy is as much in the journey as it is in reaching the destination.
This article is the opening shot of our search. It will be a recurring theme on the Saent blog in the months and years ahead. It might even influence our new products.
The approach
Great thinkers like Elon Musk and Ray Dalio break problems down to their fundamentals. They reason based on (first) principles. As Dalio writes in his book, Principles: Life and Work:
“Rather than argue about our conclusions, my partners and I would argue about our different decision-making criteria. Then we resolved our disagreements by testing the criteria objectively.”
This philosophy should also apply to our search for the perfect day. We will not be fooled by a template for the perfect morning routine or the ten secrets to having a perfect day. Those are outcomes based on someone else’s values and characteristics. It would be like arguing about our conclusions instead of the criteria that went into our decisions.
We will dig deeper. This is why an earnest search for the perfect day is hard. It requires you to not execute someone else’s prescription mindlessly. Instead, it involves thinking, trying, measuring, reflecting, adjusting, then doing it all over again to improve further. That’s why it’s as much about enjoying this journey as it is about reaching that perfect day destination.
For now, start by observing your days more consciously. Be aware of how they unfold. Take little notes of what makes them great and what is not going so well. Now review those notes regularly. Doing just that, you’ll see that you’re already on your way to a more #perfectday!
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