Episode 101. The Ideal Day for the Ideal Life

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “The Ideal Day for the Ideal Life.”

I think the best way to figure out what an ideal day is to ask yourself first, what a terrible day is to start. I think not sleeping enough would make for a pretty terrible day. I'd be agitated, my senses would be dull, and I'd probably be feeling lazy. If I really wanted to have a terrible day, I'd probably put some kind of intense pressure on myself.

Maybe there'd be an important deadline that I forgot to prepare for, and I'd be filled with dread. A few other things I could try to ruin my day would be to avoid food until I was absolutely famished. Maybe lay in my bed for a really long time thinking about how I don't really feel ready for the day. I could also just not take a shower or brush my teeth or do any preparation.

I don't know that I'd even get out of my pajamas. I'd probably stay inside all day in a dark house. I wouldn't talk to anyone, and I'd watch something really mind numbing. I mean, maybe daytime tv. When I finally forced myself to get up to eat something, I think I'd opt for a giant bag of Doritos.

Those are just the things I can control. Obviously, if I could orchestrate a wave for the weather to be bad or my air conditioning to break. I can make things worse, but I could just go on and on with those sorts of things. Virtually every friend, grandma, work, colleague, influencer, athlete, and celebrity has something to say about how we should live our day to day.

Sometimes they'll tell you to eat an apple a day. Sometimes they'll tell you need to do ice baths. Maybe they'll tell you that you need an hour of meditation once a day. But whatever they say, there's no way we can manage to do everything that people tell us we need to do. There are a lot of successful people in the world, so it would appear that there are millions of ways to live a life that would get you where you want to go.

At the end of the day though, simply knowing what will make your day terrible, gives us 90% of what we need to know about having a good day. Knowing what a bad day looks like. You can take a good guess at what an ideal day would look like. A lot of it simply comes down to preparation. I think if I want a good day today, I'd have to have spent some time making that happen the day before.

If I want less cavities today, per se, I would have needed to brush my teeth for some time prior. If I didn't want a looming deadline, I would've had to have worked on the project before the day of to have a good day. I'd probably work to make money so that I could have more of it at my disposal at some future point.

Maybe on an ideal day, I'd spend a little time planning things out for the week so that I wouldn't have to think so hard in the future. So, part of a great day for me might start with simply waking up at a decent hour and having a good meal followed by promptly getting ready for the day. I think a great day would have me get outside for a little bit and maybe get some exercise in.

A great day would mean I made some meaningful connections with other people. A great day would probably be filled with a lot of preparation for more great days to come. It's funny, but truly ideal days are not devoid of work. Work puts pressure on us and we don't like that, but we're made to operate under pressure.

I think we like to imagine that a perfect life is full of luxurious trips to beautiful places. We seem to like the idea of relaxing and doing nothing, but nobody wants to do that forever. Yeah, maybe we could all appreciate a few days to do nothing and just relax every now and then, but we would be bored out of our mind given enough time.

When I think back to my favorite vacations, they usually included some kind of work, even if it was something fun like learning to surf or giving ourselves some kind of objective during the trip. Fun as those things were, they still required some amount of effort and work, which in turn made it more fun.

Ideal days are pretty ordinary days. A lot of what I think makes them ideal is preparation, but also how we choose to think about them. When we see other people doing things we wanna be doing, it's pretty easy to become discontent with how we are living. But that discontent is largely a burden that we place on ourselves.

Living proof of that is all of the super depressed, uber successful people out there. We want what we don't have, and there's a lot of misery in that comparison. One of my favorite movies is about time. It's a fictional movie where the men in the main character's family have the ability to travel backward in their lives and relive them.

So, to make my point, I'm about to spoil the ending, so if you want to tune out, now's your chance. But at one point during the film, the main character's father tells his son how he chooses to use his ability, and he tells him that he chooses to relive every day twice whatever goes wrong or makes that day bad for him.

He goes back and he relives the day better the second time around. At the end of the movie, the main character has been through some twists and turns and story plots but eventually chooses to stop using his gift altogether because he realizes he doesn't have to relive every day to get it right the first time.

He ultimately chooses to enjoy and appreciate the little moments that every day brings. So, to sum up my grand conclusion as to what makes the ideal day is really not so grand after all. The ideal day is not made up of big, impressive things, but rather it's made up of mostly simple things. It's a day that makes tomorrow easier.

It's also made up of how you choose to see your day, whether you choose to see what you have and feel grateful for it, or whether you choose to feel bad over what you want, but do not have. An ideal day, an ordinary day that you've made the most of. We can't predict what days we're going to strike gold or when calamity comes, but we can choose to make the most of our days and be grateful for them.

All great things are made of a lot of simple things. Instead of blindly chasing after your best life, build your best life out of what you make of each individual day. And good things will follow. This is Skipping Stones - “The Ideal Day for the Ideal Life.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com.

And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly. Every Monday.