How perfect would you say is your life?
Now I know perfect is such a loaded word isn’t it just if you grade your life out of 10, what do you think?
When you look back on your life or even look back on just this last week or month or phase how good is your life out of 10?
How do you measure it? What are the things you think about that add up to being your best life? How best are these things right now for you? How much more best can they be?
How much do you think about these things?
I’m thinking about…
Bill Gates.
Because you can see a person who has truly changed our world.
What he and Microsoft did for the personal computer now seems passé.
Especially relative to all the fancy AI and apps these days but you know Windows and Office ushered in this future of personal computing.
Bill Gates of course became one of the wealthiest people on the planet and a prominent humanitarian, respected, admired, loved by many.
But also
What you’ve seen over the last handful of years is a dog’s breakfast like when Tiger Woods was revealed to be less perfect than his golf game.
Everyone already knew about some of the grosser things Gates did in business like betraying Steve Jobs on Windows and anti-trust type stuff which many can see as par for the course in cutthroat business.
But then you started to see the deeper stuff bubbling up like Epstein and his affairs and perhaps being somewhat of a sexual predator and how his ex-wife talks about him with such disdain.
Is he just a bad dude? Maybe so super genius in some ways he fails to be super good in other ways? Or maybe just like the rest of us a regular human with our regular flaws?
Who knows?
Who cares?
Whose business is it anyways?
Because if you want to fault any human on the planet it’s real easy. I’m yet to meet the perfect human and you might know even the saint Mother Teresa wrote letters questioning her faith in life.
Which human could stand up as some perfect embodiment of what you can be? We’re all living in glass houses aren’t we and you’re best to avoid throwing stones.
You can however see the signal, can’t you? It’s a most common signal you see everywhere all the time in our world. For richer and poorer.
For better and worse.
We are…
Human.
We are equal parts made in likeness of a God with limitless love and caring and joy and giving and every other amazing thing existing in each of us.
And too, we are the devil on our own shoulder. You can’t know exactly the derivation of religions and such teachings but you do know there is a common thread running through all of them, isn’t there?
It’s the same as any great story of hero and antagonist. The one shining light and the one swimming in darkness. Whatever is the truth of these things it’s happening inside you right now, isn’t it?
I have a sign on my desk that reads “Never a negative line” because even after decades of this work and mental conditioning that brain can still be drawn to the dark side.
It’s never your fault, you’re a survival machine, your nervous system and brain are built with a negativity bias, perhaps even 80% negative, and this is the works.
The works
In the Catholic Church faith isn’t enough, they also talk about The Works.
It means your faith isn’t some passive thing you just go to Church and say your Amen and you’re all good as a human being. No, in a survival machine with a nervous system built to avoid threat and swimming in negativity to win this game you must do the work. You must practice, train.
It’s the same as being a professional athlete. You’d never expect a professional athlete to just show up and play their best game, would you? You expect they are always, constantly, never-ending training for playing your best game.
Same is true being a professional human. Being an amateur you’re carried along by that nervous system and brain down whatever path it is headed like an autonomous vehicle driving you.
Being a professional human you take ownership for being your best human.
Best human
Best mind best life.
Best thinking, best feeling, best action, best human.
It’s really simple, obviously. And like I said living in a glass house you never throw stones at other humans who also suffer from the human condition much of the time living in less than best thoughts, less than best feelings, less than best actions, being less than your best human.
Because if you’re honest about these things and you look back on your week out of the 604,800 seconds how many seconds would you see you were your best human?
What would you guess?
64%
That’s my last 7 day average. It’s OK, some 387,072 seconds of winning, but that’s 217,728 seconds of failing grade.
Every day I’m ranking my day across a bunch of variables and this 7 day average is merely 4 variables: best energy, best mind, best actions, best results.
Out of 10 this week I scored just 64%. That’s 36% off my full potential. And 36% less than I’m willing to accept. Still, you never want to beat yourself up about these things.
You just want to keep iterating to the target looking at every way you perfect your human being. And for me here there’s a handful of protocols and procedures I was failing.
It’s all very obvious in my methods just very not easy to keep perfecting.
Perfecting human
You see one of my favorite quotes at the top of this page from famed football coach Vince Lombardi—”Perfection is not attainable but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
It’s such a powerful concept, isn’t it? Because all the time people “try” to tell me how perfection is “unrealistic” and they are right. Still, it never means you just give up the game!
And if you’re willing to accept less than perfect where do you draw the line? Is 99% good enough? 80%? What about 64%? How do you know if you’re not constantly raising the Highline?
Like for me a reason my daily grades were stuck in the 60s on average is because I’m unwilling to grant myself a perfect score for mind and actions.
Over now 2+ years measuring this way I’ve never earned a perfect 3 for mind nor actions because perfect must be perfect for a perfect grade.
Perfectly pursuing
See, and also there’s something spectacularly amazing going on in this for me.
It’s fun! The pursuit of excellence. Pursuit of perfection. Even when I’m putting up crappy grades like 64% I’m fired up to keep perfecting my days. It’s like school being measured by cold hard numbers is a wonderful forcing function for and this is the key phrase “getting leverage over your own brain” and getting the best from you and for you and others too.
Because this is what I’ve decoded matters most in life. You know the destination… Indeed as they say life is a journey, man. And the more you’re perfecting your journey the more you’re perfecting your life.
And this is my point on Bill Gates which is knowing what to perfect in your life. In him you can see a person who has tried so hard and achieved so much for himself and for humanity. But achieving all that out there you can see as winning the loser’s game if your entire life you’ve failed to play and win your inner game.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.”
This is your best life
You can win the external game of life and fail miserably at the internal game.
Because no matter how much you do and achieve nothing out there can ever fill you up inside. It’s like painting your house red outside hoping to feel warmer inside.
This game of life is an inner game. Best mind best life. The quality of your life is the quality of your Internal Life Experience and there’s only one way to win this game.
You train. So unlike people like Bill Gates who achieve so much out there but never evolve inside as I wrote about here you’ll never win the game of life without perfecting your inner game.
Perfecting both your External Life and Internal Life Experience this is your best life.