*Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh*

Guhhhh, your alarm goes off to wake you up to the start of another day. What is today? Wednesday? Through bleary eyes and foggy brain you’re not even sure what day it is any more. They’re all starting to feel the same. You just know one thing for sure, it’s not the weekend. You roll over and briefly toy with the idea of going back to sleep but your brain is already awake. You give in and fall in to your normal morning routine.

On the way in to work a yellow smart car cuts you off and nearly runs you off the road. Asshole! What was he even thinking, driving a go-kart like that and he wants to cut you off? You laugh to yourself knowing that that any collision with his fisher price toy car would not end well for him and you cruise on in to work.

There’s a reason terms like rat race exist and your job is no different. You get to work and bury your head in the pile of work you have to get through, pausing only to shuffle off to a department meeting right before lunch. During the meeting you barely pay attention, staring at the clock just hoping they stop speaking soon. The only thing that gets your through it is you notice that they misspelled your bosses name on the agenda. You co-worker cracks a joke about it and everyone has a good laugh.

The rest of the day passes by uneventfully. Truth be told you felt like you were half asleep and couldn’t recall the mundane details if someone offered you a couple hundred dollars to hear it. Not that anyone would, of course. You go through your after work routine and settle in for bed, just hoping the next few days go by a little faster than they did today.

*Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh*

The alarm again. One day closer to the weekend. Just knowing that is enough to rouse you out from under your blankets. You go through your normal routine again and get ready for work. As you’re driving in to work, the same yellow smart car nearly runs you off the road. What is this guy’s problem? Does he have a death wish? Come on, man, leave a few minutes earlier or something! Dopes!

Your mind is preoccupied with the stupidity of mankind as you make your way in to work and settle in to your routine. It’s amazing, you’ve been doing this so long at all your clients feel the same after a while. You could have sworn you had taken care of some of these already, but your heart and your mind are elsewhere most days so you barely even notice.

It’s getting close to lunch and suddenly everyone starts getting up, note pads in hand. You look and ask your neighbor where everyone is going. “The department meeting, don’t your remember?”, giving you a quizzical raised eyebrow in response. Jeez, you must really be losing it, you completely forgot there was a meeting today. But who can blame you? We have so many of these things, who can keep track!?

The meeting starts up and feels all too familiar. Updates are given and you space out, looking at the clock. You laugh to yourself how samey this all feels and how everyone is such a creature of habit. Everyone even picked their same seats as yesterday. You look down at the agenda to see how many more updates there are before this is all over. You scan down the sheet and your heart skips two beats when you see who is next. The same misspelled name as yesterday!

You can feel your heart racing a little as you try and sort it out. I’ll bet it’s just some kind of prank, a joke on yesterday. You tune in as they are introducing your boss and your co-worked makes the same joke you know you heard yesterday. This is feeling all too familiar. You know you were in a daze but something isn’t right. You check your phone and the world fades away. All you can hear is a buzzing in your ears as you read Wednesday on the screen. This can’t be right. Maybe you dropped your phone or something. Or it froze during an update?

You turn to the person next to you and try to speak but your mouth has gone dry and your tongue seems two sizes too big for your mouth. You manage to mumble and ask them what day it is and they confirm, Wednesday! What’s going on. Are you really losing it that bad? You could swear it was supposed to be Thursday. The yellow car … what’s going on???

You finish off the rest of the day with a pit in your stomach knowing that something isn’t right here. At best, you’re going for a CT scan because déjà vu this bad has got to be a sign of something bad. You get home and try and fall asleep, tossing and turning, worried about what all this could mean and doing your very best to stay off WebMD.

*Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh Wrahhh*

You jolt awake and check your phone and throw it against the wall. Wednesday! What’s going on!

Yellow car … Misspelled name … Bad joke …

This is all too familiar. You remember seeing this in a movie as a kid. You’re stuck in Groundhog’s Day. The same day is repeating over and over again. But with knowledge comes some relief. At least now you know what’s going on. Man, you really are cursed! Not only do you have to repeat the day over and over, but it’s a work day! But hey, at least it’s some nice weather, and you are now free to live without consequences. No matter what happens, when you wake up in the morning the world will be reset and you get to start fresh.

So …. What do you do?

Life is unfair. So often it’s not about what you know, what you can do, or what you could offer, but about who you know. It’s about knowing the right person who can open a door for you or get you in touch with so-and-so who can get you this opportunity over there. So we spend a lot of time and effort meeting people, making friends and figuring out who is going to be able to get us where we would like to go.

It’s all well and good, but what about the other side of the coin? Karma is a two-way street. If I’m hoping that someone will reach out a hand and help me out when I need it, I should hold myself to the same standard. Wherever I can I want to be able to be someone worth knowing to someone else. No matter how meager my means, there’s bound to be a way I can help someone the way that other people have helped me. We aren’t super heroes, we can’t save the world, but we can matter to people who matter to us.

It’s the holiday season. In the midst of all the mania around shopping during Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays and trying to find the best deal or the perfect gift, it’s good to remember the little things that make this a great time of year. The important things are the moments that you share with people, the adventures that you go on and experiences that stay with you. It’s what’s behind the gift, the person that gave it to you that matters, and not what’s inside the wrapping paper that counts.

None of us were born perfect. We were not born inherently perfect at the things we love to do. Maybe we were gifted with some talent, but with that talent comes the need to practice. Practice is how we get better. It’s how we come closer to that ideal of perfection, making strides each time we work on our goal. Practice doesn’t make perfect, and that’s ok. We should be chasing progress, not perfection. Progress will get us closer and closer to our goal each day we practice. Never get discouraged by failure. Keep going and marching along the pathway of progression and appreciate the journey along the way.

Life is an amazing adventure. Embrace the absurd opportunities that it puts in front of you. Continue to say yes to things and push yourself beyond your comfort zone.

Just do the thing. Whatever the thing is for you. All too often in life we sit around and talk about the thing, think about the thing, plan for the thing and wonder about the thing. All that mental stress goes away when you take action and just do the thing.

It’s a familiar refrain for me, but this is an amazing time to be alive. Never before have we had access to as many outlets for creative expression as we do now. There are places all over the internet where people are free to showcase and share their ideas and their work. It’s a double-edged sword. There is such an influx of stuff out there now that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to stand out. But at the same time, there is also so much being done to draw inspiration from.

The incredible things that people create could inspire you to create something of your own. It’s this upward spiral of creativity that wasn’t able to exist before we had the tools that we have today. Instead of being limited to a single medium and mastering it in different ways, there is this explosion of creativity in all different directions, branching out in ways no one has ever seen before and building off of what was just done in a new way. It’s a cool thing to see unfolding.

Train yourself to give everything you have in to what you do. Don’t hold back.  Push yourself to your limits and trust that your brain and your body will find the strength within you that you need to get you through. The best way to grow and get better is by pushing yourself further and further than you thought possible. Don’t save anything for the trip back.

It’s so easy in today’s day and age to fall into the trap of false reality. We can slip into a world of virtual reality where we are afforded the opportunity to be an alternate version of ourselves that embodies the epitome of what we would like to be. This is fine, as a temporary escape. It’s nice to be someone else for a while and stepping outside yourself can make you think in a different way and help you grow.

The danger lies when you get immersed in the virtual world. It’s a world constructed to give you just enough of a reward to keep you hooked and coming back and paying for more. There is a bizarre satisfaction in working on the virtual character. There is a skinner box-like reward system that rewards you incrementally for keeping going that can’t be mirrored in real life.

At the end of the day though, none of this is tangible. If the virtual would that you invested in disappeared tomorrow then you would have nothing to show for it. The character that you “leveled up” would be gone and you would be no better off in the real world than when you started. You could even be feasibly worse.

There is no virtual accomplishment worth your health. There is nothing worth sacrificing to achieve. Far better to spend the time you would invest on an avatar on the only thing you will always be invested in, yourself. Better to spend your time reading and learning in reality. Better to learn and master skills in real life than mastering abilities in a virtual realm. The skills you learn in real life will always be with you. False reality is a button click away from being deleted forever.

It’s something you hear over and over as life advice, but it’s one of the most important and difficult things in life to find and accept. Be yourself. We spend a lot of our time thinking about what other people are thinking about us. It’s an innately human thing to want to be liked. Especially by the people you like and think are cool. We end up putting on a person costume and acting out a role for the person we think they would want us to be.

The worst thing that could happen is that it would work. That whoever you are trying to talk to find impostor you an intriguing person. Now you’re trapped. You have to go on acting out the role and denying who you are inside. That can only go on for so long. Eventually the seams of the costume are going to fray and the real you will be bursting to come out. When the real you finally does come out, it’s unnatural to the other person. Where they may have been cool with you for who you were in the beginning there’s now only an uncomfortable feeling and a sense of betrayal. They’re left wondering who you really are.

Far better to be honest and be yourself, whoever that is, from the beginning. If they’re not cool with that, then it was never meant to be. You both save a lot of time trying to impress one another and can get on with finding the people who you can be comfortable around and just be you. Learn, change, grow, but always be true to you.