The Rally

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well hello, this is The Daily Five with Aurooba. That's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] We have entered the last quarter of The Daily Five, y'all. This is the 76th episode, 24 episodes till we hit 100. For those of you who have been with me on this ride since episode 1, y'all are amazing. The conversations I've had with some of you have made this season rewarding in ways I didn't expect. My headspace today is in a lot of different places.

[00:00:41] If we go back to the official plan I laid out for each quarter of the season, officially speaking, we've entered the rally part of the season, which in many ways definitely feels accurate, at least in terms of what I'm feeling. While it's been an easier and more fun time recording this season than the first season, recording every single day, publishing every single day, is no easy feat.

[00:01:02] I can't believe Seth Godin has been doing this in written form for years and years. And that's amazing.

[00:01:10] So today my focus is yet again on energy, among other things, but primarily energy. You can spend your energy doing things you don't like, or you can spend your energy doing things you do like. You can spend your energy trying to shore up your weaknesses, or you can spend your energy exercising your strengths.

[00:01:30] In a lot of situations, if you have control, and even if you don't think you have control, you often have more control than you think. Doing what you like and exercising your strengths will get you better outcomes than the opposite. Sometimes, however, we fall into the trap of thinking something matters or is worth spending our energy on when it isn't.

[00:01:49] This is likely to happen when you become too close to something. Sometimes this happens when you start to take on more responsibility and in the course of caring and wanting to improve, you become too close to remain effective in some ways. That's a signal to step back, to reassess, to re evaluate. Check where you are spending your energy.

[00:02:10] Something that's coming to mind right now is It's the fact that a day is shorter than you might think, a year is longer than you might think, but that the reverse is also true. A day is longer than you think and a year is shorter than you think. The point is, or maybe one of the point is, what seems urgent is not always actually urgent.

[00:02:30] What seems like it's important but not urgent is sometimes far more worth doing than other things. And among all of that, one of the things that really matters is keeping your word, or at least trying to. You know, we shouldn't give our word for things we cannot keep. And if you do give your word, it's important to try to honor it.

[00:02:51] Our words, our energy, our actions, these are the things that ultimately define us, both in our own eyes and the eyes of others. It may be more so than those splashy individual accomplishments, which are generally only more impressive to those not in close proximity to us. You know, it's a little bit like makeup.

[00:03:09] You can do makeup that looks amazing from far, but when you get close to the makeup, it doesn't look so great. But you can also do makeup that looks pretty good from afar and looks pretty good from up close as well. Personally, I strive for the latter, you know, I want to seem as good from afar as I seem up close.

[00:03:31] There's evidently, you know, a lot of different ideas swarming around my head. Responsibility, the sanctity of your word, care, energy, identity, strengths, weaknesses, optics, makeup. As we rally for these last few episodes, I'd like to focus on evaluation. You cannot fix what you don't acknowledge. You cannot acknowledge without first evaluating or paying attention.

[00:03:58] And there's a lot to acknowledge, a lot to evaluate. So let's do that a little. Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?