The day after

[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.

[00:00:15] The day after you miss a day of whatever it is you want to do every day is the toughest day. You've experienced a small hiccup in your momentum. Now, we've talked about this on the podcast before. Don't break the chain. Don't let more than one day go by when you do break the chain.

[00:00:34] And that's where I found myself today. Yesterday was not a great day, and my ability to do anything but the absolute minimum was, well, there was just no way that anything more than a minimum was going to happen.

[00:00:48] And that's a part of life sometimes. Sometimes you have bad days that you can push through, and sometimes you have bad days you can't push through. And hopefully, you have a lot of good days too, where everything feels possible. So, here I was, having missed a day of the podcast, the first time this season I had officially not put out an episode of some kind in a row. If you've been paying very close attention, you may have predicted this. All week, my episodes have been generally short, on the terser side, and when I listen back to them, I can hear the exhaustion mounting in my voice.

[00:01:25] What you don't know is that this whole week, I have been sleeping extra. Sleeping pretty hard. And every day, I was setting an alarm for 11pm at night to drag myself out of bed and do an episode. And I absolutely did hit snooze twice before actually getting up every day. And yesterday, I just couldn't do it. I needed the sleep, and I slept for 15 hours straight. Now, I definitely woke up feeling like a brand new person. But I did miss a day of the podcast.

[00:01:54] So there are a few ways I could approach that. I could beat myself up about it and do it so intensely that I wouldn't have the will to try and keep going. And then I'd miss a second day, and then a third, and then the next thing you know I've destructively ruined a streak I've worked so hard to build.

[00:02:11] I could shrug it off and just pretend it didn't happen. In fact, I could even technically fudge the dates so that at least on the website it didn't look like the skip happened. I'd have to record two episodes in a single day to do it, but I could.

[00:02:22] I could also accept it happened and just keep going and make up the missing episode by keeping the season going one extra day.

[00:02:30] Or I could do some combination of both. Or, of the ones that I've suggested.

[00:02:36] People who know me well can probably guess what I chose to do. I beat myself up for a good two to three hours. Then I sighed. Then I smiled. And come the evening when I would typically record, I sat down at my desk and you're listening to the result of that, I'm here acknowledging what happened, explaining how I thought it through, and I'm moving, moving forward. I made a lesson out of my own missing of the day.

[00:03:02] Missing stuff, dropping the ball, all of this, you know, it's a part of life. No one is perfect. There may definitely be people who can make the whole hundred days didn't happen without dropping the ball.

[00:03:13] But somewhere at some point in our lives, even in their lives, You're gonna drop the ball. The dropping of the ball doesn't define us, though. It's what we do next that does. Our mistakes don't define us, as cliche as it sounds, it's what we do after that does. I'm defined by the fact that I'm here after dropping the ball, recording anyway, and stubbornly not letting that affect my momentum.

[00:03:37] There's a whole book about this concept, actually. It's called Grit. It's a good book. I recommend the audiobook version to the written one, if you're interested. It was more interesting and engaging to hear her read it out loud than to read the words themselves.

[00:03:52] So, it's not the bad thing, or the bad day, that matters. It's the day after that does. Care about that. Think about that. Obsess over that. Because what that says about you is far more meaningful than what making a mistake says. Making a mistake just means you made a mistake. Means you're human. You probably did some dumb stuff to make that mistake, of course, but you'll learn.

[00:04:18] We all learn. And if you do learn, then what that says about you is so much better.

[00:04:25] And if you're wondering what I'm going to do about the skip day, I am just going to extend the season by a single day because I am in fact determined to get to 100 episodes. That number 100 does matter to me quite a bit.

[00:04:39] So yeah, here we are, the next episode.

[00:04:49] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?