ITERATE

August 14th, 2018

Groundhog day is a movie where the main character experiences the same day over and over. It’s the exact same day, Groundhog day, and he has to endure the same celebration in a small town over and over and over.

The main character, played by Bill Murray hates the beginning of the process and tries in vain to get away from it all.  He even resorts to suicide.  But alas, he is given the same day once again.

He finally comes to a sort of peace with the situation and begins to embody a frame of mind that is less based on being imposed upon by external circumstances, to a perspective that is more akin to “What the hell, might as well do something with the time.”

This is where the character begins to change and blossom.

He begins to explore and more importantly he begins to ITERATE.

With piano lessons, with ice sculpture, with all sorts of things.

He devotes a little of each day to iterating on this or that project.

And in each areas, things begin to COMPOUND.

The most brilliant part about the movie is not that the character gets the gift of a seemingly infinite repeating day.

The brilliant part of the movie is that it’s really not any much different from normal life.

Yes, different things happen from day to day.  But with routine, structure and schedule, we can make our own Groundhog day, and in so doing create repeating spaces were we can make progress on all sorts of fronts.

One good one is waking up.

For a lot of people, waking up is a painful, difficult, miserable process.  The reason why it’s often difficult is because our focus is backward.  We are thinking about how comfortable and restful it was to be asleep. 

But what happens if similar good feelings apply to the things we are about to do?  Like waking up early to open gifts on a holiday, or get going for a vacation that has been in the works for a while.

Or how about a project that we’ve been making progress on.

What is the project is an insanely simple one.

What if the project is just to wake up with more drive and motivation?

How might we accomplish this repeating feat?

No formula will work for everyone and this is why it’s so important to ITERATE  the process and try to find what works.

It might help to replace the alarm clock with a coffee maker that brews on a timer.  It might be helpful to adopt a cold shower routine first thing in the morning.  Or doing pushups or stretches or meditation or figuring out what the best food to give the body first thing might be.

Regardless of what the final formula for the best possible morning wake – up routine might be, the most important thing to undertake is the process of Iterating.

We may find that we can always make it a little better.

And in so doing we never hit a plateau. 

We are living a trend. 

The truly strange thing about embodying a living trend with any sort of iterating project that we attempt to improve ourselves through is that with any kind of consistency and perseverance, we can perpetually experience a better version of ourselves.  This would mean that every moment is a time when we are better, which effectively means we are perpetually experiencing the best existence we’ve experienced because our ability to engage with reality supersedes all prior moments.

Of course no one functions on this kind of upward trend.  We all fall a few paces behind in this or that respect or with this project or that hope.  But the prospect is still one to shoot for, because it is a perspective that offers a high probability for improving. 

This episode references Episode 80: Compound. If you’d like to fully explore the reference, please check out that episode next.