(In my continued pursuit to find awesome ideas and people doing awesome things, I’m excited to introduce you to writer/entrepreneur/chief Sumo Noah Kagan.)
Through most of 2012 and 2013 I was at the lowest point in my life.
Funny enough, I had an extremely attractive girlfriend, my AppSumo.com business was generating a healthy 7 figures and I had a pretty snazzy body.
What was missing?
It’s hard to pinpoint but I explored how to deal with expression and engineered a way to make every morning great.
Over the year I started to feel better from doing a variety of things to face my fears, took 5 rhythm dancing (awkward!) and even walked by myself around India.
Since then my 2014 has been great.
Instead of hoping each day would be great, my buddy Adam and I decided we would engineer a best day ever (BDE).
Here’s how we went out about.
Any time you have a good day, write out exactly which elements you really enjoyed about that day.
A few examples:
-> I really enjoyed having a conversation with my friend
-> After the gym I felt a natural high
-> I LOVE waking up and having bacon, eggs and coffee with my breakfast
The key thing is to block out time to reflect on this, even 4 minutes at the end of the day or exactly when the moment happens.
Here’s my exact elements of a perfect day:
1) Sleep enough
2) Eat well
3) Exercise
4) Drink coffee
5) Do engaging work
6) Hang with energizing people
7) Flirting
8) Work on your blog
There’s no magic bullet, just simple elements that I can easily recreate wherever I am in the world.
Each person will have different things that make their day great. The point is to recognize what exactly those are.
Then make your best day ever elements easily visible for yourself every day. I put it on a sticky on my computer so I see it everyday:
It’s not to say that even if I do everything the day will be magical. But it makes it way more likely to happen.
Be aware that not everyday will be unicorns, tacos and other amazing things. Even becoming aware that some days won’t be amazing make the BDE days that much sweeter. This recognition has significantly helped me when days aren’t as exciting as when I get featured on Acuff.me 🙂
Most people don’t ever spend any time thinking about and reflecting on what makes a good day a good day. Instead of living each day as groundhogs day, and hoping to have a good day, why not make it more likely?
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Noah Kagan is the Chief Sumo of AppSumo.com, the free newsletter to help entrepreneurs win. Grab his free marketing newsletter on how he grew AppSumo to 700,000+ subscribers. Or, download his story of losing $170,000,000 from getting fired at Facebook.