WEBVTT
00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:05.759
No matter what Instagram says, nobody's life is actually just made of highlights.
00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:09.279
And no matter what you envision it to be, yours won't either.
00:00:09.519 --> 00:00:14.640
Instead, it'll be made of roughly 30,000 mostly ordinary days.
00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:19.440
And what you do with an ordinary day turns out to be what you do with your whole life.
00:00:19.679 --> 00:00:28.320
Hi, this is Jordana, the CEO of the Recon Network and host of the In Brief podcast, and today we're making a case for the unremarkable day.
00:00:28.559 --> 00:00:38.479
We live in a culture obsessed with peak, picture-perfect moments, the milestones, the breakthroughs, the trip of a lifetime, and the moments that stop people in their tracks.
00:00:38.719 --> 00:00:46.079
But while we're waiting for the extraordinary, the ordinary days are quietly doing the actual construction of what our life turns out to be.
00:00:46.320 --> 00:00:49.439
And today is about taking it seriously.
00:00:51.439 --> 00:00:52.479
This is in brief.
00:00:52.799 --> 00:00:54.079
Let's get to it.
00:01:02.719 --> 00:01:06.000
Run the math on a life in totality.
00:01:06.239 --> 00:01:11.040
Subtract sleep, and you have maybe a few hundred thousand waking hours total.
00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:19.599
Now count the peak moments weddings, promotions, once-in-a-lifetime trips, the days that you'll actually tell stories about.
00:01:19.840 --> 00:01:22.959
Being generous, they add up to a few hundred hours.
00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:29.040
And everything else, more than 99% of your existence, is ordinary.
00:01:29.359 --> 00:01:33.680
Commutes, dinners, workouts, conversations, chores, evenings.
00:01:33.840 --> 00:01:36.239
That's not the filler around your life.
00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:38.159
That is the life.
00:01:38.560 --> 00:01:39.920
But that's not how we treat it.
00:01:40.079 --> 00:01:45.200
We treat ordinary days as a waiting room, the gray stretch between the things that count, right?
00:01:45.359 --> 00:01:47.519
We defer living our weekends.
00:01:47.680 --> 00:01:53.760
We defer living our lives until the weekend or the vacation, the someday when things settle down.
00:01:54.079 --> 00:01:57.599
Sadly, the counting error in that approach is enormous.
00:01:57.760 --> 00:02:06.400
It writes off 99% of your time is overhead, and then you're left wondering why life feels like it's mostly just waiting for something else to happen.
00:02:06.719 --> 00:02:11.759
The reality is that ordinary days are where everything meaningful actually gets built.
00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:14.159
Nobody gets healthy on a milestone day.
00:02:14.319 --> 00:02:19.120
Health is assembled out of hundreds of unremarkable workouts and forgettable meals.
00:02:19.439 --> 00:02:21.919
No marriage is sustained by anniversaries.
00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:26.560
It's sustained by how two people talk to each other on a random Wednesday.
00:02:26.800 --> 00:02:31.919
No skill, no business, no book, no recovery, no fortune is built in peak moments.
00:02:32.080 --> 00:02:34.719
Peak moments are where their building gets celebrated.
00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:42.879
The building itself happens on days that nobody photographs and barely even mentions, the hours that no one counts.
00:02:43.120 --> 00:02:49.280
This is just how compounding works, and compounding is indifferent to drama or excess or exceptionality.
00:02:49.520 --> 00:02:55.360
A small deposit made daily beats a heroic deposit made annually in money and everything else.
00:02:55.599 --> 00:03:00.240
James Clear sums it up best in his book Atomic Habits, where he's talking about trajectory.
00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:16.159
Twenty minutes of anything, walking, writing, learning, calling people you love, when done on ordinary days, produces more over five years than any burst of extraordinary effort and gets you closer to your goals in a steady, reliable pattern.
00:03:16.479 --> 00:03:19.439
That means that the ordinary day isn't weak.
00:03:19.599 --> 00:03:20.719
It's just slow.
00:03:20.879 --> 00:03:27.439
And slow, multiplied by thousands, is still the most powerful force available to a regular person.
00:03:28.080 --> 00:03:36.319
Now, when you're going through the military transition or even directly after, it can be tricky to see this at first because service life can distort the picture a little bit.
00:03:36.560 --> 00:03:41.759
High intensity environments train you to associate significance with intensity.
00:03:41.919 --> 00:03:44.319
If the stakes aren't high, it doesn't count.
00:03:44.479 --> 00:03:53.039
So a quiet civilian Tuesday can register as meaningless, even though it's the exact terrain where the next piece of life gets constructed.
00:03:53.199 --> 00:04:01.439
And even in service, your ordinary days were often spent preparing for the moment that things did become remarkable or chaotic or memorable.
00:04:01.759 --> 00:04:08.159
So with that step back, we can start to look at ordinary days as the steady preparation for the extraordinary ones.
00:04:08.479 --> 00:04:13.039
But it's also important to note that preparing for amazing moments isn't the whole story.
00:04:13.280 --> 00:04:19.519
Ordinary days aren't only where life gets built, they're also where it gets experienced if you're looking for it.
00:04:19.759 --> 00:04:21.600
The problem is that mostly we're not.
00:04:21.839 --> 00:04:27.920
Ordinary time is when we run on autopilot mentally elsewhere, waiting for something worth paying attention to.
00:04:28.079 --> 00:04:34.480
We aren't paying attention to the breeze on our skin or the sound of birds singing in the trees or the smell of fresh baked cookies.
00:04:34.639 --> 00:04:49.199
Instead, we're in the mindset of waiting for the next big thing to come along, which creates a strange modern condition of being alive for decades while actually experiencing just a few weeks of the extent of what life has to offer us at best.
00:04:50.079 --> 00:04:55.680
The thing is, people who seem to have rich lives usually don't have more highlights than you.
00:04:55.759 --> 00:04:57.439
They just have a better camera angle.
00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:02.959
And the people who truly have rich lives maintain a different relationship with the ordinary.
00:05:03.199 --> 00:05:06.480
The morning coffee is an event, briefly.
00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.079
The walk is a walk, not a podcast delivery mechanism.
00:05:10.319 --> 00:05:12.480
Dinner is attended, not just eaten.
00:05:12.639 --> 00:05:15.279
And none of this requires spare time or money.
00:05:15.439 --> 00:05:22.160
It just requires deciding that the moment you're in counts as your life, not just a corridor to it.
00:05:22.480 --> 00:05:30.560
So there's two practices, both small, that can help you start taking a different perspective of what ordinary can mean in the greater picture of life.
00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:33.040
The first is a construction practice.
00:05:33.199 --> 00:05:40.639
Pick one thing that you want to be true in five years and give it a daily foothold so small that it can become nearly automatic.
00:05:40.879 --> 00:05:43.199
20 minutes, 10, or even just five.
00:05:43.360 --> 00:05:50.480
If you can, attach it to something that already happens every day, like practicing gratitude just after a morning workout.
00:05:50.720 --> 00:05:55.680
The point isn't the daily output, which will look laughably minor, and that's the point.
00:05:55.920 --> 00:06:03.120
The point is that you've enrolled the ordinary days, all several thousands of them, into building something.
00:06:03.360 --> 00:06:07.360
That's the whole trick, the extraordinary moment mindset misses.
00:06:07.839 --> 00:06:10.319
The second is an attendance practice.
00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:18.720
Once a day, pick a stretch of ordinary time, a meal, a walk, the first 10 minutes after you get home, and attend it.
00:06:19.040 --> 00:06:23.360
No screens, no multitasking, no mental time travel.
00:06:23.600 --> 00:06:26.079
Just be at the thing that you're at.
00:06:26.319 --> 00:06:30.480
If you're washing dishes, notice the feel of the water and the clink of glass.
00:06:30.639 --> 00:06:34.079
If you're out walking, listen to the birds or the wind rush by you.
00:06:34.319 --> 00:06:40.879
Sure, it may sound trivial, but it's the difference between a day that happened to you and a day that you were present for.
00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:48.720
Multiply that difference by 30,000 and you get two very different lives built from almost identical circumstances.
00:06:49.040 --> 00:06:50.720
And here's the quiet payoff.
00:06:50.879 --> 00:06:57.279
When ordinary days carry both construction and attention, the pressure comes off of the extraordinary ones.
00:06:57.600 --> 00:07:01.279
Vacations stop having to redeem the year.
00:07:01.600 --> 00:07:05.439
Milestones stop having to justify everything that led to them.
00:07:05.600 --> 00:07:08.959
The highlights become what they always should have been.
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:12.720
Punctuation on a sentence that was already worth reading.
00:07:13.040 --> 00:07:17.600
Remember, in the end, your life will not be decided by its biggest days.
00:07:17.759 --> 00:07:26.240
It will be decided by its most repeated ones, which means that the day that matters the most, almost always, is today.
00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:55.120
From our annual VET Summit to online workshops and even in-person local events, we provide real training, real conversations, and practical insights you can use the same day.
00:07:55.279 --> 00:08:00.160
With a goal to get you the tools you need to find direction and meaning now.
00:08:00.800 --> 00:08:04.800
So if you don't know what you want or where you want to go, no worries.
00:08:04.959 --> 00:08:07.120
There's no cost, no pressure.
00:08:07.279 --> 00:08:09.519
Just support when you need it.
00:08:09.759 --> 00:08:15.519
So find your next event at recon.bet and join us for something new.
00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:05.759
No matter what Instagram says, nobody's life is actually just made of highlights.
00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:09.279
And no matter what you envision it to be, yours won't either.
00:00:09.519 --> 00:00:14.640
Instead, it'll be made of roughly 30,000 mostly ordinary days.
00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:19.440
And what you do with an ordinary day turns out to be what you do with your whole life.
00:00:19.679 --> 00:00:28.320
Hi, this is Jordana, the CEO of the Recon Network and host of the In Brief podcast, and today we're making a case for the unremarkable day.
00:00:28.559 --> 00:00:38.479
We live in a culture obsessed with peak, picture-perfect moments, the milestones, the breakthroughs, the trip of a lifetime, and the moments that stop people in their tracks.
00:00:38.719 --> 00:00:46.079
But while we're waiting for the extraordinary, the ordinary days are quietly doing the actual construction of what our life turns out to be.
00:00:46.320 --> 00:00:49.439
And today is about taking it seriously.
00:00:51.439 --> 00:00:52.479
This is in brief.
00:00:52.799 --> 00:00:54.079
Let's get to it.
00:01:02.719 --> 00:01:06.000
Run the math on a life in totality.
00:01:06.239 --> 00:01:11.040
Subtract sleep, and you have maybe a few hundred thousand waking hours total.
00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:19.599
Now count the peak moments weddings, promotions, once-in-a-lifetime trips, the days that you'll actually tell stories about.
00:01:19.840 --> 00:01:22.959
Being generous, they add up to a few hundred hours.
00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:29.040
And everything else, more than 99% of your existence, is ordinary.
00:01:29.359 --> 00:01:33.680
Commutes, dinners, workouts, conversations, chores, evenings.
00:01:33.840 --> 00:01:36.239
That's not the filler around your life.
00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:38.159
That is the life.
00:01:38.560 --> 00:01:39.920
But that's not how we treat it.
00:01:40.079 --> 00:01:45.200
We treat ordinary days as a waiting room, the gray stretch between the things that count, right?
00:01:45.359 --> 00:01:47.519
We defer living our weekends.
00:01:47.680 --> 00:01:53.760
We defer living our lives until the weekend or the vacation, the someday when things settle down.
00:01:54.079 --> 00:01:57.599
Sadly, the counting error in that approach is enormous.
00:01:57.760 --> 00:02:06.400
It writes off 99% of your time is overhead, and then you're left wondering why life feels like it's mostly just waiting for something else to happen.
00:02:06.719 --> 00:02:11.759
The reality is that ordinary days are where everything meaningful actually gets built.
00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:14.159
Nobody gets healthy on a milestone day.
00:02:14.319 --> 00:02:19.120
Health is assembled out of hundreds of unremarkable workouts and forgettable meals.
00:02:19.439 --> 00:02:21.919
No marriage is sustained by anniversaries.
00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:26.560
It's sustained by how two people talk to each other on a random Wednesday.
00:02:26.800 --> 00:02:31.919
No skill, no business, no book, no recovery, no fortune is built in peak moments.
00:02:32.080 --> 00:02:34.719
Peak moments are where their building gets celebrated.
00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:42.879
The building itself happens on days that nobody photographs and barely even mentions, the hours that no one counts.
00:02:43.120 --> 00:02:49.280
This is just how compounding works, and compounding is indifferent to drama or excess or exceptionality.
00:02:49.520 --> 00:02:55.360
A small deposit made daily beats a heroic deposit made annually in money and everything else.
00:02:55.599 --> 00:03:00.240
James Clear sums it up best in his book Atomic Habits, where he's talking about trajectory.
00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:16.159
Twenty minutes of anything, walking, writing, learning, calling people you love, when done on ordinary days, produces more over five years than any burst of extraordinary effort and gets you closer to your goals in a steady, reliable pattern.
00:03:16.479 --> 00:03:19.439
That means that the ordinary day isn't weak.
00:03:19.599 --> 00:03:20.719
It's just slow.
00:03:20.879 --> 00:03:27.439
And slow, multiplied by thousands, is still the most powerful force available to a regular person.
00:03:28.080 --> 00:03:36.319
Now, when you're going through the military transition or even directly after, it can be tricky to see this at first because service life can distort the picture a little bit.
00:03:36.560 --> 00:03:41.759
High intensity environments train you to associate significance with intensity.
00:03:41.919 --> 00:03:44.319
If the stakes aren't high, it doesn't count.
00:03:44.479 --> 00:03:53.039
So a quiet civilian Tuesday can register as meaningless, even though it's the exact terrain where the next piece of life gets constructed.
00:03:53.199 --> 00:04:01.439
And even in service, your ordinary days were often spent preparing for the moment that things did become remarkable or chaotic or memorable.
00:04:01.759 --> 00:04:08.159
So with that step back, we can start to look at ordinary days as the steady preparation for the extraordinary ones.
00:04:08.479 --> 00:04:13.039
But it's also important to note that preparing for amazing moments isn't the whole story.
00:04:13.280 --> 00:04:19.519
Ordinary days aren't only where life gets built, they're also where it gets experienced if you're looking for it.
00:04:19.759 --> 00:04:21.600
The problem is that mostly we're not.
00:04:21.839 --> 00:04:27.920
Ordinary time is when we run on autopilot mentally elsewhere, waiting for something worth paying attention to.
00:04:28.079 --> 00:04:34.480
We aren't paying attention to the breeze on our skin or the sound of birds singing in the trees or the smell of fresh baked cookies.
00:04:34.639 --> 00:04:49.199
Instead, we're in the mindset of waiting for the next big thing to come along, which creates a strange modern condition of being alive for decades while actually experiencing just a few weeks of the extent of what life has to offer us at best.
00:04:50.079 --> 00:04:55.680
The thing is, people who seem to have rich lives usually don't have more highlights than you.
00:04:55.759 --> 00:04:57.439
They just have a better camera angle.
00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:02.959
And the people who truly have rich lives maintain a different relationship with the ordinary.
00:05:03.199 --> 00:05:06.480
The morning coffee is an event, briefly.
00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.079
The walk is a walk, not a podcast delivery mechanism.
00:05:10.319 --> 00:05:12.480
Dinner is attended, not just eaten.
00:05:12.639 --> 00:05:15.279
And none of this requires spare time or money.
00:05:15.439 --> 00:05:22.160
It just requires deciding that the moment you're in counts as your life, not just a corridor to it.
00:05:22.480 --> 00:05:30.560
So there's two practices, both small, that can help you start taking a different perspective of what ordinary can mean in the greater picture of life.
00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:33.040
The first is a construction practice.
00:05:33.199 --> 00:05:40.639
Pick one thing that you want to be true in five years and give it a daily foothold so small that it can become nearly automatic.
00:05:40.879 --> 00:05:43.199
20 minutes, 10, or even just five.
00:05:43.360 --> 00:05:50.480
If you can, attach it to something that already happens every day, like practicing gratitude just after a morning workout.
00:05:50.720 --> 00:05:55.680
The point isn't the daily output, which will look laughably minor, and that's the point.
00:05:55.920 --> 00:06:03.120
The point is that you've enrolled the ordinary days, all several thousands of them, into building something.
00:06:03.360 --> 00:06:07.360
That's the whole trick, the extraordinary moment mindset misses.
00:06:07.839 --> 00:06:10.319
The second is an attendance practice.
00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:18.720
Once a day, pick a stretch of ordinary time, a meal, a walk, the first 10 minutes after you get home, and attend it.
00:06:19.040 --> 00:06:23.360
No screens, no multitasking, no mental time travel.
00:06:23.600 --> 00:06:26.079
Just be at the thing that you're at.
00:06:26.319 --> 00:06:30.480
If you're washing dishes, notice the feel of the water and the clink of glass.
00:06:30.639 --> 00:06:34.079
If you're out walking, listen to the birds or the wind rush by you.
00:06:34.319 --> 00:06:40.879
Sure, it may sound trivial, but it's the difference between a day that happened to you and a day that you were present for.
00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:48.720
Multiply that difference by 30,000 and you get two very different lives built from almost identical circumstances.
00:06:49.040 --> 00:06:50.720
And here's the quiet payoff.
00:06:50.879 --> 00:06:57.279
When ordinary days carry both construction and attention, the pressure comes off of the extraordinary ones.
00:06:57.600 --> 00:07:01.279
Vacations stop having to redeem the year.
00:07:01.600 --> 00:07:05.439
Milestones stop having to justify everything that led to them.
00:07:05.600 --> 00:07:08.959
The highlights become what they always should have been.
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:12.720
Punctuation on a sentence that was already worth reading.
00:07:13.040 --> 00:07:17.600
Remember, in the end, your life will not be decided by its biggest days.
00:07:17.759 --> 00:07:26.240
It will be decided by its most repeated ones, which means that the day that matters the most, almost always, is today.
00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:55.120
From our annual VET Summit to online workshops and even in-person local events, we provide real training, real conversations, and practical insights you can use the same day.
00:07:55.279 --> 00:08:00.160
With a goal to get you the tools you need to find direction and meaning now.
00:08:00.800 --> 00:08:04.800
So if you don't know what you want or where you want to go, no worries.
00:08:04.959 --> 00:08:07.120
There's no cost, no pressure.
00:08:07.279 --> 00:08:09.519
Just support when you need it.
00:08:09.759 --> 00:08:15.519
So find your next event at recon.bet and join us for something new.
