Focus progressing in your own life according to your own ideals.
Make genuine progress in life
“Genuine progress”:
Making progress on something which is personally meaningful to you. You judge your own actions and your own progress.
Genuine growth
Becoming stronger in the domain you desire to get stronger in.
What is “genuine”?
Too often we track our progress in life according to value-measure-metrics of society. We judge our worthiness based on metrics of money, social status, or “productivity” (in the vulgar email-efficiency ‘inbox zero’ mentality).
I believe in life we should only ever measure and track ourselves according to our own personal measures of success. This may be a quantitative thing we track (numerical metrics), or perhaps it can be a more qualitative thing we can track by following our own gut and judging ourselves of our own progress.
What is genuine to you won’t apply to others, nor should it. To be “genuine” means to be ‘genus’ (specific to only you).
How do I know whether I’m making genuine progress or not?
To me it is simple —
Do you feel more powerful today than you did yesterday?
I like the idea of treating every day like a mini lifetime. I don’t like to track or measure my personal growth over weeks, months, or years. I like the “day-over-day” mentality, as I also have a poor memory.
To me, to see “progress” is to see an increased quantum of strength, focus, or creative productivity from yesterday to today. For myself, if I can judge my own profess as 3-5% more everyday, that is awesome and great.
What I strive to progress in
- Physical strength
- Mental focus
- Bodily and mental vigor and energy
- Invention of new ideas
- Writing (blogging) output
- Photographic output (making more images)
It is difficult to judge “quality”, so I generally just follow my own gut, my own intuition, and my own self-judgement of myself. I don’t ask others, because I’m not trying to impress them — I’m striving to only impress myself. And the more I impress myself, the more I inevitably end up impressing others.
Stay genuine, stay grounded, and stay you — there isn’t anyone else for you to emulate but you.
ERIC