The Importance of an Ordinary Day |
We chase success as outcomes but overlook how we actually spend our days.
Flourishing comes from aligning daily actions with values, not achievements.
When students, or professionals, sit down across from me for what I call a “Flourishing Chat,” which is a mix between life, professional, and health coaching, they rarely begin with a crisis. More often they say something like, “I know what I want to do… I just don’t feel that great about it.”
They describe futures that sound impressive: consulting, medicine, law, leadership roles at major companies. The plans are polished. The résumés are strong. From the outside, everything looks ready to go.
Then I ask a different question: “What would your ordinary Tuesday look like at this job?” I don’t want to know about the title on their business cards or their starting salary. I want them to tell me what time they’ll wake up, who they will spend their days with, what kinds of problems they will solve, what their evenings feel like when they come home tired.
At this point in the conversation, every time, students, and sometimes even professionals, can’t answer my questions. The conversation turns into silence. They have thought about what role they want, but they haven’t yet thought about what the role entails – or how it fits with the activities they like to do and the people they care about.
We are taught early to think of success as a possession. We accumulate credentials, milestones, promotions, and recognition. We pursue outcomes that can be measured and displayed. Yet even if we mark our life journey with milestones, most of our time travelling will be in the everyday steps we take along our way.
How we travel will not only determine which path we take, it will also determine which milestones are worth marking.
The philosopher Aristotle distinguished between external goods – wealth, status, honor – and what he called eudaimonia, which is what today we call flourishing or living a good life rooted in activity rather than possession. Flourishing isn’t something you own; it’s something you do – consistently and as a way that speaks to your gifts and identity. It is a way of living that aligns one’s actions with one’s character and in accord with their values.
When I talk about this type of flourishing, most people agree that it sounds nice in theory. Yet when it comes to making personal and professional decisions about their lives, they often revert to their old habits of choosing the path that looks most successful from the outside rather than one they can get excited about actually living day to day.
I see this tension regularly with students who feel pulled toward careers they are not sure they will enjoy, but I also see it with professionals at almost every stage of their career. Ambition is framed as climbing a ladder rather than finding better ways to act on one’s values so that you can have greater impact on oneself and others. Success is an external metric rather than an internal measure of alignment.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. Our culture reinforces the idea that success happens at the finish line. Social media compresses lives into highlight reels: the graduation photo, the new job announcement, the promotion. We see the trophies, not the ordinary weekday mornings that make up a life.
Life Is Mostly Weekdays
I learned this lesson myself early in my career. Like many ambitious young professionals, I believed that hard work meant sacrificing the present so that future happiness could eventually arrive. Like the lesson of the famous “marshmallow test,” I thought it demonstrated the capacity to achieve success: A noble ability to endure now so I can enjoy later.
While endurance is an important ability – and it is important to put in the time to become great at what we do – it is equally important to consider what we are enduring for. Is it to achieve for the sake of achievement, or is it to be able to successfully accomplish the things we truly care about doing?
Psychologists sometimes talk about the “arrival fallacy,” which is the belief that reaching a certain goal will bring lasting fulfillment. The problem is that achieving these goals rarely transforms daily life in the ways we expect. We adapt quickly. We keep running on that “hedonic treadmill.” New pressures replace old ones. The future we imagined becomes simply the new normal.
Meanwhile, the real question remains unanswered: Do I actually like how I spend my days?
This is why, in these flourishing chats, I push my conversation partners toward the details – towards painting as complete a picture as they can. Not because I want to discourage ambition, but because ambition is healthier when it is grounded in reality and in self-reflection.
“What are you doing from nine to five?”“Who are you talking to?”“What parts of the work energize you and what parts drain you?”
These questions shift the frame. They ask us to stop seeing success as something you possess and to start seeing it as something you practice. They ask us to pay attention to the details of how we live our days.
This perspective doesn’t make decisions easier. In fact, it can make them harder, because we now have to think beyond external validation and ask ourselves what actually sustains us. We must be honest about tradeoffs we are willing to make and have the courage to choose paths that may not look impressive from other people’s vantage points.
Yet, taking this view of success also offers something liberating, because now our everyday isn’t a means to a few momentary milestones. Life is embraced through the ordinary days we spend living it.
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