Just Get to Baseline

If you're not careful, you can go years frustrated that you aren't any better.

As a college student I felt bad for not waking up early enough. I wanted to be that guy who got up early every day—seven days a week. I knew someone who would do Bible studies at a nearby McDonald’s early in the morning. I got invited—which made me feel awesome—but, man, those mornings sucked. If you no-showed, there was a chance you’d receive a slight rebuke.

“Hey, you said you would do this but you weren’t here last week.”

Photo by mostafa mahmoudi on Unsplash

I’d find myself as a 21-year-old college senior doing math on the ideal time to get up based on what I thought success looked like.

“I think 6AM works. Which means I need to go to bed at 10PM for the eight hours I’m told I need. Wait, I need to BE asleep by 10PM. So I probably need to get in bed by 9PM to give myself a shot.”

Basically never happened.

I did have some wins, though. For my second and third years of college, I was an RA at the now-defunct Kirby Smith Hall. I had mandatory front desk hours. I picked the 5-8AM shift three days a week so I could get some alone time before the overachievers started going to their 7:30AM classes. One year I had a terrible 4-7AM shift instead and I still haven’t recovered. No one should be up at 4AM.

But every time I’d get up later than I wanted, I’d get mad for not being disciplined enough.

Overzealous and Ambitious

This type of feeling plays on repeat for many. People will pick an area they feel defunct and spend the next six months feeling bad about not being able to live out their fever dream ideal. The problem with their ideal is that Superman couldn’t do it.

“I want to get up at 5am every day of the week, regardless of how I feel or what the prior day had, so that I can get a head start on the day. I will read, pray, go to the gym, have my protein shake, make the kids’ lunches, and then head to work. While I commute I will listen to the most recent industry podcast so I can stay relevant.”

“I need to eat healthier so I will never go to a restaurant ever again and only have celery as my snack.”

“I need to be more wide-read so I will read a book a week.”

By the end of thirty days, none of these habits are being kept consistently and we are right back where we started. We’re frustrated by what we aren’t getting done and mad at ourselves for failing.

If you had to choose between healthy and unhealthy, I hope you’d choose healthy. If you were an early riser or a late riser, I think it’d be better if you were an early riser. Reading or not reading? Pick reading if you have the capacity. But no one is demanding (other than you) that these changes take place.

Our problem occurs when a vision of what “better” looks like becomes an unachievable rule by which we measure ourselves.

Giants I Can’t Match

The biggest thief of establishing a baseline? Comparison. We look at someone we love and think, “That’s what I want,” so we try and start doing that. But we might not realize that there’s a whole web of commitments that builds the type of person we’d want to be.

I remember sitting—again, as a college student—in a group I was invited into for a year and a half. The leader was smart and put the meeting at night and not early at McDonald’s (thank you for being sane). He said, and I can still hear his voice, that he would get up “at 5:00 or a quarter of 5:00” depending on the day. I think we were sitting at a Chili’s when he said that.

It’s been about 23 years since I thought, “That’d be nice,” and I still don’t do it. But how cool would it be if I did, right?

“But arbitrarily making contracts with ourselves and others just feels right” is how my friend Mike would put it. And it’s true. We create a gigantic, inflated world of expectations that we won’t meet to try and be like people we aren’t. Every day we have to be firing on all cylinders to give our vision of “ideal” a fighting chance.

It doesn’t work.

Getting to Baseline

I’ve started using the phrase “Let’s get to baseline” or “Let’s establish the floor here” when I talk with people in this purgatorial frustration. Every day has its own troubles, so I want them to think about the types of structures (or even principles) that someone could execute every day regardless of what the day throws at them. What could you pull off on your worst day and your best day?

But how do you do it? Here’s a simple approach.

• What are you trying to address?

• What do you know you can accomplish every day in that area?

• Try to add a qualitative ten percent to it.

• Do that for at least several months, if not an entire year. (I’m not kidding.)

• Evaluate and add when you’re done.

Fitness is a common one. Here’s one I started last year with steps. I wasn’t active enough. So I did 7,000 steps a day for Q1, 8,000 for Q2, 9,000 for Q3 and 10,000 for Q4. But I didn’t need to do that forever. I’m at 8,500 a day for this year. I’ve missed it twice. But two misses out of ~530 days is okay by me.

You might go, “I can’t do that.”

Okay, what can you do? 2,000? Then do that. Baseline is baseline.

Want to pray more? Set a floor of dedicated time. Five minutes. Start with five minutes.

“But five is so few minutes. I should pray more than that.”

“Okay. Do thirty.”

“Maybe five is okay.”

It’s not magic. The work is in establishing the baseline and then not backing off. Over time (years), the foundation gets stronger and more can be added. But you don’t need my structure and I don’t need yours. You need to get to baseline.

Pick a sphere: What’s your baseline? Or what should it be? Let me know below.

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