If you had Aladdin’s Lamp for only a day…

Recently very close friends from North Carolina called to ask my wife and I to visit at their wonderful mountain home. Two newborn grandchildren have our family strictly distancing, even at times from each other. So, I had to temporarily decline. As I hung up, this verse from an old song popped into my mind:

If I had Aladdin’s lamp for only a day
I’d make a wish and here’s what I’d say
Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina
In the morning.

It stirred me to ask myself the question…one wish for one day…what would it be?

My answer came quickly. As much as I love these Carolina friends, my wish did not transport me to the charm of their mountain abode. Nor was it a favorite sea shore haunt or some special adventure. Instead it was a day with the 8 members of my immediate family, all together, unabashedly hugging each other, talking, laughing and playing.

I clearly pictured us frolicking and nurturing with the one-year old and six-week old grandsons in the kiddie pool…or on a picnic or across the dinner table. I teared up with joy at the thought of such simple close togetherness at gatherings, that prior to this year, would have been routine…but not the last 6 months.

A big part of my instant joy was recognizing these will be usual happenings in the relatively near future. My Aladdin’s lamp wish… the most important thing I wanted for a day, will again be an oft repeated, reoccurring part of my life. WOW!

It is a wonderful positive to recognize that my Aladdin wish is a goal I had previously achieved and a goal I will embrace again soon. I am still apprehensive and concerned, but I am cautiously optimistic about getting back to life’s positive routines. I observe most people moving forward as best they can, appreciating we are in this together, and that it won’t last forever. I’ve found our feisty resolve inspiring.

What about you? What would your one-day wish be?

You may not have had the need or been in a position to socially distance as tightly as my family. So the closeness and standard happenings with family and friends, your food, shelter and transportation comforts, a million conveniences at your fingertips, may not blow you away with awesomeness. But maybe they should.

After you choose and muse a bit on your one-day Aladdin wish, reflect too on the many ongoing wonderous wishes that come true for you everyday now, and others that will return to your wish fulfilled list relatively soon.

There are 40,000 different items in your local supermarket. There are over 35,000 products in a Home Depot and two million more available to you online. The ingredients and materials for these products and so many more are grown, mined, processed, manufactured, negotiated, financed, marketed, transported, tracked, displayed, and delivered to you through trillions of exchanges and by billions of people scattered across the globe every day.

Most of these necessities and conveniences can be delivered to your door the next day, or picked up the same day. You access these products and the most minute details of knowledge and life around the world through a device you hold in your hand.

How does that happen? It dwarfs the capabilities of Aladdin’s lamp. It’s a tribute to human initiative and the human spirit. If you live in a society and circumstances with such access then every day you have bestowed on you wishes that were unimaginable, even with a magic lamp, not that many generations ago.

As we move forward towards restoring and improving this wish fulfilled normal, how will you choose to gage your progress and that of the society you are part of? Let me suggest a counterintuitive way to measure our progress that can motivate and better our work and life happiness and success.

Measuring Backward

“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.” This is a quote from Dan Sullivan a noted strategic coach for executives and entrepreneurs. Dan found that many of his clients were perpetually dissatisfied with themselves no matter how great the success they had in their work or their life.

He found those clients were always accessing themselves against the ideal, which is more of an unmeasurable feeling and a constantly moving target. It is always on the horizon but never reached. Sullivan calls this mode The Gap, a negative place that can demoralize and disillusion you as it is never bridged.

Instead he encourages you to measure The Gain, how far you’ve come on your concrete measurable goals from where you started. When you do this you can see great progress. I find it leads to increased satisfaction, confidence and a greater sense of current well-being.

The ideal will still be there. It illuminates what future goals you should drive towards. But progress does not depend on the ideal, it depends on how far you’ve come from where you started. Measure that.

Measuring how far we’ve come instead of how we fall short of the ideal is important in assessing our cultures as well. Don’t measure yourself, others or your society by the continuously moving ideal, but by how far you and we have come.

No matter your setbacks or the size of our current challenge take time to appreciate where and how you’ve moved forward and how you and your fellow travelers have measurably progressed on this miraculous human journey.  Doing so lights up the future with hope and motivates us to pursue specific objectives that enhance it even more.

I wish for you days filled with the appreciation of normal wonders and how far you’ve come and we’ve all come together. I look forward with you to unapprehensive hugs with those we are close to as well as creating meaningful progress, from our starting points, on concrete goals to make our work and life even better.