It’s great to dream big. It’s great to have audacious goals and aim high. To an extent, it’s great to expect great things of yourself.
But it’s also important that when you measure you performance, you measure against the right yardstick. That is, don’t measure yourself against your most audacious, bold hopes and dreams. Don’t hold yourself up to expectations that you wouldn’t feel right holding up others to in your same situation.
The great thing about Level 1 of The Today System—that is, the Today Card—is that it provides a way tor train yourself to do just that. You get to choose each day how much you expect of yourself. And based on how much you end up doing, you get a number that shows you a vital piece of information that can be interpreted in 2 ways.
The first way to interpret your score is as a measure of how well you followed through—how much you put in the necessary work. A consistently low score each day could point to a lack of effort, focus, or efficiency in your daily approach. But that’s not the only way to look at it.
The other way to interpret your score is as a measure of how realistic your expectations of yourself are. A low score might be telling you that you’re expecting way too much of yourself—and that you need to dial it back for a bit. There could be many reasons for that, and in a sense, the reasons aren’t important. What’s important is that you scale back to allow for whatever is getting in the way of matching your expectations to reality.
