The Three Days We All Live

And The One We Should Live

This article is a special guest post from the one and only

Mack Collier

— marketing maven, writer, and someone I’m lucky to call a friend.

Mack recently reminded me that we’ve officially hit the one-year mark of knowing each other, and in honor of that milestone and our friendship, we’re writing for each other across our publications. Mack will share my article on June 26th.

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The Yesterday I Don’t Remember

This faded Polaroid is from my third birthday party. I’m in the middle.

I don’t remember any of the people in this photo, including myself! My mom tells me the blonde-haired boy on my right was named Chris Brown and he was my best friend. She doesn’t remember the name of the girl with us, but she’s a cutie!

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and lived their for the first 4 years of my life. I don’t remember a single minute of my life there. My first memory is when I was 4 years old and my family had just moved away from Birmingham. I remember the morning after we moved into our new house.

Memories are funny things. For years, I remembered that first morning after we moved. When I was a kid, I would get a dollar a week allowance. I would always save up my allowance until I could afford to buy a Mego ‘action figure’. We drove into town and stopped at a TG&Y before heading to our new house. I bought a Robin action figure (It was a doll, but boys can’t call them ‘dolls’), and that’s what I had with me the next (Sunday) morning, for the first memory I remember.

That was when I was 6 years old, and it was in 1977. Only it wasn’t. I recently mentioned that memory to my mom, told her I remember getting up early the morning after we arrived, and that I was 6.

That’s when my mother informed me that we hadn’t moved when I was 6, we moved when I was 4. So this memory was from 1975, not 1977 as I had ‘remembered’ for over 40 years.

I think one of our favorite games to play is the ‘what if’ game. What if we had done this instead of that, how would our life had changed? Another favorite is the ‘remember when?’ game. Remember when we did this or did that?

These games can be fun to play, as long as they don’t lead us to becoming so attached to our past that we miss living our present. I look at that faded Polaroid and it represents a life I don’t remember with people I don’t remember in a place that I don’t remember living. I wonder sometimes about that life I don’t remember, and what it might have become.

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The Tomorrow I Always Plan For

I’m always planning for tomorrow. How I can live tomorrow better than I lived yesterday or today. Sometimes, the practice of putting that plan together for what tomorrow could look like is very exciting. Other times, it’s very daunting.

I think for many of us, we look at yesterday either with a sense of regret, or a sense of longing. We either regret choices made in the past, and wish we could have made different choices, or we long to return back to the ‘glory days’ when we feel things were better than they are now.

This shapes how we plan for tomorrow. Either we want to use tomorrow to ‘right’ the mistakes we feel we made in the past, or we want to use tomorrow to hope for a better life. A chance to move forward and reach our true potential.

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The Comparison Trap and How We Sabotage the Most Important Day

Today seems to usually get lost in the shuffle, an afterthought. Today is either when we deal with yesterday’s regret, or when we hope for a better tomorrow.

But somehow, we don’t seem to see the true value of Today. The true value of living in the moment.

Neela recently wrote about falling into the comparison trap. We are far too willing to compare how others are doing to ourselves. It’s as if we don’t feel we have found true ‘happiness’ or true ‘success’, so we let others define for us what that must look like.

Then we begin to compare. And we begin to tell ourselves that we don’t measure up.

That we fall short.

Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why can’t we allow ourselves space and grace to discover happiness and success on our own terms? Why do we need to compare ourselves to someone else?

You could make a solid case for Nick Saban and Kobe Bryant both being among the very best at their profession. The most successful.

Saban and Bryant both had one character trait that defined them. Both were razor-focused on performing in the moment. Both played and coached and taught that what happened yesterday or what could happen tomorrow didn’t matter. Focus on what is happening RIGHT NOW.

Check out this video of Saban coaching. Alabama is on defense, up by 52 points with 8 seconds left.

The offense made a substitution, and that substitution meant that Alabama’s defense now was in the wrong formation. Alabama’s defensive players didn’t recognize this. Saban and his staff yell, then scream at the players on the field to try to get their attention and correct their mistake. They never did, so Saban called a timeout and berated the defense as they came off the field for not paying attention. “Damn, man! You guys got no poise!”

It would be easy to look at this and claim Saban is overreacting. His team was up by 52 points with 8 seconds left. They had won the game.

Saban was trying to teach his players to focus on the moment. What will happen later (we win) does. Not. Matter. The scoreboard is irrelevant.

His message is simple: If you focus on today and this moment, and accomplish what you are capable of accomplishing today, then tomorrow takes care of itself. The habits we build today can actually change tomorrow’s outcomes.

I’ve seen interviews where Kobe would say that his coach Phil Jackson stressed the importance of playing ‘in the moment’. He said if you go back and watch the moments with the Bulls in the 1990s or the Lakers in the 2000s, when the game was on the line, they almost always won. Because, as Bryant explained, they didn’t let the pressure of the game and what COULD happen (tomorrow) worry them. They focused on what they could control and that only. Which was the present moment in time.

Without realizing it, I think many of us (myself included), sabotage our best chance for success and instead tempt failure. We spend today either focused on what went wrong yesterday, or we hope for a better life tomorrow.

While missing that true growth and happiness is defined by how we live today.

In the moment.

“Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” - Matthew 6:34

I cannot change what happened yesterday, or alter what may happen tomorrow. But I can decide what I do today. Today I have control, and that’s where I choose to live.

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Thank you so much for reading!

Mack Collier

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