Choices: The Good, the Bad, and the Tragic.
What is the first thing you did when you woke up this morning?
I want you to pause, take a moment, and answer that question for yourself now before reading on.
Your answer may have been any number of things; drank a glass of water, went to the bathroom, hugged your partner, or pet, scrolled on your phone, went for a walk.
But what you actually did before any of those things, the very first thing you did, was make a choice.
You could have chosen to turn over and go back to sleep, choosing to spend the whole day in bed. You could have chosen to leap from the sheets and immediately do 100 burpees.
The point is that every day begins not with what you do, but what you choose. Our actions are always preceded by the first principle of choice.
People are what they do, not what they say. There is great truth in this.
But before an action comes a choice.
Fundamentally, the start of every day begins with a choice.
It is our choices that define us.
For me, choices come in three basic forms: Good, Bad and Tragic.
Let me begin by defining the first two:
The Good: a choice that takes you closer to where you want to go, no matter how small or big that move might be
The Bad: a choices that moves you away from where you want to go, no matter the magnitude
The reality of life is that we will all make both good and bad choices.
Life is not about trying to eliminate every single bad choice, and only make good ones.
We’re human. We’re fundamentally flawed, and that is ok. Our inherent flaws lead to occasional bad choices, and they give us room to grow and improve.
A life that feels as though it is progressing is one that is trying to tilt the balance in favour of good choices over bad, over time. It is a long term play.
But the definition of Good vs Bad choices is built around a unifying principle: knowing where you want to go.
If we don’t know where we want to go, we are left with the third category of choice, and in my opinion the most damaging.
A tragic choice is one in which we abdicate our power to choose.
Good choices allow us to identify progress within.
Bad choices allow us to identify room to grow into.
But choosing not to choose is the most tragic choice because it denies us room to grow.
A lot of things in our world today attempt to attack our power to choose:
Polarised 24-hour news media coverage that would rather you adopt a predetermined stance or opinion on a topic, than reason one through for yourself
The technology in our devices overwhelms the chemicals in our brain in constant attempts to keep you scrolling for longer that you want to, often at the expense of relationships and other goals
Peer pressure from family, cultural groups or society’s expectations that would rather you went with the flow, than carved your own path
We spend a large portion of our lives debating Good vs Bad when it comes to choice, perhaps passing judgement on ourselves or others as a result.
But in the modern era, the biggest threat to our sense of who we are is not about good vs bad. Good vs bad is rooted in having a sense of where we are trying to get to.
As our lives have gotten more comfortable, we have unwittingly given rise to the threat of the Tragic.
The threat of the tragic resides within not knowing where we want to go.
Disney’s Story Arc
Disney have become synonymous with story-telling the world over. The make great stories that bond us together.
The above chart is the plot of virtually every Disney story ever told; it is tried and tested. The fuel that drives their story-telling engine is a heady mix of good and bad choices. Good and bad choices are what drive life. They allow the protagonist of a story to stumble and rise on their quest to get where they want to be.
Disney don’t make stories about tragic choices. Because there is no story to be told within them.
Tragic choices don’t create arcs of triumphs and challenges; they simply float away. Like a plastic bag in a breeze. Tragic choices unfold because there’s no embedded sense of where the protagonist is trying to get to.
Our choices define us. The Good, The Bad, and the Tragic.
The more we can live through and grow within the first two, and limit the third, the more our life’s arc can take shape.
And that is the point; to allow the arc of our life’s story to unfold, to rise and fall, and rise again, but never to drift away.
The only way to limit the Tragic in our life, is to be clear about where we want to go. To Choose our own Meaning.
Deciding where we want to go is, therefore, possibly the greatest choice you will ever need to make.
E.E. Cummings, one of the 20th century’s most notorious poets, put it like this:
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
- E.E. Cummings
Choosing your own meaning is a lifelong endeavour and pursuit. To learn more about what it entails, you can read The Grey Life Building Blocks here.
But when everything begins with choice, here’s how you can choose to bring more meaning into every day, starting today.
Getting Practical: what you can do today to tackle Good, Bad and Tragic Choices
Actively thinking about the Good, the Bad, and the Tragic more often is one of the most effective ways to alter the balance of choices in your life.
Here are two journalling or thoughtful prompts you might want to consider starting and ending your day with, and simply by doing so, put yourself in a position to start limiting the Tragic:
What choices can / did I make today that bring / brought me closer to where I want to go?
What choices might I currently be avoiding?