The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today: Today’s QOTD is some words of inspiration from H. Jackson Brown Jr. Life is busy and we are caught up in the daily stress of how life is going on, the future planning and the demands of the day. No matter how busy our life is – there is still a small element in us asking to take control and seize the day.

Unfortunately we give the most common reason that we are too busy to think about what’s important. What if we were able to forgo that reason for just once and look at our days more strategically. The strategy asks us to focus on our dreams, passions and decide what’s most important to us.

Sure, there are urgent things that demand our attention on a daily basis. They always take over what’s more important just as the Eisenhower Matrix prescribes. This quote talks demands our attention to today and focus on what we can do today towards what’s most important to us. That is, no more excuses of being busy or having other things to do. This is too important to ignore, procrastinate or let it die. We have done it for too long.

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today

Well, now that we have made it clear that our priorities cannot be compromised, we need to ask – what we can do today to help our tomorrow. Tomorrow is a fine notion, but it is unclear and hence easy to procrastinate. The moment we think of tomorrow as the future, it creates a lack of urgency to do something about it. But if we focus on what we can do today, life changes immediately because we are in the moment and wanting to do something about it.

The vision of tomorrow or a dream is something that inspires us. But a dream needs momentum and that momentum can be given by what we do today. H. Jackson Brown Jr. calls it the preparation for tomorrow. For the sake of our focus, let’s call it the necessary step for what we need tomorrow. Tomorrow keeps fleeting and creates a distant image for us. But the fallacy of tomorrow is that it allows us to postpone things and not do anything at all.

Doing your best today

Now, this is the core and crux of this QOTD – it is asking you to do something today without any excuses or explanations. This doesn’t allow you time for justifications either. We can always use the reason that we are busy. But that translates to saying that the vision of tomorrow isn’t as important or you’re not too serious about this desire for the vision of tomorrow.

Our tomorrow depends on what we do today – our actions create our results. This has always been the truth. Nothing ever comes out of wishful thinking – it just creates a notion that we are doing something or working hard. But the proof is in us doing something today and that usually entails bringing our best to the table. If we do our best today, it at least creates a fighting chance for tomorrow. Hence the term – The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.

First we create our habits and then our habits create us

Ultimately, all success is about creating a momentum for us to follow and developing those habits. Once these actions or preparatory steps become a habit, then the rest becomes easy without having to make an effort exclusively. The best way of doing something is to do it without even realising that we are putting an effort.

A habit has the power of creating unconscious exercises that will create their own momentum. Before we know, we are doing less work and more actively engaged in the flow of the day which is where we’d love to be. Ultimately it is our habits that create our present and future.

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today
– H. Jackson Brown Jr.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Jackson_Brown_Jr.