The 365 Commitment

Guy Reams

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Self-Improvement
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The 365 Commitment Podcast focuses on helping people make and keep life changing commitments.

1h ago

Day 336 - Your Presenteeism is Not Useful

The question is not: "Can I force myself to work today?" The better question is: "Will working today increase or decrease my total usefulness this week?" Many of us believe that by showing up and being present, we are at least doing something. I at least showed up is the prevailing thought in our minds. We practice presenteeism. We keep working while sick, depleted, sleep-deprived, or otherwise functioning well below capacity. Unlike absenteeism, you are technically working, but your output per hour can be dramatically lower, mistakes increase, and recovery may take longer. We don't do the math correctly here. We think we do, but in reality we make the effort-recovery model worse by forcing ourselves to work when we're performing suboptimally. The funny thing is that we instinctively know this; we just choose to ignore it because we somehow believe being present is automatically better than being absent. The science behind recovery, in things like muscle development, is conclusive. The basic idea is that exertion creates physiological and psychological load, and recovery returns you toward baseline. If you keep applying effort without adequate recovery, the load accumulates. In that situation, five days at 40% capacity can sometimes be worse than taking a day or two largely off and then returning at 90–100%. When you show up and perform sub-optimally, you create recovery debt. You think you are helping, but in reality you are extending recovery time. The cycle is: work while depleted → accomplish less → recover more slowly → remain depleted → continue working inefficiently. We are all guilty of this, and we've created a vicious cycle where you feel like you've worked all week but have surprisingly little to show for it. The core principle to remember is: Rest can be an investment in future productive capacity rather than the absence of productivity. However, do keep in mind. Rest isn't watching Netflix all day while eating ice cream. If that is your solution, then just go ahead and muddle through the workday because you are NOT recovering. Lie to yourself all that you want, but this is simply not rest. Often the fastest recovery is deliberate recovery: sleep, food, hydration, sunlight, walking, low cognitive demand, reduced obligations, and genuinely disconnecting from work. So, maybe it's less about pushing through every single moment and more about finding that sweet spot where you're actually building yourself up, not just wearing yourself down. It's like, instead of just trying to fill every minute with "doing," we could try to be a bit more intentional about how we recharge. Think of it as giving yourself the best chance to show up as your best self, not just showing up.
1d ago

Day 335 - A Life is a Story, Not a Snapshot

There is great danger in judging the value of a life from its present condition. A human life is a long trajectory, but we tend to encounter people as snapshots. We see who they are now and unconsciously let that moment rewrite everything that came before it. When I was in high school, my aunt and I drove around downtown, taking pictures of random people. I was trying to get on the yearbook staff as a photographer. The only people around that afternoon were the homeless. I came across one of the photos I took of one of these men, with a bright smile and a jovial expression. I remember the moment; the man looked passive and distant as he stared out at the street, invisible to everyone who passed by. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a young kid and his aunt came rushing in and asked to take his picture. He asked what for, and I explained to him that I needed to submit a bunch of pictures to an advisor to go along with my application to be a staff photographer. He said something to the effect, "Well, in that case, we'd better make this look good." So he smiled, and I took his picture. I did get on the yearbook staff, and ended up taking most of the photos that show up in our high school yearbook. Unfortunately, I got into some trouble late in the year, and they removed my name from any attribution. So the few months of my emerging career as a photographer came to a quick end. What did I do wrong, you might ask? I sold yearbook advertising to an organization that wasn't exactly a great look for the school. A story for another day. Anyway, at that moment in time, I viewed that man as a homeless person. His entire lifetime of experiences had been reduced to my momentary view of him. I have no idea what he did after that, or what he did before that, but in my mind he was just another homeless person. All too often we let the present condition become the identity for others and often ourselves. We are all this homeless person at least one point in our lives. We all have a bad day, a bad moment, a time when we are at our lowest point. If someone took our picture at that moment, we would be forever captured and judged by that snapshot. However, our value is not a snapshot, and we intrinsically know this. The stories of Jesus healing the stranger, talking to the woman at the well, or feeling his virtue leave him by the touch of a stranger all resonate with us because we all desperately cling to the idea that all of our contributions over time must mean more than their present value. It gives us hope that the life we have lived has accumulated value and that the worth of our soul is indeed great. The modern way of thinking that human worth must continuously justify itself through current productivity. That standard becomes particularly cruel because nearly everyone eventually loses under it. Strength fades. Cognitive ability can decline. Careers end. Circumstances change. Eventually, most of us will need more from other people than we are presently capable of giving them. Someone's worth should not depend entirely upon whether their lifetime ledger happens to show a positive balance. But recognizing the difference between a lifetime and a snapshot is an important place to begin.
2d ago

Day 334 - A Lucky Day

I stood in line at a pharmacy today, waiting to check out. The self-checkout machines were down again, and the CVS pharmacy attendant was the only one working in the building. The poor woman had 1 person asking for the restroom code, 2 people frustrated because the red light was blinking above their checkout machine, several people asking for access to a locked-down product, and 10 people, including me, waiting patiently in line to check out. Although this is not the point of this article, if you ever want to know the state of affairs in your community, the impact of cost-cutting measures in large corporations, and the degree to which petty crimes are impacting your neighborhood, then look no further than your neighborhood CVS. The fact that this place remains open is nothing short of a miracle. Needless to say, I had some time to myself while I waited in line. Nancy was absolutely earning her $20 bucks an hour this morning. She made one of the patrons realize that the order he was having trouble placing was worth more than she would make all day. I think she should be excused for her indiscretion; she at least showed up to work this morning. While standing in line, I was eye level with a large cooler reserved for energy drinks. Most of them had been purchased, or perhaps stolen. The young man in front of me had some rather bulging pockets, and I was suspicious. Anyone, one of the remaining energy drinks was the brand Lucky. On the back of the can is a message about the founders' narrow escape from a plane crash in 1985, just outside the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airfield (Delta Flight 191). I have never read this story before, but I had a minute to scan the QR code and read how Richard Laver decided to name the company after a bracelet his son gave him that said, "Lucky F&ck!" Apparently, Richard had not only been one of the few survivors of this plane crash, but his daughter had also barely survived being born with cerebral palsy. I thought about this experience and started asking myself: can or should an event like this define you? I suppose if you were a survivor, the answer would be an absolute yes, but if you were not, maybe not so much. A few things about this plane crash that interested me. First, I was about the same age as Richard at the time. I believe I was getting ready to start high school, and there was discussion of me traveling back and forth from Colorado to California. I remember the discussion of this plane crash, and although I cannot say this is exactly why, I ended up taking the bus instead of flying. I was reminded of this recently when a plane I was supposed to board in Texas was grounded because of a thunderstorm. When I asked, they said it was because of concerns about microbursts, which apparently became a primary concern after this particular plane crash. As I read the back of this energy soda, I was reminded that this event sparked much more than a great story of one founder's journey. My parents had bought me a personal computer later that year. I didn't realize then how significant a purchase it was, but it was. A lot had happened that year that would impact my entire career. In 1985, Well Online would start. This San Francisco-based user group would gain rapid popularity. I joined the group in 1987, and by then, it had already become famous for many "first on the Internet" claims. Ironically, and tragically, one of the creators of the original IBM PC was on this fateful plane when it crashed. He, his wife, and several other IBM employees died during that accident. That was Philip Estridge, and that same year, also in the Dallas area, a young man named Michael Dell started selling and assembling his "Turbo PC" out of his dorm room at the University of Texas. To cap off what a pivotal year this was, the National Science Foundation used TCP/IP to launch the first major connection between several Universities and called it the NSFNET. Have you ever been talking to people about where to sit on a plane and they tell you to sit in the tail because it is safer? Not sure if that is true or not, but the reason they say this is because several of the 27 survivors of this particular plane crash were in the tail part of the plane when it broke apart in the failed landing. I am pretty sure that's where the story comes from, because it was such a big deal in the news at the time. You could call Richard lucky, because I do not believe his father and he were seated in the tail section of the plane. He survived, but with several significant injuries. Sadly, his father did not make it. After that incident, there were no other major fatal airline crashes involving a commercial passenger plane for 16 years. Flight 3407 in 2009, and the next was that accident last year, when Flight 5342 collided with a Black Hawk helicopter out of Washington National. If we exclude acts of terrorism and what the NTSB calls Part 121 accidents, then Richard Laver survived at the beginning of a massive transformation in airline safety. So I have to conclude that an event can be transformative in our lives. A lucky day can impact many lives at once and create a ripple effect that begins with one person. Will this moment, reading a story on the back of a can while waiting for Nancy to get through her line this morning, change me? Perhaps it will. Perhaps today will be my lucky day.
3d ago

Day 333 - Charlotte's Window

My garage is currently winning. Not decisively. There has been no surrender ceremony, and I still technically control the territory, but it has established a strong defensive position. Every time I think about cleaning it, I immediately see everything that needs to be done at once: shelves that need reorganizing, tools that need homes, a collection of wasp nests that apparently believe they have permanent leases, and a broken e-scooter that has been sitting there long enough that I am beginning to suspect it is no longer a repair project and is simply part of the garage. A black widow has also established permanent residence in one of the windows. She has been there long enough that removing her now somehow feels less like pest control and more like eviction. I am seriously considering putting a small sign above the window that reads Charlotte and allowing the arrangement to become official. Then there are the spiderwebs in every location that is just barely out of reach, which I assume is intentional, and the vast assortment of things that belong to the most dangerous category of garage possessions: I Should Probably Keep That. This category includes old bolts, pieces of wire, half-used cans of something, questionable scraps of lumber, mysterious brackets, and at least one object I cannot identify but am absolutely certain I will need approximately three days after throwing it away. So I will occasionally walk into the garage with the sincere intention of doing something about all of this, look around for a moment, absorb the full scope of the problem, and quietly return to the house. I have realized that this is the real problem. When I tell myself that I need to clean the garage, my brain does not interpret that as a series of small jobs. It tries to contemplate the entire project at once. Every shelf, every box, every decision about what to keep, every trip to the dump, every tool that needs a better home, the eventual resurrection of the e-scooter, and apparently a future negotiation with Charlotte over property rights all arrive in my head at the same time. No wonder I do not want to start. What I have been calling a lack of motivation is probably something closer to task paralysis. The project has become so large in my mind that simply thinking about it produces enough resistance to keep me from beginning. So I have changed the assignment. I am no longer cleaning the garage. I am cleaning one shelf. Maybe I fill one trash bag. Maybe I put ten tools where they belong. Maybe I spend fifteen minutes dealing with a single pile and then walk away. Whatever I choose, the job has to be small enough that my brain cannot reasonably argue that it is overwhelming. This feels almost embarrassingly insignificant compared with the scale of the garage, but that is exactly the point. I do not need enough motivation to launch a heroic weekend campaign against several years of accumulated disorder. I only need enough motivation to begin something small. And, predictably, once I begin, the garage becomes much less intimidating. One shelf leads to another. Ten pieces of trash become twenty. I notice something nearby that can be fixed in five minutes, and somewhere along the way momentum starts replacing dread. Usually this continues until my wife appears at the door wondering why I have not come in for supper yet. So the garage survives another day. But it has lost a shelf. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will take another one. Charlotte, however, appears to have tenure.
4d ago

Day 332 - We Need to Talk More

I came across an interesting study that demonstrates that, within a population of people being tracked, they are speaking less and less each year. The study by Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026) found that the population of people under the age of 25 was, in fact, having fewer conversations throughout the day. This trend seems to be consistent over time. There are several reasons this matters. First, conversation helps us think. Human thought is remarkably dependent on language. When you try to explain something to another person, vague intuitions have to become sentences. Contradictions become visible. Assumptions that felt obvious suddenly need justification. This is why saying, "Let me talk this through," genuinely works. The other person is partly functioning as an external cognitive system. Second, conversation calibrates reality. Alone, you can construct an internally coherent interpretation of almost anything. Other people introduce friction. They say, "I don't think that's what happened," "Have you considered this?" or simply look confused. Conversation continuously tests our private models against other human beings' models. In that sense, it is one of our most important defenses against self-deception. Third, conversation regulates emotion. Humans are deeply social mammals. Describing something frightening, painful, exciting, or confusing to another person often changes the experience itself. The event has not changed, but the brain is no longer processing it entirely alone. Another person's attention, facial expressions, tone, questions, and reassurance can help regulate stress and uncertainty. Fourth, conversation creates relationships. Relationships are not maintained merely by exchanging useful information. Much human conversation is apparently "unnecessary": jokes, stories, gossip, observations about the weather, remembering something that happened twenty years ago. Yet these exchanges continually communicate something more fundamental: "I see you. You see me. We still belong to one another." That may be much of the actual purpose of everyday conversation. Fifth, conversation creates identity. We partly discover who we are by explaining ourselves. Someone asks what you believe, what happened, why you made a decision, what you want next. In answering, you construct a narrative about yourself. Other people then accept, challenge, modify, or reinforce that narrative. The self is therefore not entirely something sitting privately inside the skull. Some portion of it is constructed socially. And finally, conversation is how human intelligence became collective intelligence. One human brain is impressive. Thousands of brains capable of exchanging ideas are qualitatively different. Language allows knowledge to survive the individual. Conversation allows ideas to be corrected and recombined. Writing extends that conversation across centuries. Civilization itself is largely accumulated conversation. This makes me think there is an interesting danger in the modern world. We have become extraordinarily good at receiving language without participating in conversation. Podcasts, videos, social media, television, articles, and now AI can fill virtually every silent moment with words. But consuming language is not the same thing as talking with another human being. Conversation requires you to formulate your own thoughts, notice another person's reactions, tolerate disagreement, repair misunderstandings, wait your turn, read emotion, change your mind, and expose some portion of your internal world to another person. Those may not be incidental features of conversation. They may be what conversation is for. Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026). Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 21(4), 447-449. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261425131.
5d ago

Day 331 - Are You in Control?

If there was not enough evidence already that I am a complete geek, I found myself reading a bunch of articles published by Daniel Yon at the Uncertainty Lab at the University of London. That is right, this actually exists. There is a lab dedicated to studying the human brain's capacity to deal with uncertainty. This is a concept that has always fascinated me. I recognized this at a young age: we humans have this unique ability to deal with what is not there. I noticed this in my dog as a young kid and how he really struggled understanding what happened when something went missing. He had very limited ability to even process something that was not in his immediate view. However, humans are quite capable of identifying, understanding, and processing things that are not in our immediate purview. We can cope with things out of our control, and sometimes we can even pretend that we actually have control over things that we do not. I think that seems to be the basis of the work I read by Mr. Yon. I was thinking about superstition in this regard. I was reading about one of the famous White Sox baseball players from the early 1900s. Apparently, he had a superstition about carrying some small sticks or twigs in his back pocket during games. He would fidget with them constantly, and he had a superstition that he had to have them in his pocket to have even a chance of winning the game. He actually believed that having a few matchsticks in his back pocket would influence or control the outcome of a game. Did he really believe this? Perhaps. However, if you stop and think about this a moment, we do this all the time. We have accumulated hundreds of cause and effect paradigms that we catalog in our own minds in order to exert control over our environments. Some of these are real, some are incredibly far-fetched, and most of them are a combination, meaning they do have an impact, just not as big of an impact as we give it attribution for. Often times we tie this to things like prayer or other religious practice. "If I go to church, or if I pray, or if I pay my offerings this week, then I will get what I want" is the shorthand for the reasoning we play out in our minds. I am not debating if that is true or not; what I am indicating is this profound concept that we as humans cope with uncertainty by evaluating what we have control over. We can take giant mental leaps that we know are probably not true, but once we have seen a cause and effect scenario play out a few times, we convince ourselves that our little action has far greater control than it actually has. This is perhaps the reason we are so fascinated by superheroes in our society: people that can climb walls, fly, shoot laser beams from their eyes, or bend the laws of nature in our favor. We are attracted to this idea because we also do this ourselves, just on a more subtle level, or at least most of us do. I have heard people make some audacious claims about their luck, or their bad luck, or the penchant for a certain outcome. My mom, for instance, is convinced that if she watches a USC football game, then they will lose. She is convinced because nearly every time that she has done this, they have indeed lost. You would think that the coaching staff of Notre Dame or UCLA would hire my mother to just sit there and watch the USC game live when it happens, but they have not called yet. Does my mom have control over the outcomes of football games by merely watching them? No. I do not think that she really believes this, but there is no denying the cause and effect relationship. This is what our brains focus on and capture without us even noticing. We are always evaluating cause and effect. It is how we survive, and we are incredibly good at it. We may not be able to control our environments, but we want to believe we can, which is fascinating: that we can imagine that something we cannot see is at play to help us control an environment that we have little actual control over. The question becomes, what role does our agency really play in our lives? We live in systems where we rarely have either 0% control or 100% control. The difficult intellectual task is figuring out whether our actions have a little influence, a lot of influence, or merely coincidental association. I think the wisdom I gained from Daniel Yon is that this ability for us to fool ourselves into the illusion of control is not a bad thing; it actually has served us well. It is wise to therefore consider how sensitive we might be to weak relationships of causality and to learn to filter out those and instead calibrate ourselves more to the actions that I can take that do have some measure of actual impact.
5d ago

Day 330 - Cognitive Magic Pills

Beware of the cognitive magic pill. We used to describe these as snake oil in the last century, and in modern times they are peddled with just as much veracity. If you go on to any social platform and scroll a while, you will see them, usually because they pull at you. They offer an alluring solution to a range of your problems, all easily solved with some magic pill. A solution that requires your engagement, your subscription, or your attention. A recent example is cortisol. The recent fad is to blame all of your common human problems on cortisol, which has been rebranded as the "stress hormone." This is the perfect example of a cognitive magic trick. It sounds technical enough to win some credibility. You have heard this a few times before by now, so you are not immediately suspicious, and your brain easily accepts that stress causes all these problems. So you naturally, and cognitively, are willing to make the giant leap that cortisol is the cause of all your stress and therefore the cause of all your problems. This, of course, is not reality. True, cortisol is produced by your adrenal glands, and true it is a steroid. However, to call it the stress hormone is a stretch. That might be a label we would assign to adrenaline, but even that would be incorrect. Cortisol is an important chemical. It is tied to your daily rhythm. It is probably what makes you feel awake, as it is at the highest levels when you first get out of bed. It is what makes you feel energetic and is needed to regulate your blood pressure, keep inflammation and immune activity under control, and use stored fat as energy. Yes, it helps you prepare to deal with stress, but not because it is some adverse chemical that, if we were to get rid of it, we would become stress-free. You remember the shake weights from a few years ago? A thing you could hold in your hand and it would move aggressively, and you had to hold on to it. Doing this would cause you to tense your muscles and, therefore, was considered a new form of exercise that would magically turn you into a fit, healthy, gorgeous supermodel. We all knew this was ridiculous, but if you were up late at night feeling discouraged about your weight and you came across a post about this. You might buy it because it was offering a solution to several of the problems you were experiencing. If you kept watching, you might actually believe the science behind it, and sure enough, arriving on your doorstep in that Amazon package is your new pair of shake weights. It is important to understand this attempt by people to use our desire for "things to make sense" as a tool to encourage us to pay attention. All too often, we find ourselves falling for this trick as it masquerades in many costumes. What you call silly, another will buy immediately. What you think is outrageous, your neighbor is receiving that package right now on their doorstep. So, next time you hear about some new "magic bullet" for life's challenges, maybe take a beat. Instead of jumping on the latest trend, consider what's really going on with your own body and mind. It's less about finding a quick fix and more about understanding the nuanced dance of how we tick. Sometimes, the most powerful insights come from simply paying attention to ourselves, rather than chasing after the next big thing someone's trying to sell us.
Sep 3

Day 329 - Art is Capturing the Form

I have often pondered what art is. Creative outlets are just as much a part of human existence as eating or sleeping. Since the beginning of time, we have been expressing ourselves or trying to understand ourselves through artistic expression. Does form follow function, or does function follow form? The age-old debate. I am looking at two tape measures sitting on my desk. I was working on a project and for some reason collected two tape measures. One of them is ugly, bulky, but highly functional. The numbers are easy to read, the action is clean, and it even has a belt clip, if you were so inclined to attach it to your belt. On close inspection, it has many features captured that you may not notice on casual use. It has a place to nail the end of it into place so that you can measure a longer distance. It has glow-in-the-dark numbers, and it has various markers for convenience depending on what you are working on. This is the epitome of form following function. On the other hand, the other tape measure, the one that I actually used, is a much simpler device. It is smaller, made out of a brushed metal, and just looks cool. I like to hold it because it is rather fun to fiddle with. Not only is it a decent tape measure, but it also serves as a fidget spinner. This tape measure serves its purpose. I can measure things, well, at least most things. It is shorter, has fewer features, but it looks like a retro tool from the early 1900s and has a die-cast look that is attractive. This tape measure is a representation of function following form. You can tell that the aim of the manufacturer was to produce a tape measure that you would not mind carrying in your satchel. That choice of word was deliberate because the wielder of the satchel would probably care about such a matter. So you might argue that the second tape measure was more art. Then, of course, you would get into an argument with those that believe that art should be, at its very nature, functional. Meaning something is not really artistic unless it serves a function. Not sure I believe that, but I know that camp exists. Well, I got introduced to a new argument, and that is that art does not precede or follow function, but rather captures the form. That is interesting. We all use light switches, and they all have a form, but what if someone truly captured its form? Brought it to life so that you could experience the light switch and instantly understand the connection it has to almost the entire human family. That would definitely be artistic. In the middle of the New Mexico desert, in 1971, a man named Charles Ross started building what he is now calling the Star Axis. Go to the website at staraxis.org and watch the documentary. He has not finished the project yet. They are saying it will be done in the next year or so. This ambitious project started out with one primary purpose, which has now extended into other areas, and that was to capture the journey of the North Star, or more officially, the star known as Polaris. Humankind has been staring up into the heavens and looking at this star since we took our first steps. It is one of the constants in the heavens, and civilizations have been tracking it through various means for multiple millennia. A few years ago, I ran a race out in the Nevada desert that went into the night. While running in nearly pitch-black conditions, my headlamp ran out of batteries. While I sat on a rock trying to fiddle with putting new batteries in, I suddenly could start to see better. That is when I looked up and realized the night sky was full of light. I know this, of course, but when you live in a crowded area, the light pollution can sometimes make you forget just how many stars are visible with the naked eye in a dark sky. I sat there for a few minutes and just connected with all my ancestors in a flash of recognition that they had also seen this same night sky. Perhaps that is what Charles Ross is intending to capture with his project. What is fascinating about his project is that as you walk up these stairs and look up, you can see a circle, and if you are on the correct stair, the star Polaris will actually go around that circle. The reason is the Earth has a wobble, and that wobble follows a highly predictable pattern, and it is slowly shifting. I believe I read somewhere that our North Star might eventually become the star Vega instead because of this persistent and shifting wobble in the Earth's rotation. So Charles Ross describes this as moving forward yet backward in time as you see the same pattern people might have seen thousands of years ago while you are on a particular step. So I think I can definitely call this art. Charles Ross is truly capturing the form here. We are all surrounded by light, and we all have this one constant to stare up at each night. Just like the common light switch that binds us all, so too are we all staring up at the heavens and seeing the fixed position of the North Star, but of course, with a little bit of wobble thrown in just to keep us guessing.

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Welcome to the 365 Commitment Podcast.

The 365 Commitment Podcast focuses on helping people make and keep life changing commitments.

Creator

Guy Reams
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

921
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 Guy Reams
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The 365 Commitment