Issue 8: Your Life as an Excel Spreadsheet

Now, see your life in Excel?!?

The number 1 question I get asked is “What is the meaning of life?” to which I respond by handing them a dictionary and saying, “look it up loser.” while gliding away on my Heelys. You see, teach a man to fish, and you’ve wasted a whole afternoon, but send him the link to a YouTube video titled “How To Fish – GONE WRONG?!” and you have your time back. Side note, I’ve spent a small fortune on dictionaries because I keep handing them out instead of letting go of this dumb joke. I had a class in college with Noah Webster’s (of dictionary fame) great great great grandson or something like that. He doesn’t get a family discount on dictionaries so it’s time to open yet another credit card.

The second most common question I get asked is “How do you have time to write these?” That’s a great question. 

We have a lot of equations in life. Time=Money and a picture=1,000 words. What I want to figure out is how many words does time equal and how much money is a picture? Well, we can solve one of those questions with this week’s sponsor Andrew Card Photo. 

Actually, with his unique pricing approach, the answer to “How much money is a picture?” is left up to you. We used Andrew Card Photo at Daily Dispatch’s Chattanooga office recently. He took our pictures for our employee security badges, captured our team building wilderness retreat, and curated a session for my upcoming profile in Forbes Magazine. (They are using one of the pictures for the cover.) Using his “Pay-What-It’s-Worth” pricing model, I deemed the experience priceless and was content to pay nothing. However, our accounting team said I was “being selfish and stingy again” and paid him a sum I didn’t realize we had in the bank. Worth every cent. All 3,200,000 cents. 

Visit andrewcardphoto.com today to see his gallery and book a session for yourself. I promise it’ll be a priceless experience at a fair price. 

Back to our original question, “How do you have time to write these?” aka “How many words does time equal?” 

In order to answer the question about how I use my time now, we need to go back in time.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” -Socrates 

I’m not going to argue with Socrates today, so let’s examine my life up to this point. Some people are passionate about money or power. Some people are passionately in love or like the taste of passionfruit. While I relate to 3 of those things, I’ve also been drawn to something less tangible. I love figuring things out. This is not a new theme in the Daily Dispatch. We have dedicated many words to the questions “Why?” regarding McDonalds pizza, “Why not?” with ChatGPT, and “How?” when we attempted to catch a wild horse. Sometimes, though, the process of figuring something out doesn’t begin with “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, or “Why?”. Sometimes you simply start with “If I…” 

One small word “If” and one medium sized man “I”.  “If I”. Science will call this a hypotenuse. Hypothetically, if I had become a scientist, I think this is the part of the job I would enjoy most: predict, test, analyze results. But I didn’t become a scientist. I went into business. My “Lab” is a blank Excel workbook. It is my testing playground. It’s a beautiful thing to see the answers to all your questions displayed in numbers and charts. It’s clear. It’s actionable. 

At work, if I look at an Excel sheet, I can see what is working, what isn’t working, and what can be done to improve. I can see the effects of every action and then press “undo” if I don’t like the results. I can put “Proficient in Excel” on my resume.

Let’s continue to examine my life. I could continue writing a love letter to Excel here, but then you all will start thinking I’m lame. Which is totally not true. As a kid, I loved magic tricks. I’m always looking to learn new tricks or techniques. Abracadabra. I just transformed from a nerdy Excel guy to an intriguing man who knows cool magic tricks right before your very eyes. 

I’ve never owned Apple products. That’s cool right? From my Sony Walkman or Zune, to Acer, Lenovo, and HP laptops. I’ve had Motorola, LG, Samsung, OnePlus, and Google phones. Part of it has always been “uniqueness”, but the main reason has always been value and usability. People say Apple is user friendly. I guess to some users that is the case. Usability, to me, has always been customizability and freedom. I enjoy getting a new phone and spending hours making it uniquely mine. I love that stuff. I’m the green messages you love to hate. 

This is my second newsletter. I’ve mentioned it before, but I used to write one in 2018 called Business Briefing. That newsletter was more focused on actual news headlines and was also a tool to make fun of our friends who didn’t have official work email addresses. 

I mention this, because it helps answer the original question, “How do you have time to write these?”, but more importantly, it shows my lifelong obsession with “If I…” 

“If I learn magic tricks, people will be entertained and interested.” 

“If I own different technology, I stand out from the crowd.” 

“If I write a newsletter, people will hear what I have to say.”

I’ve always wanted to improve as a person. I wanted to be interesting and to grow into someone who is likable. I’ve dedicated hundreds of hours into these and other “If I” statements over the course of my life. But how do I know if it’s working? I don’t have a lot of Instagram followers. Am I unlikeable? Am I uninteresting? Do I not use enough hashtags? What is a good number of followers to have anyway? 

Let’s continue our adventure through time. The year is 2018. I had less Instagram followers than I do now, but the Eagles had just won the Super Bowl so, like an elevator operator’s day, it had its ups and downs. If we’re being honest, in 2018 I was not happy. I was not content with my life. 

I’m a happy person generally. I had a happy life. Growing up, I was a great student. I started a pressure washing business. I was a good guy. I thought I was going to be the most successful guy to ever walk the halls of Franklin High School. But I graduated and went to a college that wasn’t “impressive” by most people’s standards. It wasn’t even unique. I graduated that same college in 2018, a semester late, because I failed a class I thought would be a cakewalk. I stopped trying. I went from a guy who had turned a bunch of “If I” skills into “and” statements to a guy whose “If I” skills were “but” statements. That is a confusing and poorly written sentence. What I’m trying to say is in high school and college, I was a guy who was a student “and” could do magic tricks, “and” had unique tech interests, “and” had a lot of interesting and funny things to say. In 2018 I was a guy who graduated late from a college he felt he was settling for to begin with because of failure “but” could do magic, “but” had unique interests, “but”… 

I mentioned earlier I sunk a lot of hours into “If I” statements and skills. In 2018 I had a ton of time on my hands. I was single. I lived alone. I was totally a catch. 

“If I could just get my life together.” 

This “If I” became how I spent my time. How do you begin that journey? It’s a little more complex than “If I learn how to double lift playing cards for magic…” 

I wrestled with this question for a while. Then I had a breakthrough; or possibly a breakdown. What if I could become measurable and able to be analyzed with numbers and charts in Excel? Then I could better identify, quantify, and remedy the problem. I started exploring the idea of quantifying my level of personhood. I decided to develop a weekly point system for my life. This way there is a number assigned to my quality. A number can be analyzed and improved on. How do you score a person? Let’s start by defining who I am and what I do. 8 categories, 5 points per category to be totalled every Sunday night for a max score of 40. 

“If I create a point system, I can tangibly improve.”

The categories: Mind, Body, Spirit, Personal Management, Relationships, Contribution, Career, and Reflection. Let’s break them down.

Mind:

Read a book, do puzzles like sudoku or riddles, study memory (I wanted to memorize as many digits of pi as possible.), brainstorm (just, like, think about something for a while), and creatively write/draw for 2 hours (Business Briefing). 

Body:

Consciously cut down sugar, drink less than 5 sodas (I was 20% Dr. Pepper at that time), stretch, do leg day, and do other workouts. 

Spirit:

Read Scripture, pray for my heart, go on worship walk (this was the act of going on a walk on Sunday mornings before church and listening to only worship music to make my heart more receptive), pray for someone else, and have 2 Gospel focused conversations.

Personal Management:

Make and use a budget, clean my apartment, practice humility, cook 3 meals, and spend at least an hour alone on purpose (the hours I spent alone on accident didn’t count). 

Relationships:

Go on or schedule a date, call a friend who lives out of town, listen more than I talk (I legitimately never got this one), have a serious/intentional conversation with someone where they are the topic, and be honest with how I’m doing.

Contribution:

Help a friend, be generally uplifting, do a nice act out of my way, give more than I take, and help a stranger. I liked this category because if I helped someone I could usually check off 2 boxes at once. Boom Selfishly selfless. 

Career:

I was in sales at this time so my Career section included start a new customer, set up a call, learn from someone new, read something career focused and write my goals. 

Reflection:

Here I cheated a little. “Reflect and reevaluate scorecard.” This was just doing the scorecard so I automatically got 1 point each week. Write something new I learned, write what God taught me, write the best part of my week and record my weight. 

There were many versions of this scorecard. That’s what “Reevaluate scorecard” was for. This was version 3. It changed as I changed, or, more importantly, if I wasn’t getting enough points, it was probably a scorecard issue, not a me issue, right? 

I then would take this information and analyze the analysis of myself. Finally get to bring my old friend Excel to the party. 

*Insert Excel screenshot

My average points were 14.9. That’s 37.25%. That’s failure in any school setting. Trust me, I know.  My highscore was 27. I thought that would be the minimum each week. My low score was a 6. I got 1 point for filling out the sheet. During that year, my best category was “Spirit”. My worst category was “Personal Management”. I was the manager and I made the system. I still don’t know how this was so bad. 

What is the conclusion? What did I learn? Did I improve? 

I don’t know. 

I spent nearly a year of my life doing this every week. I was trying to become a better person. I was trying to do it methodically and analytically. I had the right intentions. Some people knew I was doing this and it caused them to try to be better. I was doing a good thing, but I failed at my task. Or did I? Sure, I don’t know if I actually became better or not, but I saw my “If I” through. “If I create a point system, I can tangibly improve.” Turns out, not true. 

I spent so much time and effort scoring and analyzing my life, but when I was done with the point system, I was in a job I hated, still alone, still unhappy. I couldn’t solve my life with data and statistics. 

“If I” still matters. I am a collection of the “If I” statements I did and didn’t explore.

For example: “If I had not failed that class…” I would have graduated sooner and maybe moved away. I might not have been in Chattanooga at the same time as the woman who became my best friend and the love of my life. 

“If I had gone to a better college…” I may have tried harder, gotten a better job out of school, made a lot of money, and not felt the need to start a newsletter. You wouldn’t know what to do with an extra 30 minutes on a Friday morning.

All I can say is, you can’t figure out a person and maximize a life with a point system and data. Life is not a science. You can be honest and try your best. I’m a guy who learned a new magic trick this week, has a Google phone, and just sent the 8th Issue of the Daily Dispatch, because those things make me happy for now and that’s all they need to do. 

So, how do I have time to write these? Because I make time. It makes me happy so I do it. I don’t get a point for it, there is not a minimum or maximum word count. 

If I answer a question that requires a 4 word answer with 2,000 words, people will know me better.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” but neither is the over-examined life.