Groundhog’s Day: Revisited 

We’re taught the idea that being busy automatically yields production. TGIF. The grind includes Friday, all that shit. It has never been easier to confuse action for effectiveness, but the notion of busy for busy sake is usually just an illusion of progression and rarely the genuine article. Action in and of itself is the start of the progress, but arbitrary action that’s void of intent will leave you rudderless. Distracted action is deadly. It will keep you in place silently, almost unbeknownst because you’re often too busy to notice. You end up as a real life version of Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, re-living the same hamster wheel over and over again, rarely progressing.

Only when action takes on purpose and intent tied to a larger objective do you begin to move forward. In the movie, Phil Connors repeats the same exact day because he lacks any intent. He is so caught up in trying to win every moment that he loses sight of what matters. He gets really good at executing each step of the day since he gets to repeat it so often, but he never escapes the cycle of reliving Groundhog’s Day because he’s missing the forest for the trees. Only when Phil changes his actions from one of activity to productivity does his purgatory sentence end. He focuses only on the stuff that matters, which in his case is becoming a better person. He dedicates himself to that, removes the superfluous and he wakes up the next day with Rita.

How much intent is behind your actions?

Are they designed to progress you from where you are? Or are they keeping you exactly where you are?

-Dave