Every day at Low Two Pair, we unpack a fresh Thought of the Day and Question of the Day—a combo that’s part reflection, part provocation, and hopefully, part “oh wow, I needed that.” Today’s pair is all about perspective: What are we chasing, and what did we think was coming for us?
We’ll dive into today’s Thought of the Day about deciding if the game is even worth playing—let alone winning—and the Question of the Day, which invites you to rewind to last Monday and ask: Did you expect joy or frustration? Let’s get into it.
Thought of the Day:
“Before you worry about how to win the game, figure out whether the game is worth winning.”
Whew. This one hit me like a toddler’s toy brick to the ankle at 2am.
We spend so much of our energy strategizing. How to climb the ladder. How to get more followers. How to be the Pinterest parent, the MVP employee, the best-looking person in a badly lit Zoom call.
But… for what?
I’ve realized recently (probably sometime between making my 8-month-old laugh and stepping on said toy brick) that winning the wrong game feels a lot like losing. Only with more burnout. If you’re sprinting full-speed toward someone else’s idea of success, you might arrive and wonder why you’re not happy or worse, why you feel less like yourself than when you started.
I’ve been chasing some outcomes lately that looked good on paper but felt hollow in real life. So I’m doing a reset. Not quitting, just pausing long enough to ask: Whose scoreboard am I using? If the “game” doesn’t align with what I value—family, creative freedom, honest connection—I don’t need to win it. I need to walk off the field.
“At the beginning of last week, did you expect the week to have many joys or many frustrations?”
I’ll go first: I expected frustrations.
Kids home with a virus, work deadlines stacking like Tetris blocks, and not a full night’s sleep in sight. And yeah—some of that played out. But something surprising happened too.
There were moments of joy I never saw coming: a midweek ice cream cone that made everyone sticky and delighted. My 3-year-old singing a made-up song about toast. A really kind email from someone who reads these posts (hi!).
What I’ve learned? Expectations shape how I enter a week, but not how the week unfolds. Life doesn’t always ask for your forecast before it sends the weather. Sometimes you get storm clouds and rainbows in the same day. That’s okay.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether we expected joy or frustration. It’s whether we made room for both.
