There are good days and there are bad days. A bad day might be your own fault or it might not but either way there is no shame in having a bad day. If you have a positive outlook on life the ratio of what you consider bad days versus your good days will be better than if you feel depressed; so your own judgement can transform a bad day into a good day and vice versa but even if you have a habit of transforming what could objectively be called a good day into what you subjectively think is a bad day, there is still no shame in having a bad day.

“You can not win them all” a saying goes and even though I think it is dangerous to think highly of this saying (as it could be misconstrued into meaning that you should not try to win them all), I still think you should keep this in mind when a bad day occurs. It is said that Edison tried 1000 different ways to make a lightbulb before he found the solution that actually worked – if he tried 5 different experiments a day that would amount to 200 days of failed experiments, do you think that after the first 10 or 20 days Edison thought to himself “it’s no use, I am simply not made for this experiement-business – everything I do is a failure, I might as well stop trying before I ruin more days of my life”? I do not think so. Actually I do not think he even thought of them as bad days, but good days where he learned a lot about how not to make a lightbulb.

Much can be learned from bad days and even though 200 days of “learning” is probably not always needed to get a good day, those 200 “bad” days might be the precursor to a life-changing 201st day. So what I am suggesting is that you should not let a bad day get to you but instead focus on how this bad day might help you in the future to achieve a day that is so good that your bad days fade into oblivion and become so insignificant compared to the good day that you almost can not keep from laughing. You have probably also heard the saying “Some day we will think back on this day and laugh about it” and it is a good saying to use as a goal when you are having a bad day – notice that there is no promise that some day you will think of a really bad day as being funny but by developing your life to the point where you can think of the day as funny is a worthy goal.

In 1996 I competed in the “Amiga 4k intro competition” at the Mekka-Symposium party in Germany. This will probably sound as gibberish to you if you are not familiar with “the demo-scene”, but think of it as a sub-culture of geeks who try to impress eachother with their graphics, music or programming skills on a computer – the output (demos and intros) can be compared to a music video. The “4k” part means that the entry in the competition had a maximum length of 4096 (2 to the 12th power) bytes or characters and the challenge was to squeeze as much impressing stuff into this small space as possible. Even though 4096 bytes is not much it took me 3 months to develop my intro (the music in the intro was not made by me, but by another member of our computer-group) into what I wanted. During those 3 months I would think there was a bad day or two but I can not remember any. What I do remember, is the great feeling it was to hear the cheering from hundreds of people when the intro was shown at the party and how nice it was to afterwards see the intro take 1st place in the competition. The 3 months had paid off and I even received money and hardware as 1st prize. I was recently made aware that even though this was 10 years ago, the intro is still considered among the top 20 intros made.

I can not help but think that I want more of those days – the days that are still significant to you even 10 years later. All the bad days in the world can not compete with those days. So whenever you are having a bad day, just think of it as a minor setback on your quest for the great days – the days that you will tell your children about – the days that you will write blog entries about