Well then, almost a year since my last post here… and what a year it’s been…

Recently I’ve started watching a show called The Good Place on Netflix, it’s a great show (and is highly recommended by me), but more-over the initial concept of a points-based system measuring the good and bad things you do in your life struck me as a very interesting way of viewing life.

In the points system from the show, you gain points for the ‘good’ things you do in your life, and lose points for the ‘bad’. How many points depends on how good/bad the thing you do is – the ‘value’ of that event/action.

If you extend this scoring mechanism to include things that happen to you, outside of your control, and you can get a fairly accurate idea for how things are going for you.

For me, this year (and the year before), the negatives have outweighed the positives (sometimes by a considerable margin).

That’s not the whole story though, you can’t sum things up to a simple number. In the show, a positive/negative value can be assigned to things that you do (and how good/bad they are can be quantified by their effect on others) but how do you assign a value to something that happens to you. The ‘value’ of that and how good/bad it is can only be determined by its effect on you.

So, how do you improve your score when it’s affected by things that happen to you? Simple – reduce the ‘value’ by changing the impact things have on you.

Some would say you can’t do this – and for some ‘things’ that’s right, you can’t… but that’s not the case for all things.

Does a certain place/situation affect you negatively? Leave that place/situation. It may not fix the situation but it will reduce the value of it (maybe to 50 points instead of 100… but less). The longer you are out of the place/situation, the lower the value will go, until eventually it has almost no value compared to your score as a whole.

Who knows – maybe your negative will end up as a positive in the long run…