A birthday marks a yearly milestone. Long term objective that matters because a group of people created and enforced a behavior around acknowledging the milestone. A vanity metric.

What if we thought about birthdays at the margin?

Every single day we can take incremental action to make ourselves and our world better with the resources available. If we use our time and energy wisely, we can end our day believing we left the world slightly better than where we left it.

Should we wake up the next morning, we get another chance to make that incremental improvement. We celebrate that opportunity — a marginal birthday.

I would rather go from measuring that I survived 365 days to measuring how I used the 24 hours I had available to leave the world slightly better — a true KPI.

I’m all for a marginal birthday.