“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”― Mahatma Gandhi

One of the deepest truisms in life is that everybody eventually dies. Everybody dies, but not everyone lives, as we mostly get stuck in the trap of trying to get ahead in life, so we stop truly living. We lead a life of quiet desperation, autopilot, trance, and sleepwalking throughout our precious time here. We spend our youth trying to keep up with the Joneses, amassing wealth while ignoring our health, and we devote old age to using that same wealth to care for our health. You cannot fit a wheelchair in a Lamborghini; live your life to the fullest while you are still here and try to be of service to the world around you because everybody dies in the end.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..” ― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Most of us live in someday isle, wherein we delay living our lives and we postpone almost everything to a future we are not promised. We delay starting the business until we have enough money in the bank, we delay going on the adventure of life until we are retired, and we wait living our life until everything is aligned. The reality of life is that everything will never be aligned; you just have to keep showing up day in and day out while creating your luck. As Author MJ DeMarco, observed, “Someday – The legendary place where your hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations all magically come to fruition. Someday is dangerous and paralyzing. It traps you in the land of Nowheresville.” To live a worthy life, you have to start from somewhere by living one day at a time. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. This is not a drill, it is the real deal; we all die eventually – Start Living.

In his very insightful and thought-provoking 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, Apple’s late CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, advised that one should meditate on one’s eventual demise and use mortality as a compass to live a worthwhile life. Steve said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

In DIE Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, founder and CEO of Accidental Creative Henry Todd writes about the need to have a sense of urgency to live and do our most important work every day.

We have only a certain amount of time available to us, and how we choose to spend our days is significant. We’re also aware that there are things we would like to do and experiences we would like to have before we die, many of which are desires we’ve suppressed for months or even years. We feel the ticking of the clock, and the accompanying sense that we may be missing our opportunity to make a contribution to the world. However, we often ignore these impulses as a result of the relentless pragmatics of life and work.

What DIEing Empty is not

It’s not about ignoring all areas of your life so that you can exclusively focus on getting work done. In fact, working frantically is actually counterproductive in many cases. Emptying yourself of your best work isn’t just about checking off tasks on your to-do list; it’s about making steady, critical progress each day on the projects that matter, in all areas of life. Embracing work with this mind-set will not only increase your chances of tackling your goals, but will also make it all more gratifying.

Urgency means leveraging your finite resources (focus, assets, time, energy) in a meaningful and productive way.

DIE with Zero

You should be focusing on maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth. Those are two very different goals. Money is just a means to an end: Having money helps you to achieve the more important goal of enjoying your life. But trying to maximize money actually gets in the way of achieving the more important goal. By aiming to die with zero, you will forever change your autopilot focus from earning and saving and maximizing your wealth to living the best life you possibly can.

Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life.

“ In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories.”

Meditation

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Storms

“Storms make trees take deeper roots.” – Dolly Parton

When you are faced with a gust of emotion that threatens to sweep you away, imagine yourself strong and rooted like a tree amid a storm. Though the branches and leaves may trash wildly in the wind and rain, the trunk remains steady and grounded, its root anchored deeply into the earth.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – The check-in tool
A check-in tool that Jay and his wife used regularly. Like a compass, the tool keeps them in the direction they want, and it is a great tool for recalibration whenever they wander.
Daily: What did you do for yourself today? | Weekly: What big things are coming for you that I can help with? | Quarterly: Is this relationship going in the direction we both want? | Yearly: What are your goals for the next 12 months?
Regularly self-check-in to ensure you are achieving goals and re-evaluating your priorities. A regular conscious check-in can reveal what matters to you and where you’d like to improve. The point of the tool is to enable one to stay in touch with their internal GPS.

“There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”― Charles Proteus Steinmetz

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – The Body Budget
Our brain wants to keep things in balance, except that the demands of our modern world take out more than they put in; not sleeping enough, not getting exercise, doom scrolling the news, and getting scrutinized on social media, all these things drain our body resources and the more chronically drained we get; the more vulnerable we get to disease, burnout and generally feeling like crap.
Balancing our body budget involves learning to put more good stuff in our body system. Equanimity is about not fighting with our situation and not perpetuating any type of inner stress.

Podcast