Time to grow
I became embroiled in some philosophical discourse chez the site of @chrisbrogan yesterday.
He was going on about time management – the pressures on him from all corners to do stuff, now or yesterday.
It’s a good old argument, this one. How do you juggle everything?
Well we can’t. And even if we could, what then? What’s the point of taking everything on, overburdening your daily plate?
Then like a thunderbolt from the fine skies above, someone said:
There will still be items in your mailbox when you’re dead.
What a frickin’ genius! Simple but true.
Every morning you wake up, you died a little in the night. Every effort is a little undone. Everything you’re aiming for becomes a little harder to achieve.
Flip this around and what we discover is mortality is the best Red Bull we could ask for.
If you were undead, permanently, you would settle for the average more often than not. You’d coast. You’d find the middle ground, and you’d accept ‘comfort’ as the way ahead.
But because we all know we’re dying, we all know that every day left counts a little more than the last.
We all do things because we feel like we should. Because everyone else is. But that’s BS, people. You are you. Whoever’s holding your hand when you pass, isn’t going to be there on the other side.
Care, yes. Unbridled love, absolutely. But girls and boys, we have to do what’s right for us and us alone.
Rules are important, because they give us boundaries. Unfettered creativity is a dangerous thing and more often than not, leads to limitations as we realise that the human body literally isn’t capable of anything.
I hang with folks who are superheroes. They inspire me. I love them back. But I don’t want to emulate them because that’s not my bag.
Guys who build skyscrapers are incredible. People who rock out applications that change the internet, also, are amazing.
But you know the person I admire most? It’s the guy who goes to work with passion, every waking day, and does his stuff with a smile on his face. He genuinely adores what he does. And the knock on effect is his people fall in love with what he does, too.
We’re surrounded by the most inane bollocks. The $97 lucky lucky men and women (and incidentally, I know what inflation is all about but if you’re gonna rip us with your baloney, don’t go insane and add numbers in front of the $97! Man alive, it’s hot enough without having to totally destroy our savings).
What they peddle is what we already know. If we want to achieve, we strive and – as Vay-ner-chuk would have it – we work our tails off.
You can’t teach passion. But you can be yourself. And do exactly what it is you want, and do it today, and do it tomorrow, and do it for the rest of the limited time you have on this planet.
Buddhists get it. In their most natural state, the monks are smiling because they have achieved inner peace. And that’s what we all strive for, right? In among the cacophony is a place where we can all be truly sated.
And that’s all about living life for today. Doing it now.
Thanks for making it to the end of this article. Now will you do me one simple favour?
Use it. And do what makes you happy, right now.
(nb, get a copy of The Power of Now – it’s on sale at just over $10. Use my link if you like. I don’t care – just make a revolution in you today. That’s my gift to you.)