You’re Not Going to Care About These Things When You’re on Your Deathbed
So stop worrying about them now
You’ll spend all of your life caring about things that don’t really matter and you’ll just die.
You’ll hesitate on doing the things that do matter because you’re preoccupied with the irrelevant and trivial.
Then, you’ll die.
Better fix it, fast.
Times running out.
Stop worrying about these things altogether.
Rejection and Embarrassment
“It is necessary to put yourself out for rejection, and accept that you will be rejected.” Robert Genn
Rejection and embarrassment in real life aren’t as bad as you imagine. The worst that happens? You just don’t get what you want and maybe the rejection is stiff. After you experience the rejection, you’ll forget about it eventually, probably pretty quickly.
There’s this saying:
“When you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks, when you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60, you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.”
By the time you’re in old age — near your death bed — you’ll come to realize how little of a fuck you should’ve given throughout your life. We care too much about our short-term feelings over our long-term satisfaction.
I try to remind myself that my perception, no matter how much I feel like a slave to it, is under my control. I could look at things differently, particularly situations where I face a little rejection. And I try. I’m not perfect. Neither are you.
All of this is in your head. If you live long enough, you’ll come to find you didn’t care all that much, but then you won’t have the energy to go out and do the things you should’ve done. So let it go now.
“Risky Situations”
“I’ll tell you what changed my whole life: I finally discovered that it’s all risky. The minute you got born it got risky. If you think trying is risky, wait until they hand you the bill for not trying” — Jim Rohn
How you manage risk can make or break your long-term success in life. I have an entire chapter about it in my book. To sum it up, you want to look for situations that have a level of risk you can tolerate but also have a massive upside. Take enough of those calculated bets in your life and you can end up very successful.
If something you want to try doesn’t leave you absolutely destitute, why not try it? In the face of death, what do you really have to lose? Money? Yes, you want to have enough to keep a roof over your head in the short to intermediate future, obviously. You want to save for retirement.
But let’s say you want to start a business and the investment costs $10,000. A lot of money, right? Is it, though? In the face of death? With a potential upside that can change your life?
If you take a risk and lose, but don’t completely collapse, you’ll live. If you win, you’ll get to add an amazing memory to your mental bank account at the end of your life.
Your Resume and C.V. Letter
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” — Charles Bukowski
If you don’t deeply care about your work or derive real meaning and satisfaction from it, all the accolades you accumulate from your career won’t matter to you when it’s all said and done. At least, they won’t matter to you as much as having a vocation would.
Can you have an amazing career that isn’t your life purpose but still look back fondly on it? Yeah. But it’s just not the same.
I see people working so hard to carefully curate this professional image. For what? To impress whom? One of the biggest tragedies in modern society is seeing people succumb to the religion of ‘careers.’
You’re told if you climb the ladder you’ll get the respect and admiration of your peers. So what? That speaks to the first point. We spend so much of our lives building an image that pleases other people instead of doing what makes us happy.
You can make a ton of money and be mission-aligned at the same time. I feel no guilt over the money I make because I love what I do. People who do things they hate for money, however, need those toys and accolades to fill a void. Instead, they could ditch the credentials and do what they love in the short life they have.
How do you feel about all of this? Does your career make you feel fulfilled? Imagine you’re 90 years old now. Will you care about your career accomplishments at all?
Use that answer to fuel future decisions.
Petty Spats and Huge Disagreements
“No family is perfect.. we argue, we fight. We even stop talking to each other at times, but in the end, family is family.. the love will always be there.”
I couldn’t imagine being totally estranged from my siblings or parents, but it happens. Human relationships are complicated. There are certain things that are simply unforgivable and require you to completely cut yourself off from a person, but everything below that threshold should be seen using the lens of death.
I was at a seminar recently and the speaker asked us if there was anybody we were on rocky terms with that we’d regret not patching things up with if they died. He then instructed us to go outside and make phone calls to talk to those people.
Another speaker told a story about this same exercise at a conference he attended years back. Earlier in the day the whole ‘make amends’ thing went down. Later on in the day, a woman, visibly shaken, stood up on top of a chair in the middle of the seminar and demanded to talk. The speaker relented.
She went on to say that mere hours after calling her father and making amends, he got into an accident and died. She still had to wrestle with all that wasted time when they could’ve rebuilt their relationship, but at least she got to speak with him before he died — something that she hadn’t done in years.
Who are you on bad terms with right now? Who are you having a petty spat with that has simply grown out of control? What if they died right now? How would you feel about that?
I won’t tell you what to do, but I’ll let you wrestle with the answers to those questions.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” — Dave Ramsey
Those fucking Joneses.
You don’t even like them. Hell, how many people do you genuinely like, period? The people you actually like, and who actually like you, don’t care about what car you drive, the home you live in, or name brands you wear.
You’re not going to care about impressing people at all when it’s all said and done. Drive a nice car because you like nice cars. Buy the appropriately sized home for you. Wear the clothes you like, name brand or not.
Spend money on things more valuable than materials like experiences.
You won’t care about the kind of cars you drove, but you’ll never forget that trip to Europe, the seminar you attended that helped you start your business, the concert by your favorite band, whatever.
I love money. But not for toys. Money is good for having the freedom and logistics to do what you want, not just have what you want. Money can facilitate the type of experiences that can enrich your life.
But to go and get that money, you’re going to have to stop caring what people think, stop being afraid of rejection, stop avoiding situations of potential failure, and get on with the tasks it’ll take to make that money before you run out of time.
You Know What to Do, Just Do It
All of these points are iterations of the same point. Get on with it. Remind yourself as often as you need to that you’re going to die so that you can get on it. It’s not easy at all.
Our inner critic is a mean bastard. You’re biologically wired to not be bold, daring, and adventurous. You’ll have to fight your own aversion to risk to pull off the life you want to live.
And I have no perfect answer on how to solve that other than to realize you’re going to die.
If you’re scared…just be scared. In many ways, I live in total fear, but it also makes me feel courageous. Fear helps me feel alive.
‘Get busy livin’ or get busy dying,’ right?
Screw it. Live your life. To the fullest.