Come down from your head for a moment and focus only on where you are. We don’t do this very often so it might be a little hard at first.
Look around you. Look at the stuff. Look at your hands. Those are your hands. You’re seeing them with your eyes. Wow. Breathe some air. Try to appreciate, absolutely fully, where you are right now.
Pause and do this. Just for a few seconds. It feels good. Really.
Now, while looking at your hands, looking at real stuff (not pictures of stuff on your screen), and breathing real live air—while being intensely here—realize that you’re going to die.
Bring that reality into sharp focus. Someday, it’s going to be now, and you’ll be dying. All this is going to be gone. No more breathing. No more hands. No more eyes.
“That’s sick Chase. Why did you make me do that.”
Indeed. Why think about it this way?
Because, most of the time, our death is just kind of a blurry, invisible specter in the basement of our consciousness. We don’t really remember or think about him much. We rarely ever consciously think he’s ever going to come up and say hi.
Most of us don’t really think about how the unseen hands on our silent clock are moving, moving, moving. We just kind of go around, do our jobs, do our weekends, gaze at screens and all our other hobbies. Just kind of moving around as if it’s what we’re going to do forever.
Some of us work really hard all the time, building our businesses, constantly making them bigger, better, more profitable. We say we’re building an “empire.” We’re super busy all the time, 4 am to 8 pm.
Some of us find paramount importance only in doing things that make us “look good” to others. That’s a never-ending job.
There’s lots to do and even more to think about. We forget about the specter. He’s in the basement and we can’t see him anyway.
Death exists in our attitudes as just an abstraction. An abstraction that happened to Grandma but not to us.
Why bring him up to look at him so graphically? It’s not news, after all.
Because when we do it this way, suddenly our mortality doesn’t exist only in abstract. Suddenly it’s so REAL, we can feel it. It’s tangible.
And when it’s that real, when we’ve brought that reality nose to nose with ourselves and really looked it in the eye, even just for a few seconds, our phones may fall forgotten from our hands, and we might exclaim, “What have I been doing?”
We often go through life in a sort of fog. Usually, it’s because there seem to be so many things that we must pay attention to. “Distraction” is a state of being for us. Everything seems so important. It’s not.
Getting caught up in all the stuff that seems important. That’s the fog. That’s the place where it’s easy to stress us, to manipulate us, to brainwash us. Next time you start to feel pressured in any way, relax and think about how you’re going to die. Your best course will become much more obvious. And people will wonder why you’re smiling.
There’s an exercise recommended by multimillionaire entrepreneur Mark Ford.
He says to spend a full 15 minutes (by yourself) thinking about your own mortality. Breathe slowly. Look around. Realize that someday, you will no longer exist. Try to stop the denial of your own death for a few moments. Get , as clearly as you can, a sense of your own mortality.
Then he says, imagine your own funeral. Visualize four people who are important to you. Imagine what they would say about you if you died tomorrow. Be honest about it. If there’s a difference between what they’d say and what you wish they’d say, you’ve got some work to do.
(I approach this differently: If I’m on my deathbed right now, how do feel about my life? Ford’s way may be more effective for some people though.)
Next, turn what you’d like them to say about you into your primary goals. Put time-limits on those goals. And work on those goals for the first hour of every day—before you get into all your other urgent but not life-fulfilling obligations.
By the way, everything written by Mark Ford is worth reading. His book “The Pledge,” written under his old pen name Michael Masterson, is where this exercise comes from.
The only purpose of this whole death-exercise is just to jolt us to true reality.
“I gotta pay bills. That’s the reality,” you might say, because you know where I’m heading with this.
You’re gonna die. That’s the reality.
I talked to a guy named Philip McKernan once. He’s a life/relationships coach, mostly for entrepreneurs and business leaders. We were doing what he calls a “clarity call.” Getting clear on life direction.
He had volunteered to do it for free because my mentor at the time, now a friend of mine, had said something about me being “driven, ambitious but looking for direction” in an online group they’re both part of (he was trying to help me get a job where I could get business experience), and Philip had said, “I was like that at his age. I’d better talk to him.”
I thought, oh wow this is going to be great! I’ll ask all those burning entrepreneurship questions I’ve needed to know about!
I charged in with all these business and wealth-building oriented questions. What are the best ways to “bring value” when meeting influential people I might want to do business with.
“If someone needs you to ‘bring value’ to them before they spend time with you, fook ‘em,” was his Irish-accented answer to that.
What are some of the best influences I should follow/books I should read to guide me on my path to wealth and freedom?
He said, “Absolutely none.”
I was asking stupid questions like that. I realized that I had approached this conversation all wrong. So I asked the only smart question I asked during the entire conversation.
“What questions should I be asking?”
He said, “Who am I really? And what do I really want?”
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"Who am I Really? And what do I really want?"
He said, “You keep mentioning this business you’ve started. Do you get any real joy out of it?”
“… not… really,” I answered.
“How much time do you spend, up in your head, thinking about this stuff?”
“Probably… eighty percent of the time.”
“Who is someone you really admire? Who are you using as a role model here?”
I named someone.
“I’m worried about you, Chase,” he said.
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He went on: “Why do you want to be wealthy?”
“Freedom,” I answered. Perfectly logical.
“I thought the same thing when I was your age.” (And Philip went out and did it, too, before he got fed up with his life and became who he is today.)
“Look,” he said, “I talk to hundreds of millionaires—and billionaires—every year. Do you know how many of them are happy? …None. Not one. And why?
"They spend all their time working. And nothing else. They keep thinking, ‘Just a little bit bigger,’ or ‘One more deal,’ and they’re never satisfied. They work a hundred hours a week, and they’re rich, and they’re really unhappy. They don’t have time for that trip to the Bahamas.
“And if they do, they’re still only thinking about one thing. They can’t enjoy anything. They thought they’d build a life of freedom. They build themselves a cage.
“Now, you might completely ignore my advice. You might start the next multi-million dollar company, and you might call me ten or twenty years from now and say, ‘Fook you Philip, I started a million-dollar company and I just booked a trip to the Bahamas.’
“And I would say, ‘That’s great. Are you happy?’ Chances are the answer would be no.”
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I felt rotten for weeks after that. I thought my plan was great. “I’m gonna work hard whether or not I enjoy it, get rich, and then do all the things I want to do.” Delayed gratification, see? Prime trait of successful people.
But after the conversation with Philip, I started questioning the direction I’d chosen.
“Three things,” he’d said before we hung up.
“a) Take these people you admire down off of the pedestal you’ve placed them on, put them shoulder to shoulder with you in worth. Their opinions aren’t worth more than yours.
b) Seriously re-evaluate your relationship with money.
c) Ask yourself who you are, and what you really want out of life.”
I had thought I was being a rebel, rejecting the status quo I’d grown up with and embracing entrepreneurial splendor.
I had just exchanged one idealist conformity for another. Inundating my brain with too much “entrepreneur porn.”
It wasn’t so much that I was fixated on becoming affluent, it was that I realized I had been deferring my intellectual sovereignty to the millionaires I was obsessed with imitating, and placing my emulated success before my happiness, rather than delving into myself and finding out exactly what I needed to do to fill that hole in my soul.
I’ve since backed off on the idea of creating businesses for the sole purpose of accruing currency, and refined my approach to the requirement that any such businesses I start must also fill my holes. (Oops. That does not sound right.)
So that’s my new plan. After all, I’m going to die.
I’d rather not go on to prove Stephen King’s favorite quote:
“Life sucks and then you die.”
How about, “Make your life rock before you die!”
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Make your life rock before you die!
Doug Casey says in one of my favorite interviews ever:
“Most people live lives of quiet desperation, and then they die in their beds with nothing but regrets at how they wasted their lives. And if they’re reincarnated they’ll probably come back as a cockroach to punish them for having been so profligate with their current life.”
Death is the only thing that gives our lives any possibility of meaning. Time is really the most valuable thing a living being has. Because it is running out. And you can’t make more.
We all die.
Well, except for this jellyfish.
You don’t count, freak.
He’s biologically immortal because at the end of his life cycle he reverts to a polyp in a process called “transdifferentiation.” He begins his life cycle all over again.
There’s this TV show where this billionaire scientist injects jellyfish genes into humans, trying to make them immortal. I guess that would be interesting.
But I don’t really want to be a transdifferentiating polyp. Do you? I’d rather die than go through puberty again.
But we do lots of things that we don’t like, and we let ourselves be unhappy. We think our dreams (i.e., doing the things that we love doing that get us high on life) are impractical. Too “out of reach.” Too hard. We seem to think that trying to do the things we love would be too hard, and would make us… Unhappy? What!? Fear of failure I guess.
But you can fail all over the place and make life hard enough for yourself… while doing what you don’t love. And then you die. Why not fail all over the place while doing or achieving what you do love… before you die?
Chances are your successes will make any little (or big) bumps in the road worth it. Right? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The time we own in our lives is like liquid in a small, fragile pot. There’s a hole in the bottom. Our life-time liquid is evaporating and dripping out at the same time in a steady drip, drip, drip.
And that hole can get bigger any time. Splash.
So today, when you have some silent alone-time, imagine you’re on your death bed. You’re dying right now. What do you wish you did?
(Well jeez I wish I wrote that novel. I guess I was afraid it would turn out bad. How lame of me.)
Then wake up and take the first step of doing it. We should do this every morning.
You’re going to die. So… what are you doing today?
What are you filling your holes with?
