(Questions + Mortality) - Time = Vision
There is one guarantee in life – death.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
As you consider your own mortality you realize the limited time we have on Earth. Time and the present moment is all we have. The depth of questions you ask of yourself can paint your vision for a life well lived.
Our mortality rate is 100%. It’s one of the few statistics we can observe with absolute certainty. Time is our most valuable yet misunderstood asset. You ask someone who has lived their life and they’ll say how quick it passed. You speak to someone who is young, and they’ll explain how time can’t move fast enough. The days are slow, and the years are fast.
The Earth has been around for ~4.6 billion years, modern humans for 60,000 years, with recorded history of only 3,500 years. Yet we’ve experienced only a fraction of what has passed or what will come. February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 at 3.7 billion miles from the sun took an iconic photograph of the Earth.
From this vantage point in space, Carl Sagan describes Earth as a “tiny pale blue dot”. In it, he describes, is every human being there ever was and the aggregate of all human joy and suffering. Life is short and we are small. Yet, we still manage to get in our own way of achieving what we want in life.
My friend Todd tells me it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. Meaning, it’s how others perceive your message. This phrase has always stuck with me. I know we’ve all had moments like this where someone or something shakes the snow globe of what you thought you knew. Just like experiences and conversations can shape you, the quality of questions you ask yourself has the potential to alter the trajectory of your life.
In college, my feelings on a career in the financial services industry was one of great meaning and impact but I felt current practices were largely outdated and stale. I felt the industry could use an upgrade. I stumbled upon George Kinder’s work though Tim Mauer’s Forbes article titled “the whole financial planning process is wrong” which outlined how you can’t solve a qualitative problem with a quantitative solution. Personal finance is more personal than finance. George’s work changes lives through the questions he asks:
Question 1: Asks you to reflect that you wake up one morning and you discover that you have all the money that you need for the rest of your life - you’ve won the lottery. The question is what would you do with your life if that happened, how would you live your life and what would it be like?
Question 2: Imagine that you go to your doctor and feel perfectly healthy but the doctors have been doing some tests and the doctor shocks you with the news that you have a rare illness. There is good and bad news here. The bad news is the illness will bring about your demise in five to ten years. You don’t know when after your five-year mark but you just keel over by year ten. The good news is that you'll feel as healthy as you feel right now so you're going to feel pretty good. The question is what would you do with your life and how would you live your life? Would anything change?
Questions 3: Similar scenario as question two you go to visit your doctor and your doctor stuns you this time with the worst news you could have and that is that you only have 24 hours left to live you've had an illness even though you didn't even know that you did and it's come to term so the question is what did you not get to do? Who did you not get to be?
These questions starve the ego and feed the soul of truthful self-exploration. Question one is fun. Imagining I’m Jeff Bezos, I’d buy the infrared sauna with an attached ice bath I’ve always wanted. I’d travel to snowboard in Switzerland and fine dine across the world. Question two gets a little more serious and introduces the idea of the end. My tonality changes as I’m now considering how I would spend the remainder of my time. My focus shifts to things that I care about most. Question three hits the hardest, it’s heavy. One day left – that’s it. Letting that sink in, this serves as a compass for what you wanted most.
For me, I would have wanted to be more of service to others. I would have wished I got out of my own way to open the door to share and connect more. With the hope this would have led me to friends and connections most relevant to who I was not who the world/society wanted me to be.
This led me to write. Naturally, I think there’s a cathartic nature to writing. The goal over time is to produce a museum of helpful ideas, concepts and connections with others (and have some fun in the process).
It's one thing to recognize the value in the exercise, it’s entirely another to live it out. Like a teacher calling you out in the classroom. You’re forced to express your ideas to the world. It’s different than thinking of the answer to yourself when a question is asked – you don’t have any skin in the game. When you open that train of thought publicly, your spoken words act as a forcing function on your curiosity.
Many times, we invert our ears-to-mouth ratio and find ourselves waiting to speak instead listening to respond. When’s the last time someone asked you a genuine question where there was an 8 second silence and they didn’t interrupt your train of thought? There is magic in the silence.
These questions can be used as the kindling to your life vision. What do you want to make out of this finite time you have here on Earth? Give yourself the time and space to think and share. I encourage you to invite your best friend out to dinner. Make a night out of these questions. Let your friend really embody and dive into their answers. An hour of thinking can save a decade of work. You’ll be surprised by what you hear. Where could these questions lead you?