This is a guest post by Chris Brogan of [chrisbrogan.com]. (Julien will be back tomorrow.)
You have a finite amount of time on this planet. You have multitudes of ways to spend it. It’s up to you. Think about all the decisions you have to make.
After you wake, you pee and wash up. It’s breakfast, the first real decision of the day. Do you eat a bowl of cereal because it’s easy or do you go find a delicious-but-time-consuming meal somewhere out and about in the city? Do you create something healthy or do you eat leftovers? You will make this decision almost 400 times in this year alone.
Will you commute to some office? How far away is it? How long do you sit in traffic? What do you do with the traffic? Do you even like the job? Does it pay enough? Are you feeling satisfied by the work? If there’s a no somewhere in the last three questions, why are you doing it? Most people’s answer: because I have to, and/or because I’m waiting for something better.
Waiting. Time is rushing by like a storm and you’re waiting. How long will you live? 80 years? If you’re lucky, 80 is a great and long life for many. A friend of a friend just fell dead in her sleep. She wasn’t even 40. Nothing particularly wrong. She just died. One of those diseases no one has and you never see on a bumper sticker ribbon.
Our lives are filled with the shadows of stories unwritten. Our lives are filled with waiting and hoping and putting off and stuffing the cracks with papers from other people’s lives.
If you KNEW without a doubt that your decisions were the measure of who you are – and make no doubt that they are – are you PROUD of your decisions? Are you living the story you want to live?
And what will you do with tomorrow that you haven’t done with today? What lighthouse will you point yourself towards? And what flag will you fly?
Live now. Don’t wait. And fill in some of those shadows with stories you’d want to see written about you.
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