The Moment When You Have No Other Option But To Succeed

Bear with me, I got a strange question for you.

What would you do if you found out that you only had 3 and a half more months to live? Only 3 and a half. Would you still wake up early to go to work every day? Would you spend your weekends watching marathons of TV shows? Or would you spend every single day left complaining about how unfair your life has been?

Think about it deeply. Because it’s more significant than you might imagine.

Would you still put someone else’s priorities above your own if you knew that in only a couple of months, you would no longer be here? Would stacking papers and sending emails to be the most important thing you would want to do before… the end?

Just asking that question scares the heck out of me.

But you know what, it’s important to have an answer to that question. A firm answer. YES or NO.

And it’s even more important to have the answer to the follow-up question: “What would you do to do instead?”.

If you are like a good number of people, hundreds of ideas would rush through your mind. You would see yourself on top of Mt Everest. You would see yourself learning how to DJ. You would see yourself playing in a music band. You would see yourself traveling the world. You would see yourself helping abused and abandoned children.

What you would not see or rarely see, is yourself sending more emails. You would not see yourself watching the entire 23+ seasons of the Simpsons back-to-back. You would probably not care that there are tones of sad, tragic, depressing, discouraging news updates on TV because you no longer have that much time to be in constant worry.

Let me ask you this: if you knew that you had only 3 (not 3 and a half) months to live, how concerned would you be about making lots of money? Would how much you made be more valuable than how you lived? Would it be more valuable than the dream you pursued?

Am I saying something completely crazy? Scary, I’m sure to a good number of us. But crazy?

Only when faced with the reality of certain death in the near future, does our inner-self decide to protest the current lives we live. Only then, do we really ask ourselves whether this is truly the best we can get out of our own lives.

Regret gets more and more common in our lives the older we get. I have a feeling that you don’t spend too much time asking senior citizens just what they regret most in life. Or what they wish they had done when they were younger. Very few respond with the answer “nothing. I lived a life true to my inner-self”.

This makes me think about something very very and I mean very disturbing….

If humans could live up to 250 years… There is a possibility that many would spend the first 200 of those years, doing things they didn’t have any personal connection to. There is also a possibility that the remaining 50 years would be spent regretting. It’s not like that isn’t what’s happening now with our current lifespans today.

Okay, let me stop.

I think by now you get the picture I’m trying to paint. We are human beings. We each have a unique set of eyes, brains, and hearts. We also have unique dreams and desires. We have to be extremely protective and conscious of them.

Only when faced with our own mortality, do we challenge the status quo. Only when sure that we will no longer be… do we “wish we had”.

Your goals and dreams truly exist. Every single human being has a calling. It’s just that some listen to it, and others do not. Others, need their entire lives to be consumed before they realize that there was a voice on the inside trying to tell them the real truth about their lives.

Now… let’s look at the flip-side. What if I told you that you have over 70 years more years to live? What would you do? Would you abandon your desire to travel the world, so that you could spend more time on emails?

Would you ignore your desire to start a blog because there are very interesting TV shows you have not yet watched?

Would you give up on trying to pursue a personal business because that would mean having to get out of bed on a Saturday and Sunday morning?

The moment you realize when you have no other choice but to succeed isn’t when you realize that you have only a few months of life left.

No.

It is the very moment you realize, that living a life true to your inner-self is all that has ever mattered.

It doesn’t take hard work to pursue your dream. It takes hard work, convincing yourself every single moment that your dream is WORTH pursuing.

As long as you are convinced that your dream is worth fighting for… trust me, come rain, snow, or shine… you will ALWAYS figure out how to succeed at what you want to succeed at most.

#makeProgressNotExcuses