“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” ― Confucius
When I was a sophomore in college, I was playing with the idea that when you die, you cease to exist. A lot of the biology and anatomy classes I was taking at the time pointed me to this understanding.
As I thought about what life is on a biological level, I considered pre-life. I considered how I perceived life before I existed. I tried to draw any memory, emotion, or idea that I had before I was born. Obviously, that was impossible. It was nothingness. At least, I only understood it as nothingness.
I explored the idea of death further with this new perspective. To imagine life after death, I just had to translate the experience of what life was before birth. When I did that, I had a powerful moment of realization.
Life after death is nothingness. No new memories. No new emotions. No new thoughts. The lights will be off, just as they were before they were turned on.
I came to this moment in bed before going to sleep. I can remember the feeling like it was yesterday. I was struck with immediate existential dread. The finality of death hit me for the first time. I knew that I only had this one life to capture as much experience and output as possible.
My second life had begun.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Mahatma Gandhi
My post on Why You Shouldn’t Believe in Heaven sparked some controversy among my friends and family. Many missed the point. Some people’s main takeaway was that they didn’t want to believe that nothing happened after you died. I might not have articulated clearly that you don’t have to believe that. Nor should you. It’s unfounded. Just like the belief in the afterlife.
I make some concessions at the end of that blog to those thinking that dying and experiencing nothingness afterwards is hopeless. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, you must believe that this life is all you have. That makes this life especially important. I stated that if you believe life is the most important thing, you’ll appreciate its brevity.
As well, if you believe that this life is all you have, you won’t waste a second of it in the hopes that you go on to some imaginary tomorrow. We have all heard of the term carpe diem. We all understand it to mean ‘seize the day’. However, how many of our days are we actually seizing? For me, the answer is very few. I waste time scrolling through Instagram mindlessly and watching YouTube videos that teach me nothing. There is little sense of urgency to break bad habits and to form new, good habits.
That is because I, just like you, am living as if there are infinite tomorrows. There most likely aren’t. The days we have on this Earth are numbered. Life is short and then we die. That means that time is valuable. It is probably the most valuable thing we have. We can trade it for money. But when we do, we can never get it back in return.
The quote by Gandhi is a good one. It creates urgency for the present moment. If we live as if there were no tomorrow, we will make more of today. However, there are flaws with this way of life. We live in a world of abundance. Everything you could ever want is at your fingertips. All you must do is spend a little bit of money to get it.
If you embrace the concept of carpe diem, you might just embrace it the wrong way. You might eat some cake because ‘Fuck it, there ain’t gon’ be no tomorrow.’ You might even start talking like that because grammatical accuracy is for those trying to improve themselves, not you who only has today. You might buy a Maserati and use all the money in your bank account for the down payment because, well, you want to drive that Maserati today. Loan payments are for the tomorrows that doesn’t exist.
There are people in this world who find out that there is no tomorrow for them. For most of those people, they can’t live a larger-than-life existence for a day because they’re in a hospital. Their urgency to make the most of the present is hindered by their current state of being. And if they could, they’d trade everything they have to have more time.
If you’re not in that position, it’s fun to think of what you would do if there were no tomorrow. Books have been written about it. Movies have been made. Unfortunately (or fortunately), living recklessly isn’t what Gandhi meant when he said to live as if “you were going to die tomorrow.”
There is more to that quote.
“Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi
The second part of this quote qualifies what Gandhi meant. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow” means to live with urgency. “Learn as if you were to live forever,” means that we must build upon each day to create a fulfilling life. We must fill each day with learning and experience. That way we can lead a life of meaning. Confucius said we only have one life. Not one day.
We cannot forego discipline, learning, and growth because we are expecting it all to end tomorrow. The urgency Gandhi preaches to us is supposed to create urgency, not carelessness.
If reckless abandon isn’t the goal, then what is? That is highly dependent on the person. We have all heard that success is relative. We all have our different views upon what success means to us.
That doesn’t mean success doesn’t exist.
“Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things.” – Booker T. Washington
Our goal in life is to be successful. Whatever that means to us as individuals. No amount of success comes through wasting the valuable and limited time that we have here.
In this blog, I want to try and provide you with some guidelines on how to approach your day to maximize it’s potential. Unfortunately, providing a concrete set of rules to live by is challenging when the result is a subjective feeling of success. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to calculate success. I explain more below, but feel encouraged to run this quick experiment to see if your life is being well spent:
If you were to look upon yesterday, pretending it was your last, what would you think? Would you look upon it with pride? Or would you roll your eyes at how careless you were? Would you scoff at yourself for being rude to that cashier? Would you throw your hands in the air in disgust for wasting time on some political discussion on Facebook?
Would you wish you would have gone outside and appreciated the fresh air? Would you have wished you had spent more time with your family? Would you have wished you started writing that essay you said you were going to write? Would you have told your loved ones how you felt about them?
As you can see, looking back on yesterday in this way changes your perspective. If you were to change anything, it probably wouldn’t be that you would have went skydiving instead of going to work. You wouldn’t take a trip to Asia or go zip lining in Puerto Rico. You wouldn’t have bought that Maserati.
You would appreciate the small things more. You would eliminate the wasted moments. You would live more fully. You would control the things you could control. You would forget about the things you couldn’t.
Carpe diem, then, may not be the thing we say as we jump out of a plane with a parachute strapped to our back. It might just be the thing we say as we awake, to ensure that no stone goes unturned and not a second is wasted. That we solidify tomorrow’s excellence because today was so complete.
What might this look like in practice? How might we judge the completeness on how we lived today?
“Little strokes fell great oaks.” – Benjamin Franklin
We have all probably heard the saying telling us to “just get 1% better every day.” It seems trite. Mostly because how do we measure 1% improvement of our day? 1% of what? What metrics are we comparing to make a 1% improvement?
I think I have an answer. However, before I discuss what the answer is, I want to validate Benjamin Franklin’s quote as well as the concept of 1% improvements.
If you’ve read anything about Warren Buffet, taken any accounting course, or passed elementary mathematics, you’ll know about compounding interest. Compounding interest means that when we make a percentage return on a previous sum continuously over time, we don’t make a percentage return on the sum we originally started with. We make a percentage return on the new sum. That means that each time we make a return (ensuring that we reinvest that return), that interest payment would be greater than the previous interest payment. When this happens over a long enough period, the interest payments can become massive.
This works well with money. But it can apply to our time, our habits, and our knowledge. Anything we make improvements on continuously over time will compound if we continue to reinvest. Small acts of improvement will not yield linear returns. The returns will be exponential if they are consistently had. If you are more disciplined today then you were yesterday, the layers of discipline you build later are easier to create and larger in scale.
But to see this improvement, we must be able to measure it. So, the question still stands: “How do I prove that I’m making a 1% improvement.”
The Day Score
You might have some ideas of habits you’d like to build and habits you’d like to eliminate. You can use a habit tracker app for these. That would work fine. However, the only thing it will be able to tell you is how much better you are at completing the habit. It probably won’t tell you about the quality at which you accomplished that habit. It won’t score you based on that quality.
To better quantify my day’s quality, I decided I’m going to keep a log of what I call “Day Scores”. These scores are a sum of positive and negative metrics that are tracked using an amazingly simple value system. Positive metrics, which signify things I’d like to do more of or be better at, are tracked with positive values. Negative metrics, things I want to eliminate or do less of, are tracked with negative values. I track all of this in an Excel spreadsheet. Every morning, I input the values from the previous day, sum the values, and get my total. That total is the score for that previous day. The Day Score tells me how well I seized that day.
Below are some examples of values I use to score my day. What you’ll see is that some of the ones that aren’t on a 0-100 scale have a multiple. This multiple is to appropriately weight the value of that metric. If I really want to begin flossing my teeth but only count each time I floss as 1, the new habit adds little to my overall Day Score (therefore making it less motivating to do). So, I add a multiple (in the case of flossing, x5) to improve the habits impact on the outcome of the score. This helps if you really want to kick a habit. Make the multiple for doing the bad thing (like smoking cigarettes), incredibly high. That will cause your Day Score to be ruined by engaging with that activity.
Positive Metrics
· Workout Quality (0-100 subjective rating)
· Flossing (1 for each time with a x5 multiple)
· Pages Read
· Fun Score (0-100 subjective rating of day funness)
· Time Meditating (in Minutes)
· Positivity Score (0-100 subjective rating)
Negative Metrics
· Phone Screen Time (Minutes)
· Phone Unlocks
· Time on Instagram (in Minutes)
· Unnecessary Money Spent (in Dollars)
· Bad Food (x10 multiple for each item)
· Negativity Score (0-100 subjective rating)
This is not a perfect system. I just came up with it. It will have to be revised repeatedly, I’m sure. Being able to accurately rate your positivity or negativity on any given day is challenging. However, as you continue to write in these scores, you’ll get more precise over time. It’s like if you were to start a new career reviewing wine. You’ll have to judge many wines until your reviews become more precise to each other. The same is true here.
This is also an experiment. It is a new system and I’m not sure how well it will work for me. Over the past three days, I have appreciated the mornings of reflection and genuinely feel like I can see clear areas of improvement. It has given me greater awareness into where I have great success, and where I have great failure.
I will write an update blog on July 31st to comment on the success of the experiment. My first day score using my own metrics was a -43.82. Hopefully, we will see that 1% compounding increase over the next month and a half!
I created an Excel spreadsheet for anyone to create a Day Score tracker for themselves. I put in the multiples as well as the formula for each column, so you don’t have to multiply and add everything on your own. The first column has some example values to show you how the system should work. Give it a try and let me know if your Day Score goes up over time!
And remember, live as if there were no tomorrow. Carpe diem, my friends.
