Only Six Months Left To Live
The ultimate exercise that helps you break patterns of inaction, paralysis and wrong focus.
Imagine for a moment that today you went to get the results of a routine medical check up. Only that this time, you are getting news from the doctor that you simply weren’t prepared for.
You have a terminal disease and only six months left to live.
I know how crazy this sounds.
But please, do yourself a favour and actually do this thought exercise. I know how hard it is to get yourself to do it. After all, it is the last thing we would ever want in our lives.
I just did it myself.
It freaks you out. Scares you to death.
But it also is the most powerful way to make the changes in your life that you may have neglected for years, or even decades.
Here’s why:
As Steven Pressfield writes in The War Of Art: “What happens in that instant when we learn we may soon die is that the seat if our consciousness shifts. It moves from the Ego to the Self”.
As soon as we realise that we may die soon, we will automatically begin to turn our attention to the most important aspect of our lives, and take action in order to make the most out of our remaining time.
Nobody wants to die without first bringing their life in order.
When you are imagining that you are going to die six months later, and you are forcing yourself to truly believe in this fact for a moment, then you are tapping into the exact same energy as you would if it was real.
But be careful.
What you do next is just as important.
The first possible outcome of this exercise is that you are just plainly scared. In this case, anxiety overwhelms you, chokes you, engulfs you to the point that you can no longer escape it.
Here’s how to make sure this doesn’t happen:
One thing you need to do is to quickly shift your mind-set from the person who has just received the news, to the person who has been reflecting on it for a little while.
The person who has just received the news is plain shocked.
The person who has been reflecting about it for a while, is thinking about what this means for their life, what steps they need to take now, and how to maximise the time they have left.
Once you’re in that state of mind, start asking yourself purposeful questions.
Questions like these:
- What do I need to do now?
- What do I need to do to bring my life in order?
- What do I need to do to make sure that these six months, are the most gratifying that I have ever had in my life?
- What haven’t I achieved yet that I could make happen during these six months, and that would give me a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment?
- What are the things that truly matter to me? The things I need to get in order in the little time that I have left?
Breaking patterns of inaction, paralysis and wrong focus.
The point of this exercise is to propel you into action. Not any action, but the kind that is focused on the things that truly matter.
It is designed to smash our three most common enemies:
- inaction
- analysis paralysis
- a wrong focus
More often than not, we simply don’t take action on the most crucial aspects of our lives. We get stuck trying to analyse the situation. Or, we make ourselves so busy with other stuff that there is simply no other space left.
Our internal resistance is at work.
We procrastinate.
Although, deep down, we know that we are not working on something that is truly important to us, we can’t find a way of breaking out of this pattern.
Imminent death is the most powerful way of breaking this pattern.
It forces us into a state of true focus.
And that is the state of mind, which we are trying to simulate through this exercise.
Some final words:
Living a creative- or entrepreneurial lifestyle forces us to keep fighting our own internal battles. It is a brutal lifestyle, that continuously exposes us to the darkest side of our human selves.
The resistance.
The thing that brings us to keep sabotaging ourselves.
The thing that would be the happiest if we died without ever achieving anything.
The thing that will come to your funeral and laugh at you because it has literally beaten you to death.
Is that what you want six months later?
No?
Then take action right now. Do the exercise.
Ask yourself:
“What do I need to do (and achieve) over these next six months, that, if I really were to die, would allow me to die happily, satisfied, and proud of myself?”
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