In Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, there’s a passage that briefly mentions a story I’m sure many are familiar with, or at least have heard a version of it:
Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live. Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing Tex-Mex songs she gave up on to raise a family (or starts studying classical Greek, or moves to the inner city and devotes herself to tending to babies with AIDS). Woman’s friends think she’s crazy; she herself has never been happier. There’s a postscript. Woman’s cancer goes into remission.
We go through life thinking we have all the time in the world—that we’ll get around to doing the things we say we want to do sooner or later, just not right now. It’s not until you look the inevitable in the face that you start to rethink your priorities. You start to think that, actually, I’m not so tired after work, that I can actually put an hour or two into learning a new skill or staying on top of chores. Going on that trip you’ve put off for years suddenly sounds all the more appealing, and making memories starts to trump the cheap dopamine surges you get from browsing social media.
So let me pose the question: what would you do if you only had 6 months remaining?
A New Perspective
Now, I think it’s fairly obvious that this is more of an abstract question. If you truly only had 6 months remaining, you’d likely do something along the lines of quit your job, gather up all the spare cash you have, and meticulously plan out the rest of your days. The point I wish to drive home with this question isn’t so much the exactness of what you do, but rather the mindset we have to have to do things and the urgency in which you do them.
No matter if your time gets eaten up by sleep, work, school, commuting, and everything in-between, or if you happen to have an abundance of time with no priorities, it never seems easy to do the things you want to do. Time and time again, you opt for the slightly easier thing instead of the slightly harder thing. It doesn’t seem that big in the moment, but look back over an extensive period of time and you start to see what the progress—or lack thereof—looks like.
Envision a graph where the X axis is ‘days’ and the Y axis is ‘percent improvement’. Every day, you have a choice to make: how much are you willing to improve yourself by the end of it? The rule of thumb here is that anything above 0% is trending upward, whereas 0% itself is trending downward—or, at absolute best, maintaining the baseline. Each day that you put a little bit of effort in, that’s a positive improvement, and over the course of 3 months, 6 months, a year, and so on, the more those little itty bitty improvements stack up. Those 1% improvements are the core foundation of building the person you want to be.
This isn’t some mechanical, linear process. The point is to show up and commit to betterment, no matter how small. There’s bound to be some days where you knock it out of the park and hit 5% improvement, or some days where nothing is going right and it’s a 0.1% improvement. The exact number doesn’t matter. We want to get into the mindset of showing up and doing the work, no matter what. By the end of the year, with a rate of 1% improvement every day, you’ve wracked up a whopping 365% improvement from where you were at. Mind you, that years worth of time is going to pass either way, so really, why aren’t you striving for a bit of improvement every day?
Here’s another way of thinking about it: there will come several times in a day where you have a choice to make: the slightly easier thing (putting the dishes in the sink, letting the trash fill up to its absolute limit, putting the email you need to send on the to-do list with an “I’ll do it later”) or the slightly harder thing (washing the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, replacing the trash bag before it becomes an issue, sitting down and taking the 5 minutes right now to get that email over with). Whenever possible, I urge you do the slightly harder thing. This will require you to be intentional about noticing these moments, but the more you notice them, the more apparent these tiny moments become, and the more you decide to do the slightly harder things, the more resilient you become in chasing after the stuff that matters.
Acting with Urgency
Now that we’re able to show up and do things, let’s circle back around to the initial hypothetical: you’ve got 6 months left; how do you start to spend your time? If you’re anything like me, the thought of this lights a fire under you and makes you realize that there really isn’t all that much time to put things off. With a meager 6 months of time, there’s no way I could get to every single thing I want to accomplish. The trips I want to take, the skills I want to learn, the projects I want to make; all of it compressed into a small time frame puts into perspective both how little time 6 months is, and also how much time it’ll take for you to do everything else.
More than that, however, is the sense of reassurance that is accompanied by this perspective. Instead of waiting around for some ethereal being to suddenly proclaim when the best time is for you to do something, you’ve now put yourself in the driver’s seat. If you don’t paint your canvas with the time you have ahead, no one else will do it for you, and that becomes all the more apparent with the end in mind. No longer are you waking up every day wondering when you’ll do something, because now is the time to do it. There’s only 6 months left, after all.
Perhaps the most impactful thought that emerges from this is the fact that we simply do not and cannot know the truth of the matter. In actuality, I have no clue if I’ve yet to reach the 6 month threshold, if I’m right on the cusp of it, or worse, have already passed it. It could very well be that I have less than 6 months left as of this very moment in time. And if that were the case, then I’m already on the right track. When the end finally comes around, it’s far less likely that I’ll regret the things I’ve done, rather than the things I haven’t.
So with that in mind, take a moment to consider if the ways in which you spend your time on a day-to-day basis is truly something you’d be doing once you fact the end into the equation. I have good reason to believe that the vast majority of people don’t willingly surrender their attention to short-form content or other addictive notions, and I equally believe that those same people have something deep in their heart that they’d rather be doing. It’s time to make that first incremental improvement.
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