I haven’t read this book yet, but I stumbled on this quote from it today. One of the many paradoxes of life is that time is one of the least valued yet most valuable asset you own.
“Death is the end of a lifetime. Denial of death is a denial that time will end. If you deny that time ends, you are likely to treat time much differently than you would if you felt time to be scarce and of limited duration. If you imagine your life as infinite, you are unlikely to value time as more precious than gold and more likely to treat it as ordinary grains of sand on a beach. Ironically, denying death relieves anxiety and psychological stress, but it may also lead you to devalue life, so you may live less fully.”
– via Philip Zimbardo, The Time Paradox
Finding myself stumbling across several books that touch on death, most dealing with near-death experiences (Montaigne, Dostoevsky, 50 Cent, Eric Hoffer, and others all came close to death early in their life), likely persuaded me to get the watch below a little over a year ago.
What’s missing from a lot of goals is a sense of urgency. The sense of urgency can be achieved in numerous ways (many are mentioned in The 33 Strategies of War), but the most significant is to realize that your time is finite. Spend 5 minutes thinking about that each day and see how it affects your TV watching.
