Life is a precious gift, and maximizing its potential is an art. Discover ten transformative strategies to optimize your earthly journey, enhancing your experiences, relationships, and personal growth. Let's delve into the art of living fully and passionately.
Accepting our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly finite.
- When we recognize the shortness of life – and accept the fact that some things have to be left unaccomplished, whether we like it or not – we are freer to focus on the things that matter.
Consolidate Your Caring
Social media is a machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things
- Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics – and devote your spare time only to those specific causes
- Focus your capacity for care, so you don’t burn out
Seek out novelty in the mundane
Time seems to speed up as we age
- While children have many novel experiences and time therefore seems slower to them, the routinization of older people’s lives means that time seems to pass at an ever-increasing rate
- Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane – to find novelty by plunging more deeply into your present life
Cultivate instantaneous generosity
Give in to the generous impulse immediately, don’t wait to figure out if the recipient deserves your generosity.
Decide in advance what to fail at
Strategic underachievement – nominating in advance areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence
- helps you focus your time and energy more effectively
- To live this way, replace the high-pressure quest for work-life balance with something more reasonable – a deliberate kind of imbalance
Practice doing nothing
Doing nothing means resisting the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you, and to let things be as they are.
- Try the “do-nothing” meditation, where you set a timer for 5-10 minutes and then try doing nothing.
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just what’s left to do
One counter-strategy is to keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, but which you can gradually fill in throughout the day.
- It’s a cheering reminder that you could have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive… yet you didn’t.
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology
Make your devices as boring as possible, removing social media apps and, if you dare, email.
- Choose devices with only one purpose. Otherwise, temptations will be only a swipe away, and you’ll feel the urge to check your screens anytime you’re bored or facing a challenge in your work.
Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity
Keep two to-do lists – one for everything on your plate, and one for the 10 or fewer things that you’re currently working on
- Fill up the 10 slots on the second list with items from the first, then set to work
- The rule is not to move any further items from first list onto the second until you’ve freed up a slot by finishing one of the 10 items
Serialize
Focus only on one big project at a time.
- Strategic underachievement – nominating in advance the areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence – helps you focus your time and energy more effectively
- Multitasking rarely works well, and serializing helps you to complete more projects.
Be a researcher in relationships
When faced with a challenging or boring moment in a relationship, try being curious about the person you’re with, rather than controlling
- Curiosity is a stance well-suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike
