What would you do if you had one week left — SEQUEL question
(Transcribed from video)
Morning! August 13th and I’ve got another question for you.
This is actually a follow up to one that I posed several weeks ago, which was then, What do you do if you have only one week left to live?
And then I suggested that actually it makes sense to change the timeframe. What do you do if you have one minute left? Why, that’s your top priority, that’s what you do. That’s the most important thing. That’s all you’ve got you all, you’ve got one minute to do it, that’s your top priority. And then you scale it up to one hour, one day, one week, et cetera. And you can progressively add things in that are lower in priority because you can achieve them. You’ve got the timeframe.
Well, the followup question to that is as important, and it’s one that most of us are not ever going to ask, simply because we don’t think it’s possible. And the question is,
What would you do with your life, if you had 1000 years left?
The logical response to that is, well, I’m never going to have a thousand years left. Nobody’s ever lived for a thousand years. So silly question.
No, it’s not. Yeah, you might not live for a thousand years, but that’s not to say you can’t have an impact for a thousand years.
The question is inspired by reading some of the Old Testament stories. You know, you look at Solomon’s proverbs, yeah, he’s long gone, but we’re still reading his proverbs, what is it, 3000 years later? 2000? 3000 years later? Something like that. He figured out a way to have an impact way beyond a thousand years, even if he didn’t live it.
When you look at the prophet Abraham, who funnily enough, when he was a hundred and finally has his promised son Isaac, and he describes himself as as good as dead yet. Wow. Looky here! I get to have a son when I’m 100! And look at his impact! We’re still talking about him 3000 years later out ahead. It had a disproportionate effect on his lifespan because while he described himself as, as good as dead, at a hundred, he actually lived to be 165, and he went on to have marry again and have more kids. It had a strange effect on his physiology, on his mind and his physiology.
So what about me? Why can’t I have an impact like that?
I suppose there’s a lot of things that could be holding me back. Most of them I’ll have no ability to control. I mean, Solomon wrote his proverbs and had no guarantee that they were going to still be around 3000 years later, but he wrote them anyway. He decided he would just trust the soup, trust the universe. It worked. You know?
So the only thing holding you back from having a disproportionate impact really, is yourself. Think big. Think over a long scale, a thousand years. What can you do that people will still be talking about a thousand years from now?
Yeah, you’re probably not going to be around a thousand years from now, but in their minds, you will be. What can you do? What can you accomplish? What would you do? How would you spend your life today if you knew you’re going to live a thousand years? Start thinking that way. Start thinking on that, on that magnitude, on that time frame. Thought, why can’t you? Why can’t you have an impact that lasts a thousand years?
Why limit it to a thousand years?
No reason whatsoever.
Kirk out!
