This is Your Last Day — A Motivational Pep Talk
“The salvation of the world depends only on the individual whose world it is. At least, every individual must act as if the whole future of the world, of humanity itself, depends on him. Anything less is a shirking of responsibility and is itself a dehumanizing force, for anything less encourages the individual to look upon himself as a mere actor in a drama written by anonymous agents, as less than a whole person, and that is the beginning of passivity and aimlessness.”
Joseph Weizenbaum
Give me a little latitude as I set up this thought-experiment. Imagine that your ship is sinking. Your house is burning. Your life support is running out. However you put it, this is your last day to get your shit together, your crap done, to be profitable, to pass on whatever you are building on to somebody else — somebody, mind you, that you care about!
Your Life’s MVP
This is the thinking required to wake yourself up, re-align your focus, and achieve great things. It is also the thinking required to prioritize on the most critical aspects of what needs addressing and to drop the noise.
It’s your MVP, your Minimum Viable Product, finish it today. Sometimes removing the cruft in and around a to-do list is all it takes to jolt motivation, discipline, and productivity back into existence.
Oh, and You’re Gonna Die
Yes, inspirational words can also be of the scary type. But there’s no circumventing this, life is short and ephemeral. So yes, this could be your last day.
There’s nothing like a good bar chart to bring this home. Here are the top deaths for 2016 from “Our World in Data”. Most of us will die from one of its listed causes. This is a harsh form of inspiration but if it gets me off the couch, I’ll take it.
It gets worse, 50 percent of all cardiac deaths in the heart’s vessels occur in individuals with no prior history or symptoms of heart disease. And the same can be said about road accidents, number 9 on the chart, infections, number 6, fires, homicides, drownings, etc. If you didn’t make the list, then you won the lottery, at least for one more day.
The point is this party will not last forever. It can end abruptly with no warning. You need to identify and accomplish the things important to you. The things you want to leave behind as your legacy. The things you want to leave behind for your loved ones. And there’s no better time than now.
Imagine the productivity spectrum, on one end, are the things we can’t wait to do, on the other end, the boring stuff where motivation, besides the gun to your head, rarely shows up. I’ll relegate the boring stuff to your raw discipline or fear of being fired. It’s that middle ground where we want to do something but either the learning curve or the emotional cost is too big. Those are the tasks where dramatic inspirational messages may help.
I hate wasting time. I feel full of regret and guilt when I wake up from an internet-gorging fest, bouncing from one boring link to another just because they are in front of me. Mind you, I have no problem going out with friends, spending time with family, even sitting on the couch and relaxing.
It’s that limbo state, the time in-between productivity, and relaxation when I meander aimlessly from one random post to the next that are costly. They design these distractions to lure you down a rabbit hole where you easily lose your sense of time and direction. It’s after a few of these surprises that I lean on a life-jolting bar chart to set me straight.
For more fringe motivational techniques, please check out my latest book “Fringe Tactics — Finding Motivation in Unusual Places”.
On Amazon: Fringe Tactics — Finding Motivation in Unusual Places
Thanks for reading!
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Manuel Amunategui, Curator ViralML.com, Founder KeepTheTalk.com. Author of “Grow Your Web Brand, Visibility & Traffic Organically: 5 Years of amunategui.github.Io and the Lessons I Learned from Growing My Online Community from the Ground Up”
