One of my favorite reads this summer was Curt Mercadante's book Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle: How to escape Your Comfort Zone of Misery.
First off, this is not a good book... its a GREAT book!
Secondly, the message I took away from Curt's book was that our lives on planet earth are much shorter than we are led to believe.
Case and point, if you were to subtract the non-working years of your life (0-21 & 66-78), you spend about 23% of your adult life at work. Furthermore, if you take into account the time you sleep, let's say 6.8 hours a night, you are working over 30% of our life! To take it one step further, a lot of people work +45 hours a week (10-12 hours a day, you know who you are!), thus calculating to over 40% of your life at work!
Now, I would agree that work can give you purpose, enjoyment, and ultimately will provide the monetary means to support you and your family, but given how much of your adult life (your prime) you will spend working, I think its imperative that you do not loose sight of everything else.
At 60 I am taking account of every year, month, week, day, and second. An actuary would tell you with a healthy diet, exercise, and the miracles of modern medicine, I have a good chance of living to 85 years of age. Those know me best realize I will be shooting for +100 years, but the most likely outcome is that I have about 25 years left.
A lot can be accomplished in 25 years, but at the same time (pun intended), twenty five years is finite. As a explained to my son Crosby who has been living in Seattle, WA for the last 8 years,
We see each other 4 times a year, maybe 5. If I were to live to 85, I probably will see you 100 more times, and after tonight maybe 99.
After this talk, my son got the message real quick - we have to increase the number of times we see each other, ASAP! 99 is just not enough time to spend with each other.
So tonight before you lay your head, think about the people you love the most - your wife/husband, kids, parents, friends, pets, and neighbors. Then try and and calculate where you are in life and do the math how many times you will see them before its all over. If you do not like the result, fix it, because life is shorter than you would think!
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Quote of the Day: "Early bird gets the worm. But Cookies taste better than worm. So let me sleep in.” – Cookie Monster
Song of the Day: "Simplethings" by Miguel
*My latest book; "Living on Purpose: Stories about Faith, Fortune and Fitness that will lead you to an Extraordinary Life", is available for order - Click Here*
