Read Online 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Bregman
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job—because you’ll end up a more interesting person. When you finally get that job interview, you’ll be able to recount all the many things you’ve been doing (and will probably have a good time relating them) instead of saying that the only thing you’ve been doing for the past three years is looking (unsuccessfully so far) for a job.
I just heard the story of a woman who decided to do work she didn’t enjoy for a few years in order to make a lot of money. Three years later, the company went bankrupt. That could happen to anyone. Bad luck. But here’s what she said that I found the most depressing: “It’s as though I didn’t work for the last three years—it’s all gone. And what’s worse, I worked like a dog and hated it. I just wasted three years of my life.”
Don’t waste your time, your year. Spend it in a waythat excites you. That teaches you new things. That introduces you to new people who see you at your natural, most excited, most powerful best. Use and develop your strengths. Use and even develop your weaknesses. Express your differences. And pursue the things you love.
There’s no better way to spend your year.
Your year will be best spent doing work that you enjoy so much, it feels effortless. You’ll always work tirelessly at your passions—hard work will feel easier.
15
What Matters to You?
Element Four: Pursue Your Passion (Meaning)
I was lying in bed, reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.
I put down the magazine and lay with my head on the pillow as I thought about death.
My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer; she died after a decades-long battle with the disease. A few months after her death, I received a call from a friend of mine, in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. A few days after that, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew hehad. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.
And here I was now, reading an article by Atul Gawande about rethinking end-of-life medical treatment. Gawande isn’t just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life, he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”
I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But it was somewhere in the middle of that article that it suddenly hit me—not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally:
I am going to die
.
Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey, asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day.
According to the data, most of us spend a total of almost 20 hours of each day sleeping (8.68 hours/day), working (7.78 hours/day), and watching television (3.45 hours/day). I know: Shocking, right? I mean, who sleeps that much?
It’s hard to look at the data and not think about where you fit in. Do you watch more or less television? Do you work longer or shorter hours? It’s a useful and interesting exercise to examine how we spend each minute of the day. To know where we’re devoting our wisdom, our action, our life’s energy.
And yet
where
we spend our time tells us only so much.More important, and completely subjective, is what those activities
mean
to us.
I recently happened upon a short article, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their
I just heard the story of a woman who decided to do work she didn’t enjoy for a few years in order to make a lot of money. Three years later, the company went bankrupt. That could happen to anyone. Bad luck. But here’s what she said that I found the most depressing: “It’s as though I didn’t work for the last three years—it’s all gone. And what’s worse, I worked like a dog and hated it. I just wasted three years of my life.”
Don’t waste your time, your year. Spend it in a waythat excites you. That teaches you new things. That introduces you to new people who see you at your natural, most excited, most powerful best. Use and develop your strengths. Use and even develop your weaknesses. Express your differences. And pursue the things you love.
There’s no better way to spend your year.
Your year will be best spent doing work that you enjoy so much, it feels effortless. You’ll always work tirelessly at your passions—hard work will feel easier.
15
What Matters to You?
Element Four: Pursue Your Passion (Meaning)
I was lying in bed, reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.
I put down the magazine and lay with my head on the pillow as I thought about death.
My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer; she died after a decades-long battle with the disease. A few months after her death, I received a call from a friend of mine, in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. A few days after that, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew hehad. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.
And here I was now, reading an article by Atul Gawande about rethinking end-of-life medical treatment. Gawande isn’t just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life, he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”
I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But it was somewhere in the middle of that article that it suddenly hit me—not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally:
I am going to die
.
Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey, asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day.
According to the data, most of us spend a total of almost 20 hours of each day sleeping (8.68 hours/day), working (7.78 hours/day), and watching television (3.45 hours/day). I know: Shocking, right? I mean, who sleeps that much?
It’s hard to look at the data and not think about where you fit in. Do you watch more or less television? Do you work longer or shorter hours? It’s a useful and interesting exercise to examine how we spend each minute of the day. To know where we’re devoting our wisdom, our action, our life’s energy.
And yet
where
we spend our time tells us only so much.More important, and completely subjective, is what those activities
mean
to us.
I recently happened upon a short article, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their
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