If Seneca could only see us now. I wonder what he would say of all the predictive analysis like the future moves the Fed will make, economic growth prospects, construction pricing, labor shifts, rent rates, you name it.
“Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight?” – Seneca
Seneca experienced many wild swings throughout his life. He was born in Cordoba, Spain over 2,000 years ago.
Think about the wild adventure that he experienced to trek 2,208 km from Cordoba to Rome where he was educated as a young man. During his working career he was exiled by one Roman emperor to Corsica for 8 years, only to be brought back to Rome to advise another emperor who eventually ordered death.
Life and death are a natural evolution for our short time on this planet. Time doesn’t stop. Time is the one thing we can all never get back.
How do you use your time?
Seneca wrote an amazing essay, On the Shortness of Life, where he highlights how silly it is for people who disregard the importance of their time. It sounds easy to live each day like your last.
Are you filling your days with goals, tasks, and people that you enjoy?
The older I get, the more I realize that life is too short to work with people you do not enjoy being around. Does that mean everyone that I work with is amazing? No, but it makes it a lot easier to say Yes to some groups and No to others.
Life is short.
Seneca reminds us that focusing too much on tomorrow will ruin your joy for today:
“But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”
Do you live in the moment? Do you focus on the present? Or do you fill your days with calls, useless meetings, and reactive requests?
We all know the groups whose pants and hair always seem to be on fire. They are in crisis mode all the time. Seneca ran across these people too in ancient Rome:
“Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.”
The stoics used to talk about how no wind is favorable to the sailor who does not know where he is going.
Where are you going with your work? Do you need to live in your inbox responding to emails that really do not require your input?
Why are you listening in on conference calls if you are not taking notes or better yet direct action after the call? What is the highest and best use of your time?
Seneca gently reminds us about the importance of focus:
“You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
I love uncertainty. I love chaos.
But I also love calm. I also love knowing what I am going to do tomorrow.
Why? Because I have set time aside for the things that matter. My health. My family. My work. My experiences.
Are you living life today with purpose? Are you controlling your time, your actions, your reactions?
Just remember, if you do not prioritize your life, someone else will.
“So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.”
Life is not about the number of years you have lived. Life is about amazing experiences. Life is about finding joy in all that you do. Go out and live like you mean it.
The Real Con 015