Embracing Finitude
Context
Recently I’ve read Four Thousand Weeks book. Like other self-help books - it focuses on the single issue, looks into it from different angles and repeat the same thoughts in different ways until some of them hit you. So if I was to rephrase this book in a single sentence it would be: “Life is incredibly short, you cannot put everything into it so choose what matters most for you and actively say NO to everything else”.
This is the exact advice I needed to hear, because oh boy, there is so many things I would love to pursue, however I’m just not capable of doing all of that! And I keep forgetting about it over and over!
I wanted to focus on one particular exercise mentioned in the book (attributed to Warren Buffett): create a list of 20 things ‘what do you want out of your life’, choose top 5 and be aware that you should say NO to all other items on the list.
This exercise is interesting because it shows that you need to say NO to things you would like to do - it’s trickier than saying NO to things that you already know you don’t want to do (for example I don’t feel any need to dance ballet, but I would love to be that good at yoyo!).
Another important thing is being aware that every choice come with two sets of consequences: good and bad ones. Being great guitarist brings enormous benefits: i.e. the feeling on stage when you perform great and you can deliver awesome music to people. But it comes at price of exercising a lot (like hour or more daily + reherseals with band). That’s why I also added consequences to top 5 so it’s more clear what I am talking about.
My version of exercise
Well, I’m not comfortable with sharing publicly this list for now and if you don’t know me well probably it would be too personal anyway - if you know me personally and you’re interested - I guess I’ll just share the password with you.
However, I can share the template which was fun to go through for me:
💎 Something I want out of life
Let’s start with the “WHY”
my reasoning why I do want this particular item
How do I know I’m good at the thing?
I'm listing some criteria I think are good to measure - sometimes I just mention that it's super hard to measure so rather I define some activities that I think I would like to see myself doing
Cosequences of this choice (good ones):
List of things that I think will be awesome thanks to me pursuing this
Cosequences of this choice (bad ones):
List of things that I think will be a pain in the ass because of me choosing to pursue this
And then I list another 15 items I would like to do for some reasons (like being great at yoyo) and which I decide to give up because I realise that I’m just human being and that’s very limiting.
If you have a password though then I guess I wanted to share with you the hidden content - type it here:
That’s a good start for embracing finitude. Sounds drastic but I think it’s the right strategy if you only have 4 thousand weeks available. Finding personal top 5 and just nailing it while enjoying every moment is the way to go.