The weekend is over. Summer is over for many people. Folks are heading back to the office and the classroom; sharing stories of all the fun things they did on vacation that they won’t be able to do again until the next holiday.
Sipping your mediocre office coffee and hacking through your 1,745 unread messages that trickled into your inbox while you were away, you pause briefly to glance at your phone. You recently updated the lock screen wallpaper with a picture of you and your wife standing in front of the beach house. Man, that was such an amazing week.
Sip. Click. Sigh.
“What am I even doing with my life?”
“Is this it? What’s waiting for me at the bottom of the inbox? Just more emails. More clicking. More sipping. More sighing. And then I die.”
Welcome to Mortality Monday. That’s right, there’s nothing quite like a Monday at the end of August to get you thinking about death and life choices. Settling back into your “normal routine” can be refreshing for some people, but crisis-inducing for others. I’m not necessarily knocking office work. And office coffee can sometimes be down right good.
But it’s healthy to take inventory of your life, your goals, your trajectory, and make sure you’re pointed in the right direction.
Over at Brerro, I’ve been leading our Business Foundations Bootcamp cohort through an exercise that has us all thinking about our finish line. We’re writing our own eulogies and drafting 10, 5, and 1 year plans. It might sound like some silly hokey pokey, but I believe it’s really important to have a clear vision for where you are headed. If you know what you want your life to look like when you are at the end of it, then you’ll be in a much better position to understand what you need to do to get there.
Reflecting on your mortality helps motivate us to make the most of our remaining days, and to do what we need to do to stay on track for our long term goals.
Cast a vision for you life. And go BIG! Don’t settle for office coffee and sighs. Think about the things you want to build, the people you want to surround yourself with, the legacy you want to leave. Write yourself and amazing final scene. Actually write it down. And read it regularly.
When you get to the office tomorrow. Instead of thinking about all the fun stuff that’s now behind you, think about all of the amazing things that are still in front of you.
