Mikkel Marius Winther

Think about your grandparents

Think about your grandparents. It doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead, think about them. Think about the lives they’ve led. About the choices they’ve made and how they were affected by them.

Think about when they were born, how they grew up and lived their lives, and where they are now (alive or dead).

Now consider yourself.

You’re going to grow old and sick, and you’re going to die.

And it’s going to happen real soon.

Think about your past. Where you’ve been, what you’ve done. Your past choices and actions brought you to where you are today. I hope you’re happy with your past because you can never change it. You can change the way you think about it but you can’t change what happened. So the wise thing to do would be to accept your past and learn from it.

Now think about your future. How would you like your life to be in ten years? Twenty? In one year? Tomorrow?

There are certain things you can’t change. You’re going to die. You don’t know when it will happen and you don’t know how. But it will happen. This life is finite.

There are certainly lots of things you have full control over. How do you face the world? What do you create? How do you interact with other people? These things are immensely important when it comes to deciding your future.

You may believe in an afterlife. You may believe in rebirth. You may believe death is the end and nothing comes after. No matter what you believe, think about the fact that your actions today control the rest of your life. And your life is short.

Think about your grandparents. What do their lives tell you about how you should live yours?

Doing my life’s work

When you’re on auto-pilot, no problem. You’ve done it before, so you recognize every pattern you’re in and there’s no need to worry.

But this also means you’re going the wrong way. You’re getting no new input, so you’re not recognizing any new patterns. If this is the way your life is going, you are actually actually becoming more useless. In an increasingly chaotic world, the best pattern recognizers win.

So the way to have an amazing life is to be constantly fearing failure, but driving forward anyway. It’s difficult to be doing this all the time. You need to pick your battles. Most things need to be stable and allow for safety, so you can focus on these one or two very difficult things.

— Julien Smith: How to tell if you’re doing your life’s work

This is very meaningful to me right now because I’m (a) generally doing great and (b) about to do something that scares me a lot. Let’s hope that’s a good sign.