I couldn’t sleep one night last week so to be productive, I decided to follow up on some emails. Many of these emails were things that I had put off because I wanted to word them the right way. For example, I had to nudge a few people who I was awaiting a response from. But that night, I didn’t seem to care; no more beating around the bush – I was direct and to the point.
After that, I logged into the various social media sites to see what my friends were up to and saw some posts from friends from high school. I immediately thought about how life would have been different at that stage of my life had I had social media. No more waiting until school the next day for communicating – I could just send an email whenever. And that got me thinking about how today’s technology could have certainly made things interesting back then.
Live Like You Were Dying
Life is too short and we never know when the final chapter of our lives will come to a close. Some of us are fortunate to have some advanced warning that our days are numbered while others depart completely unexpected. If you find yourself in the first group, there is a silver lining to that cloud.
There’s a song by Tim McGraw called “Live Like You Were Dying.” It’s about a guy with a friend who finds out his days are numbered and chooses to use it as an opportunity to really live. Rather than sulk and spend his remaining days depressed, the man in this song pushes life to its limit. As the chorus begins “I went sky diving. I went Rocky Mountain climbing. I spent 2.7 seconds, on a bull named Fu Man Chu.” Most of us would never consider doing such activities out of fear of getting hurt, getting permanently disabled or even dying. Of course, when you’ve been given only weeks or months to live, these consequences seem like less of a concern.
The Worst Type of Risk
I think most people naturally fear taking risks. There’s so much unknown and so many things that can go wrong. Plus, whenever someone takes a foolish risk and falls flat on his or her face, the story of it travels through that person’s network at lightspeed. So add ridicule and embarrassment to results often associated with taking risks.
The topic of risks came up with a few friends recently and I was asked about the worst risk I ever took. While I searched through my memories for the typical things that come to mind like asking out a girl who was way out of my league or investing time and/or effort into a startup, I couldn’t really find anything. Whenever I took social risks when it came to things like dating, I usually was glad about taking the risk — even if things didn’t work out in my favor, I knew to move on. As far as professional risks went, I’ve made my share of blunders with speeches, networking events and even with some of the classes I first offered when I pushed myself beyond my limits. But the blunders were only part of the story — for each of these blunders, there were a number of successes (sometimes just small ones) but these successes (and even mistakes) resulted in a learning experience.