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From Mark Ford, founder, Palm Beach Research Group: I injured my shoulder wrestling a few weeks ago and it doesn’t seem to be healing. Certainly not as fast as it would have healed when I was in my 30s.
This is one of the many execrable things that happen when you reach your 60s. But it’s hardly the worst.
The worst thing is you can’t avoid thinking about death.
People you know—colleagues, friends, and family members—are seriously sick or dying.
Eventually, we all come to a crossroad where we must decide: Should I continue to deny death, to “rage against the dying of the light?” Or should I accept the fact that we’re all dead men on leave?
We can do both.
We can live our lives fully and purposefully… while gradually allowing the reality of death to sit comfortably in our psyches.
Here are five steps you can take today to get yourself on that track:
- Spend 15 minutes (by yourself) thinking about mortality.
Take a walk. Find a peaceful place. Breathe slowly. Look around. Recognize that one day—sooner than you can believe—you will not exist anymore.Try to get, as clearly as you can, a sense of your own mortality. Try to stop—if only for a few moments—a fundamental aspect of consciousness: the denial of death.
Use that recognition to get to the next step.
- Imagine your own funeral.
Visualize four people who are speaking about you: a significant other, a child or parent, a friend, and someone involved in your career. Imagine what they would say about you if you died tomorrow. Be honest.If there’s a difference between what you think those four people would say about you and what you’d like them to say, you’ve got some work to do.
- Turn what you’d like them to say about you into your primary goals.
Write them down. Ideally, your primary goals should cover all four major areas of your life: health, wealth, personal, and social. - Break down those core goals into seven-year and one-year objectives.
Then, break them down further into monthly and weekly tasks. Start aligning your day-to-day activities with those that advance your core goals. (I detail this process in my book, The Pledge. I wrote this book under my former pen name, Michael Masterson.) - Make a commitment to respect the time you have.
That means living in such a way that you honor your core life goals as well as other important but nonessential life goals.Make the core lifetime goals your top priority. And work on them during that first precious hour of your working day… before you get to all your other urgent but not life-fulfilling daily obligations.
This is important. Don’t tell yourself you will get to it later.
“Later” has a way of disappearing into “never did.”
Reeves’ Note: Mark’s wealth-building system took him from broke and indebted to an eight-figure net worth. Now, he’s sharing it with you in a 100% unprecedented way…