How To Start Living (Live This Year As If It Was Your Last & Free Your Creative Vision)

I thought about whether to write this article or not. After all, I’ve got many other projects and commitments going on, and so why write an article on a subject that, while covering a question that many people ask, ‘how to start living?, also covers what many are ingrained culturally to ignore because it’s seen as a scary subject to consider, i.e. death?

Well, because focusing on the very real prospect that we will all die one day, promotes a response, and it’s often the real wake-up call we need, but which we are also deeply programmed to dismiss.

Our subconscious triggers a defense mechanism that tries to feed us with something ‘less heavy’ or ‘potentially threatening’. After all, if we focus on something we can manifest it to happen, and none of us want death to turn up at our door before we’ve had a good enough chance to do something with our lives.

Yet, that is precisely the point why I decided to write this article. We all want to do something good with our lives before we simply aren’t able to, yet in this finite window of opportunity why is it that most of us concentrate our minds on patterns of familiarity and comforts, rather than challenge and potential?

We Don’t Want To Accept That There’s An End For Us (As We Have So Much Left To Do)

What happens when we consider putting a deadline on our time? What if there wasn’t another day? What if this was your last? If it really was our last then there’s little chance of changing anything, so it doesn’t really help us to think of each day as our last. It’s far easier to ignore that possibility for ourselves, but we do feel for others.

When you hear about those who have been given a deadline by ill health, such as cancer, you can’t help but feel for them. We can hear of a famous person’s death and despite never actually meeting them we can feel a sense of loss.

Why? No one likes the idea of dying, not for us, our family, or even strangers. It makes us aware that each passing day isn’t endless, but it still doesn’t feel real for us, and so the notion is short-lived.

The day or so after we are back up again living like we are going to live forever. We may hear of others dying, but not us, we are invincible.

On one side, this is a good thing, as we absolutely don’t want to be dented or broken by the thought of death plaguing our minds, but on the other hand, it can leave us just living comfortably numb, rather than truly being motivated or set free by that wake-up call to make our remaining days count.

We choose to forget that we also have a deadline, but unlike terminal cancer patients, we don’t know ours. It might even be sooner than the months or years given to those who do know, but if we did know there’s still a sense of deep-rooted denial of the reality until we become too close to it.

Why We Are Asking How To Start Living (Surely We Should Know By Now?)

Humans are born survivors. We prefer to focus on questions like ‘how to start living’ rather than about how we may die one day.

When we were children the last thing we would be thinking about was death. Of course, why would we? We have our whole lives ahead of us, and we can dream of being anything we want to be.

Only, for many, our child eyes fade along with our dreams, and whilst there’s an understanding that time is passing and we haven’t achieved our dreams yet, we certainly don’t want to think that our chance is over. It becomes easier to live within immediate reality, into bills, responsibilities, commitments, and to just accept that once we grow up we have to work and get our head down, and then one day when we are older we can finally retire and enjoy (the last remaining few years) of life.

Only if you witnessed or asked people of age about what regrets they had in life (the 5 regrets of the dying), knowing that their opportunity to explore those dreams is now almost over, then you’d see a pattern emerge.

Many wished they’d truly lived their life to their wishes and not to others, or that they hadn’t worked so hard, or they had expressed themselves more and allowed happier moments, especially around those they loved.

Instead, many become entrapped in the rat race mentality, thinking they have to get life ‘set up’ first (and lived second), whilst not realising that their fluid intelligence is slowly drifting away and being replaced by fear, guilt, and shame-ridden societally conditioned, crystalised patterns (entrenched regrets build, such as not really taking heed of our limited time earlier, that just become harder to rid of as we age further).

We weren’t really taught as children to learn independence, only dependence, and so it’s not so surprising to hear many people question ‘how to start living your best life?’, ‘how to start living for yourself?’, ‘how to start living in the moment?’ etc.

Yet, these questions all have an heir of desperation around them. We often become wound up with stress and worry when we consider trying to get more out of our life with this direct ‘please show me the answer’ approach. Many questions like this quickly fade into ‘I’ll work it out tomorrow’ – our conditioned mind’s way of saying, ‘I don’t know and I’m too afraid to break the mold today’.

Yet, this is exactly what we need to do, whilst we still can. And we need a different approach to do so.

The One Year To Live Challenge (& Free Your Creative Vision With Dream Building)

If we don’t want to end up on that regret train then we have to break the mold. We aren’t getting anywhere by giving ourselves ‘tomorrow’ to do everything, and by that, we are assuming that there are tons of tomorrow’s left.

Instead, we need to visualise our remaining time in a clear way. If we think we have forever we will live today like it doesn’t matter. If we think we only have a short amount of time then we will be more motivated to do something about it.

Setting ourselves a time limit might seem scarier than asking hopeful questions such as ‘how to start living to my potential today?’, but it’s actually a lot more freeing when we consider just how insignificant our worries are if we weren’t around in a week, months, or years time to worry about it.

ACTION: Think about a little thing you are worrying about right now. Write it down and then just let it go (by considering in mind just how little it matters in the bigger, finite picture of life). 

Think about your spouse making a sudden noise that distracted your focus, or a toaster breaking on you. You suddenly don’t really care about getting wound up about such trivial things when you consider a bigger reality.

So, setting ourselves a deadline is actually a good thing for us, something that can relieve petty stresses and get us taking action to do the things in life we want whilst we can.

The hard part is in knowing underneath that we don’t have a ‘real’ known deadline of when our time will be up, so we have to get ourselves to both stop using ‘tomorrow’ as an easy excuse from actual change, and have a way to visualise the time counting down (but with enough time to still get something substantial done with our lives).

It was Elon Musk who said “Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10 years plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.”

Well, let’s assume we have 1 year, and not just for whatever business or career goals we have, but for personal and relationship ones too.

With such a time limit we simply HAVE to get creative. It forces us to problem solve, to build a big picture vision, to prioritise, and to use our ingenuity that is there within us all (beneath the clouds and the blocks holding our potential at bay). For example, how can we bring other people into making goals happen faster?

This is about activating our prefrontal cortex, and the key is to focus in on what really actually matters to us. The best way to find this is to promote very direct questions, for example:

• What is it in your life you love right now?
• What do you hate?
• What did you wish you were doing but ended up saying ‘tomorrow’ to?
• If this was your last year what would you truly want to prioritise and accomplish?
• What regrets do you really have?
• You have to make a yes or no decision in 5 seconds. Keep doing (enter subject) today or not? (maybe limit how many yes’ you can have)

This is really where you start dream building. It’s when you have to accept that time has a limit and you do something about it right now whilst you can, because no one else will do anything about it for you (they have their own fears and doubts to worry about).

The Positive Effects Of Living To A Deadline

Doing this will help you directly manifest what you really actually want. We really are what we think. There are so many wonderful things we could see and do in life that it would be a shame to not be doing at least one of these things. Make your dream job, life, home etc. Make it yours.

There really is a lot of power in the law of attraction, and when that is mixed with a realisation that life has an ending it can be a very powerful mix to get you living your best life.

Trust your gut and the butterflies in your stomach. If you said ‘no’ to something and then got butterflies after then that’s a good sign that you really want something. The butterflies exist because now you are really focusing on YOUR goals, possibly for the first time. So often we are ingrained to just follow goals we may think are what we want, but they often aren’t.

Part of this challenge is to recognise how much we actually DON’T need in life and to realign our minds to the present, to nature, and to pursue what we are actively capable of doing right now (aligning with our vision of what we truly want).

Want to be a pilot? Then you have a few months to make it. Find a way.

When we set such a deadline we also become less distracted by the trivial. We likely suddenly don’t care about whether we should get this colour or that colour, or about the petty argument we had with a friend or spouse etc. We really begin to understand the meaning of ‘life is too short’.

We also stop comparing ourselves in life to where others are right now, as we know at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter.

And we find our creative vision becomes sharper. When we have only a short time to make an impact, we have to cut out what doesn’t matter. Why scroll through hundreds of emails to find something important? If it’s important then we’ll search for it. Otherwise, delete, filter, ignore. Instead, we focus on values and tasks that truly matter.

Finally, we also step over fears that stop us from taking action. Before, we may decide not to call someone about something we might be interested in but nervous about exploring, but now we know it really doesn’t matter if we are nervous or not. If we don’t do it then it won’t happen, if we do then it will have a much better chance, and so we begin to put the odds in our favour, and we get the ball rolling quicker as we know time is ticking.

Of course, when a year passes it’s likely not the end for us, and instead another good time to set another challenge to achieve 10 years’ worth of dreams in 1 year.