Life - nothing but 30,000 Days Journey and let's choose to spend each day purposefully

As the year 2015 draws to a close, it is an opportune time to review the year and plan for things looking ahead. Personally I am a great believer of strategizing and planning and constantly evolving it with the changing world. The process of planning our life is more important than the plans themselves as they are transitory in nature. Great leadership coach John Maxwell eloquently puts it about coming up with one’s life Plan  – a sentence or paragraph that defines one’s life and mission, which he says first write it with a big pencil along with an eraser as we would need to keep refining it until we die.  So Planning and reflecting have to be a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly activity – all feeding into one’s life mission. The intent of our life mission for most of us is probably the same – which is “Putting a Dent in this world” but what dent and how will vary.   

As we are all in the yearend reflective mode, let’s consider our life’s span through days instead of years. The moment, I internalized this framework, it changed my way of thinking about days and no of hours in a day..

As per the latest WHO estimates – Human beings average life’s expectancy is 82 years. Our immediate reaction is, life is very long and we have so many years ahead of us. But if we look at it in - no of days, it is just around 30,000 days and to be precise 29,930 days, if we get to live all 82 years.  Let’s divide our life into the following phases

·       Equipping Phase  (Until 21 years) =  7,665 days

·       Value adding Phase (22 – 70 Years) = 17,520 days

·       Retirement Phase  (70 -82 Years) = 4,745 days

Approximately, we spend about 7665 days in equipping ourselves by going to school, college and for most of us this is the intense learning period and after 70 years one cannot be as active as the preceding years and what’s left in between these two phases - is just 17,520 days to create our legacy and putting a dent in the world.. If we dissect this further, out of 17,520 days in value adding phase, half of the time goes in sleep, entertainment, vacation and other resting activities. So to create our own unique mark in the world – we just have less than 9000 days that too, in an ideal scenario.   

Wow, now it is completely a different frame work to think about life. It really brings a huge sense of urgency and clarity about what is most important. Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford commencement address pointed out that, when we live each day as last day of our life – trivial things, distractions and all the negative emotions that hold us back from life’s mission goes out of the window..

With the above framework in mind, let’s look at our life ahead and reflect on the following questions.

·       How many days are left in our life’s journey?

·       Are we directing our life purposefully or just getting by each day?

·       How many days we made it count in 2015 around life’s mission?

·       How can we make 2016 and coming years - the best years ever around our life’s mission and not around someone else priorities?

·       Are we emptying our skills and talents every day through best work or wasting our skills and talents in trivial things?

Let’s choose to live our life with a grand purpose and be passionate about that, knowing our days are very limited. But let’s remind ourselves, bigger the plans to put a dent, more fulfilling and exciting our life becomes and I know, no one wants to lead an unfulfilled and unexciting life but most of us slide into that trap unknowingly – good news is that from today, we can change all that for every day for rest of our lives…