How to Live Before You Die

The line that sticks out to me most from this speech isn’t his closing remarks to “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” But, rather that “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Now, what’s a subject as heavy as death doing in a pep talk?  Life is all about achieving some sort of balance between long term and short term goals. We take sacrifices today with the hopes of reaping rewards in the future, which -at the end of the day -isn’t promised. The fragility of life and the lack of permanence we have in this world never really hit me until I was faced with loss. There are days when this realization is the cause of a gigantic knot in my stomach and other days when it motivates me to just go for something. Life is finite and thus there is no reason to allow yourself to be held back by artificial bounds we place on ourselves. We put up with things we don’t appreciate today because we constantly tell ourselves we have nothing but time. Truth is, we don’t, giving us a strong motivator to be more conscious about the decisions we make.