Making It Count
5 minute read
I was listening to a podcast recently. My podcast interests are pretty specific. I like those centred around food – Table Manners is a favourite and I love the cheeky giddiness of Grace Dent’s. I listen to every episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day because she has a very impressive line-up of guests and is the world’s most polite interviewer. And Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO is the podcast I turn to when I need a little kick up the arse. I enjoy the polished style he brings, his self-reflection and the fact that no matter how hard I think I’m working or how stressed I think I am, I come away feeling energised and motivated.
On a recent episode he interviewed Dr Rangan Chatterjee.
I’m a Dr Rangan fan – a Fangan if you will. The way he talks about health, wellbeing and copping yourself on speaks to me in a way a lot of people in the wellness field just don’t.
On this particular episode he was talking about happiness, and he had a little exercise for Steven. He asked him to write down the three things he does each day or each week that make him happy.
Rangan then asked him to think about the end of his life and write down three things that would make him feel pleased with how he had lived. He chose three different things for this; things unrelated to those he was currently doing to achieve happiness.
I paused the podcast and thought about my lists. I grabbed my notebook. Three things I do now that I think are contributing to my happiness. I chose them quickly and noted them down. It seemed like a good list. I’m doing it all, I’m pretty happy and I’m getting through, which at the moment seems good enough. I moved on: three things that if I looked back on my life at the end would make me happy. They were different things. Of course they were. My day-to-day happiness is in front of me. It’s small and lurching from week to week trying to keep a dozen balls in the air. Everything is so busy and fast and urgent that I feel like I’m responding to tiny fires with nothing but a small bottle of water. Sparks are flying and new fires ignite before I manage to get the last one under control.
Living like that, as most of us do, leaves very little time for the big picture. How often do we sit back and really take a whole view of what’s going on? You might fill out some goals in your diary at the start of the year and make plans for things you’d like to happen but even then, they’re not usually life altering. Mine often include holidays I’d like to go on and work goals I’d like to achieve, but they’re often written at haste because, oh look, another tiny fire is starting to burn over there in the corner.
I did have a bigger plan for this year. Something I’d been promising myself I’d do for a long time, but work started to come in, and as someone who is self-employed, I couldn’t say no and so here we are in the middle of April and I haven’t made a start – I just keep re-writing my plan on the white board in my office, moving it from January to February and on and on and on.
Rangan’s exercise is a profound one. It’s an opportunity to look at your life like you’re not in it, to observe yourself from a distance.
It’s a chance to look at what you’re doing and to see how it will serve you in the end. What’s the point in rushing from Billy to Jack if by the time it’s all almost over you won’t even remember who they are? We need to work, to rush around and get everything done, to do a lot of the mundane stuff we don’t want to do. But in the middle of all that, it might be possible to carve out a plan, a way of doing a little of what will make you happy in the end. Because as performance coach Gerry Hussey once told me, we only have about 900 months to live. It’s not a lot really, is it? I haven’t stopped thinking about that since he said it to me. It’s 75 years, which seems plenty, but broken down into months I can see it whizz by like a speeding train. I’m 531 months in. More than halfway.
Rangan and Steven’s conversation has given me the kick I didn’t know I needed. I need to change my day-to-day list to make my end-of-life happiness a reality. Even if I don’t manage to achieve it all, I’ll at least be able to say that I tried; that in the midst of the busy, hectic, frantic lives we have built for ourselves I carved out time for my hopes and dreams. I don’t want to look back and say I wish I’d given that a go. I wish I’d spent more time with my kids. I wish I had said I love you more. I wish I had closed my laptop, put down my phone and been present.
It’s not often that a podcast will fundamentally change things for you. It was an unexpected thing to happen that day. But I can really recommend treating your life like a business and taking an away day to brainstorm its future. Fast forward to the end and figure out what will be important to you then, and work your way back to now. You may only need a tiny tweak, or you may need to bin some big things and figure out a new plan. But if you’re like me and have less than 400 months left, what the hell are you waiting for? I’d like to make the second half really count!
Jennifer Stevens, April 2022
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