In fact, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight.

This is, perhaps, the most important book you’ll ever read. In the book, Eugene O’Kelly documents his experiences during the last few months of his life. In fact, his wife writes the final chapter because Eugene has died. And no matter how tough you are, the second you turn the page from the end of the second-to-last chapter to the beginning of the last chapter and realize that Corinne has taken over, you’ll be in tears.

What this book does — at least what it did for me — was give me the perspective on what I’m doing and where I’m going with my life. He inspires the question: am I really doing what matters to me? And if not, why? For all the words that so many people like David Allen and Stephen Covey say and write to get people thinking about these questions, their words just don’t compare to the words of a dying man.

It’s powerful, and it’s life changing. So, like I said, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight. It’s not even to 200 pages, so you should be to finish it in just a few hours.

To get you started, here are a few of the opening paragraphs:

I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live. You think that to put those two sentences back-to-back, I must be joking. Or crazy. Perhaps that I lived a miserable, unfulfilled life, and the sooner it was done, the better.

Hardly. I loved my life. Adored my family. Enjoyed my friends, the career I had, the big hearted organizations I was part of, the golf I played. And I’m quite sane. And also quite serious: the verdict I received the last week of May 2005 — that it was unlikely I’d make it to my daughter Gina’s first day of eighth grade, the opening week of September — turned out to be a gift. Honestly.

Because I was forced to think seriously about my own death. Which meant I was forced to think more deeply about my life that I’d ever done. Unpleasant as it was, I forced myself to acknowledge that I was in the final stage of life, forced myself to decide how to spend my last one hundred days (give or take a few weeks), forced myself to act on those decisions.

In short, I asked myself to answer two questions: must the end of life be the worst part? And, Can it be made a constructive experience — even the best part of life?

No. Yes. That’s how I would answer those questions, respectively. I was able to approach the end while still mentally lucid (usually) and physically fit (sort of), with my loved ones near.

As I said: a blessing.

Of course, almost no one thinks in detail about one’s actual death. Until I had two I didn’t — not really. We fill general and profound anxiety about, but figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to make the best ones last days, and then how to ensure that one follows the planned course of action for the benefit of oneself and one’s loved ones, are not typical habits of the dying and most certainly not the healthy and hearty. Some people don’t think about that because a come suddenly and prematurely. Quite a few who died this way — in a car accident, say — had not yet even began to think of themselves as mortal. My death on the other hand, while somewhat premature (I was fifty three at the time of the verdict) cannot be called sudden (anyway, you couldn’t call it that two weeks after the death sentence had sunk in), since I was informed quite explicitly that my final day of this or if what happened during the two thousand five calendar year.

Like I said, life-changing. Read the book.

My last post before the break was about risk and self-doubt. I’d like to report, albeit eight months later, that the event was a great success.

Not only did we have a great turnout, we also used the event to jumpstart a local professional organization, which I’m now the president. So was it worth it? Absolutely. I learned a lot—particularly that we should start planning earlier this year. Which, of course, we have. There is still quite some lingering self-doubt, but having done it once, I feel much more confident about the outcome. After all, I have a new organization behind me.

And so if there’s any lesson here it would be: persevere, persevere, persevere. Don’t let your self-doubt get the better of you; you are stronger than it and better than it. When you really push yourself, you’ll find that you have supporters where you least expect them. What’s more, no matter what happens, your work and accomplishment is so much sweeter because you know you pushed yourself.

What is risk, really? If you choose not to take advantage of an opportunity, you risk not accomplishing great things. If you go for it, you risk losing things that are important to you. You can’t escape risk. The only question, then, is, what are you willing to risk?

This is certainly not an original thought. Smarter, prettier people than I have explained this point much better and in much more detail. Right now, though, I need this reminder. I’m working on an amazing opportunity—putting together an event for World Usability Day.

It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, and the task is daunting. But I see it as an opportunity to build a stronger local community of user experience practitioners. Should the event flop, though, I risk looking like a fool and losing credibility within the local community. What’s more: we’re late to the game. The event is little morethan 3 weeks away and we’re still in the planning stages, so the pressure is definitely on. And, as with all risk, (at least, all risk that I’ve encountered), the self-doubt is as great as the opportunity. But it’s just self-doubt, a side effect of risk. I can either have the courage to push forward with the event or give in to the self-doubt and throw in the towel. What am I doing? With the help of several friends, I’m going to organize an amazing event. And when my self-doubt hits me again, and it will, I’ll push through it. I’ll win.

I just started a new job a few weeks ago. Nothing special about that, except that the company I now work for was started six years ago by two 17 year-olds. Now that’s both amazing and depressing.

Here I am, almost 30 and have not achieved anywhere near the business success that they have. Of course, I haven’t tried either. So, on the one hand, it’s violently depressing that 17 year-olds can be more successful at business in the first 17 years of their lives than I have been in my first 30. And on the other hand, it’s quite inspiring. If they can do it, I can do it, too.

I remember a high school teacher that once told my class that we had to be realistic in what we hoped to achieve out in the real world. He was trying to level-set our expectations—to strip out some of that adolescent idealism, but thinking back, his statement was counter-productive. Instead of focusing on what we could not achieve, he should have taught us how we could achieve great things.

And that’s where I’m at. I’ve finally learned how to accomplish great things because I have developed the discipline to accomplish many small things. This realization has been a long time coming, but I very much feel that I can accomplish any goal I set and with every goal I accomplish, the realm of possibility expands.

So, to answer my own question: I get inspiration from where I’ve been and where I’m going. Stories about successful people just remind me that anything, taken one step at a time, is possible.

I was just recently reminded about something I heard several years ago: everyone should have a list of 100 things they want to do before they die.

Can someone from the GTD crowd say @someday, please?

I think I’m going to split the “Things I want to do for fun” from the “Things I may get around to doing, but don’t really want to do.” I’ll have a list that I actually enjoy looking at versus one that’s just depressing.

Also, speaking of the @someday list. When was the last time you checked yours? I try to get to mine in the weekly review, but don’t always manage it. If I’m honest, I rarely get to it. After sorting through all the work I need to do, looking at future projects just seems pointless.

I know, I know. I’m only ever going to get to the items on my someday/maybe list if I make them a priority. Maybe it’s time to start?

I made the announcement last week that I was back. It’s been a week and half since that announcement and this is my first post. I’ve been working on a post for the past week, but I have been unable to say what I really mean. The words aren’t coming. It’s not quite writer’s block as I’ve written plenty of words. I’m just at a loss for the words that actually say what I mean.

In part, the post was suppose to explain my absence as well as review some issues I’ve been pondering over the past few weeks. With some reluctance, I’m giving up on any detailed explanation and have boiled my thoughts down to three statements:

• Happiness is a choice
• My future is determined by the choices I make today
• I don’t need to know where I’m going—I just need a general direction

I wish that I could better elaborate on my journey and why these points have come to mean so much to me, but the words aren’t coming. So, I’m giving you the short and sweet version and hope that it might be of some use to someone.

What would it take to squeeze the marrow out of every waking minute?

Lisa and Dan have really got me thinking about the finite lately.

We’ll start with Dan.

Dan Blohowiak interviewed Bill Jensen recently, and in the interview, Bill pointed out that there are 1440 minutes in a day and we should stop wasting them.

I don’t want to waste my life, but what does that mean—not waste “my life”? It’s such a long-term concept that it’s difficult to get my head around. I know I don’t want to wake up at 65 and think, “I wasted my life.” Beyond that? You got me. Hell, I have a hard time thinking out past the next hour. A lot can happen in an hour.

When Bill said that we only have 1440 minutes in a day, a flip switched—I finally understood what it would take to avoid wasting my life. Not wasting my life means not wasting another minute. I can get my head around a minute. A minute is immediate. Its presence can be felt immediately and its absence can be just as immediately missed. The number of minutes in a day has more meaning than the number of hours in a day.

And then I read Lisa’s “Tip of the Day - #27”: “Lead like there’s no tomorrow”. She writes:

A coworker of mine got some pretty wicked news that she has a very aggressive form of cancer at 36 years of age. Another coworker recently lost a parent in a tragic accident. An old coworker recently lost her job when her company went belly-up.

It is a shame that it often takes events like these to snap us back to appreciating each day and living fully for the moment.

What serendipity.

I’m not going to be someone who lets life happen to them. I want to take life by the minute—and make every second count. As Lisa says, “I don’t want to live in fear for what could happen, but I do want to get better at living well, healthy, fully and for today (with an eye to the future).”

As you can see, Bill and Lisa have me asking some heady questions: Am I where I want to be? Am I spending my 1440 minutes wisely? They’ve also got me asking about my future: what I want to do with the next 5-10 years? After all, how I spend each of today’s minutes will affect the possible uses of my future minutes. In a way, you could say that the future is happening today.

Life is all about timing… the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable… attainable. Have the patience, wait it out. It’s all about timing.

Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.

What’s particularly insidious about rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eight month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born. What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.

I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what is important first.

The enemy is a very good teacher.