21in caves,” he wrote, “then love will show its roots in
deepest hell.”
Pretending you aren’t going to die is detrimental to
your enjoyment of life. It is detrimental in the same way
that it would be detrimental for a basketball player to
pretend there was no end to the game he was playing.
That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy
playing style, and, of course, end up not having any fun
at all. Without an end, there is no game. Without being
conscious of death, you can’t be fully aware of the gift of
life.
Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending
that our life’s game will have no end. We keep planning
to do great things some day when we feel like it. We
assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary island in
the sea that Denis Waitley calls “Someday Isle.” We find
ourselves saying, “Someday I’ll do this,” and “Someday
I’ll do that.”
Confronting our own death doesn’t have to wait un-
til we run out of life. In fact, being able to vividly imag-
ine our last hours on our deathbed creates a paradoxi-
cal sensation: the feeling of being born all over again—
the first step to fearless self-motivation. “People living
deeply,” wrote poet and diarist Anaïs Nin, “have no fear
of death.”
And as Bob Dylan has sung, “He who is not busy be-
ing born is busy dying.”
2. Stay hungry
Arnold Schwarzenegger was not famous yet in 1976
when he and I had lunch together at the Doubletree Inn
in Tucson, Arizona. Not one person in the restaurant
recognized him.
Stay hungry