Life Is Short: How to Add a Sense of Urgency | Tim Ferriss

It is a philosophical system that concentrates on separating the things you can control from the things you cannot control and then teaches you to introduce in your daily routine habits that help you focus most of your energy on the things that are under your control.

Part of the stoic practice is related to meditating on the certainty of death and finding freedom is it instead of being overwhelmed by it.

Thinking about death highlights the short duration of life; this practice gives us a sense of urgency to pursue the things that are important to us. Without this sense of urgency that happens when we think about death, it becomes easy for us to postpone things, to push them for an undefined "tomorrow" until it's too late.

Death for example is outside of your control and it happens to everyone.

But you can control the way you relate to it: instead of viewing it as a moment of immense sadness, make it a great catalyzing help.

Think about how you relate to the emotions you don't want to feel and that you try to avoid: sadness or anger for example.

But these negative emotions are going to come up and when you identify them as bad and try to refuse them with all your energy, what happens is that you give them even more power.

Seeking out artistic cues to catalyze emotions that previously you've tried to avoid will help you to relate differently to events like death. Because most likely what you're horrified about is not so much death, but the way you're emotionally relating to the concept of death.

Watching films that are scary, sad or depressive, and then contrasting that with something that is on the opposite end of the spectrum will help you understand that these moments of sadness are transient and that you can switch them off and on with cues in your environment.