An Essay on Lifetime Views
Published: June 9th, 2017.
This essay will outline a secondary currency I’ve created. It’s allowed me to better use my time by tricking my brain into justifying what I want to do anyway. It’s called Lifetime Views. Life is about allocating resources. I use Lifetime Views as a secondary currency, along with money, to figure out how to best allocate my resources. This impacts business decisions, investments, and hobbies I want to learn. The goal is to present the history of how I created lifetime views, how it’s impacted my life, some brief lessons learned, and to start to collecting stories of how it’s impacted others’ lives. In the past two years, I’ve shared the Lifetime Views philosophy with friends, family members, strangers, and business colleagues. It’s brought people to tears, changed their actions, and frequently over the past 2 years, my friends have encouraged me to write it down and share it. A Quick Assignment I want you to imagine your three closest relationships; family, friends, whoever you choose. For each person, think about the number of times you’ve seen each person in a year for the past 3 years. Remember those numbers. Backstory of Lifetime Views Thanksgiving Day in 2014 was a Thursday. On the following Sunday, I was driving home to Boston from my sister’s house in the Bronx. I was on I-95 North crossing into Connecticut and I thought to myself, “It’s really awesome that my sister I hang out so much.” I don’t have a great relationship with my parents, but my sister and I have maintained our relationship and it’s been getting better and better every year. Even though we live four hours apart we see each other four times per year. At the time, four times per year seemed like a lot. I have many close friends that I don’t see even once per year on average. At the same moment, it occurred to me that my sister was thirty-three so I thought she’d likely live about fifty more years. Again, fifty years seems like a long time. The math then hit me. Four times per year, over fifty more years, that’s only two hundred. My sister and I will see each other only two hundred more times before we die. The number seemed incredibly small. Only two hundred more times. That was when Lifetime Views was born. The combination of four times per year felt like a lot, and fifty more years seems like a long time, but all of this added up to only two hundred more times we would hang out before we died, which felt very small. After I had calculated the number of Lifetime Views with my sister, I quickly started calculating this for other important people in my life.
Now, remember the three people I asked you about the top of essay? Calculate their Lifetime Views. Think about that for a second. If your current actions don’t change, that’s the number of times you’ll see that person before you die. Now that we’ve defined the term, here’s why I think Lifetime Views has had a large impact on my life.
Lifetime Views and Lessons Learned on the Impact of Decisions
Observations on Lifetime Views Here’s a few observations and thoughts on common questions I get about Lifetime Views.
Want to share your story? My goal with Lifetime Views is to spread the new currency. Often time I’ve noticed that language and new terms allows us to more easily see something that was always there. This is my goal with Lifetime Views. By having a term, we can see it more easily, and by making it countable, it will more easily be able to collect them.
If you’re interested in sharing your story, feel free to email me at [email protected] |