Each of us is chosen … to live a chosen life

When Steve Jobs was 17 he saw a quote: “If you live each day as though it were your last, some day you will most certainly be right.”

In a Stanford University commencement address in 2005, he recounted that after seeing that quote, every day in the morning he would look in the mirror and ask  himself, “If today were the last day of my life would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer had been no for too many days in a row, he knew something needed to change.

Jobs said that remembering we would be dead soon was the greatest tool he ever encountered for helping to make the big choices in life, because almost everything (fear of failure, external expectations, pride) falls away in the face of death.

A year earlier he had been diagnosed with cancer. At 7:30 in the morning, they showed him a tumor on his pancreas and told him it was most likely incurable; he was told he had 3 to 6 months to live.

His doctor told him to go home and get his affairs in order, which means prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the rest of your life to tell them. It means to get everything buttoned up so it will be as easy as possible for your family when you are gone. It means … say your goodbyes.

He lived with this all day. Then that night, they did a biopsy on his pancreas and discovered he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable with surgery; he had the surgery and survived.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to get to heaven don’t really want to die to get there. But death clears away the old, to make way for the new. 

And even if we are young and see ourselves as the “new,” some day, suggested Jobs, we will gradually become the old and will be cleared away. 

Concluding his now famous Stanford commencement address in 2005, Jobs said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma … don’t let the noise of other people’s thinking drown out the sound of your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”