Live Each Day

by Jim McCarthy

  Maybe you, too, have been driven to think about what life is all about — and how short it can be. Were your reflections prompted by similar events, or something else? Did you ask yourself some big questions, or did you try to put those thoughts out of your mind? My experience inspired me to develop my workshops and this book. I passionately believe that embracing life’s impermanence and facing certain questions will help you live each day more fully.

  So how would you live … if you had cancer?

  How would you live … if you had a terminal illness?

  How would you live … if you really felt your mortality — in your gut — the way that I did for the first time on February 5, 2013?

  On that day, California wine surging in my blood, I wrote out a lot of questions for myself. And I’m going to ask you many of those same questions throughout this book. I know this topic can be pretty heavy. I mean, this is supposed to be a book on happiness — why are we talking about death?

  I understand that the prospect of your mortality may seem dark. But out of darkness comes light. So I’d like to share with you what cancer taught me about happiness, and how I’ve changed my life as a result:

  First of all, I decided to reduce my stress through meditation, affirmations, yoga, exercise, eating well, taking supplements, working less, and getting enough sleep. I get regular blood tests and biopsies, and so far it does not seem like the cancer has spread. So that’s great news.

  Second, I found the courage to do the things that I’d always wanted to do but had never made happen. I had long dreamt of being a motivational speaker and author. Facing my mortality, I suddenly found the confidence to talk publicly about my diagnosis and the lessons I’ve learned from it. I hope I can touch your life in a positive way. That’s why I wrote this book.

  And finally, I gave myself permission to start enjoying my life more. At the time of my diagnosis, I was divorced and living by myself in Mountain View. I had been in the Bay Area for almost 22 years, always dreaming of the opportunity to live in beautiful San Francisco. Within weeks of my diagnosis, I resolved to move to S.F., bought a condo there, and made the move. Six weeks later I met a lovely woman named Stacy, who is today my wife. As a result, I’m investing in family, friends, and community more than ever.

  Over the years I’ve learned a variety of techniques to reduce my stress, boost my confidence, and create my happiness. These are all skills you can develop, too. I promise that in the process of reading this book, doing the writing, and implementing these simple practices, you will feel great about yourself and your life. Let’s get started …

  Imagine Your Death Day

  Writing Activity 1:

  Please imagine your death.

  When is the exact day, month, and year?

  What is your cause of death?

  What are your last thoughts, emotions, and sensations?

  Who will be with you?

  Take as much time as you need, right now, to write out your answer. If you have a printed version of this book, go ahead and write directly in the space provided. If you have an electronic version, you might be able to type notes. Write however you can — using pen and paper, making an entry in your diary, or tapping a few high-level comments on your smartphone.

  Write in as much detail as you can. Think about these questions’ implications for your career, your relationships, your health, and your legacy.

  This is often the first question that I ask in my Happiness Workshop. I hand out the question on an otherwise blank piece of paper, and I give the participants about seven minutes to write their answers. No time to overthink. No time for writer’s block. Just hurry up and start writing, now.

  I know it’s a tough question. As in the workshop, I urge you to just do the best you can. You can manifest whatever you want — if you think you’ll live until you’re 150, go ahead and write that. If you think you’ll die in an earthquake in the next hour, write that.

  Why do I pose this question? To shock you into facing your mortality, the way that I had to face mine when I learned of my cancer diagnosis.

  Many of us don’t want to face the fact that we will die someday — and that avoidance can stand in the way of having a happy, fulfilling, pleasurable life. We are often in denial that — just as you have a birthday — you will also have a death day. Merely writing down a date challenges that denial and helps you grasp your mortality in a way that can start breaking down those barriers to a fuller life.

  Will it be

  October 6, 2063?

  February 17, 2105?

  July 4, 2034?

  What does that begin to tell you? Powerful, isn’t it?

  In my master classes, almost all people struggle with this question for the first 30 seconds, and then they start writing. Some are really stuck after a couple of minutes, and then they have a breakthrough. And on rare occasions, a person’s fear or denial is so strong that they simply refuse to write anything at all. For those people, I am respectful of their emotions and their struggle. But I think they’ll start living a whole lot better when they realize that they don’t have forever.

  After all, you don’t want to be the sort of person who fits the description in the old saying, “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”

  Is the question “morbid”? Well, it’s reality:

  •You do not have forever to live your life.

  •You do not have forever to start that business or do the work that you’ve always wanted to do.

  •You do not have forever to love others, create a family, or be a compassionate father, mother, spouse, son, brother, sister, child, or friend.

  •You do not have forever to take care of your health. Or do that trip to Italy that you’ve always wanted to do. Or go to that fancy restaurant that you’ve been saving for a special day.

  In my happiness workshops, it’s not uncommon that at least one person in the room starts crying as they respond to this question — because they are feeling their mortality, they are realizing that their time is precious, they are seeing that they need to make some changes to their life, and they need to do so now.

  Once in San Francisco, I did a workshop for the local Harvard University alumni club. A woman said she visualized dying with her children and grandchildren beside her — and then she realized that she didn’t have any kids in the first place! She later told me that she went home that night and decided with her husband to start a family. I’m happy to say they now have a son.

  In another workshop, there was a lovely couple from Brazil. He thought he would only live to age 70. She thought she would live to 96. When they discussed this, she started crying because she loves her husband, and she did not like the thought of being a widow for a quarter century. They resolved that he needed to take better care of his health, so that they could envision a long life together.

  Lots of participants ask, “Should I write my ideal scenario, or write what I think will really happen?” I say it’s up to them. How far apart are the two scenarios? And more important, what would you need to do or change, so that you improve the chances of the ideal scenario actually happening?

  Writing Activity 2: Action Plan

  What do you need to start doing?

  What do you need to stop doing?

  What do you need to continue?

  Let’s assume your life is not perfect. So in doing Writing Activity 1, you probably identified a few things you’d like to improve. Maybe they’re huge. Maybe they’re pretty trivial. In any case, in Writing Activity 2, get as specific as you can with your Action Plan. Remind yourself why you are making these changes. Imagine the better life you can have as a result. Then share your answers with a loved one or a friend. Ask them what they think. Refine your answers, based on an in-depth conversation.

  After that, make a public commitment by sharing your new goals o
r resolutions on social media. Shout it from the rooftops! Research indicates that if you write out a goal, and then give a weekly status report to a friend, you increase the likelihood of accomplishing this goal by a whopping 76 percent!2 In fact, I’d love it if you sent me an email and told me what you came up with. Just send your thoughts to jim@jimmccarthy.com.

  Engage others who can and will support you in your quest. Have the courage to live a much better life, knowing that you will not live forever.

  In the following chapters, we are going to use mortality as a catalyst for you to think about the legacy you are creating through your relationships and work.

  Chapter Two:

  Relationships

  Family, Friends, and Community

  What’s on your mind these days? What keeps you up at night? What makes you upset, frustrated, or scared? In the 2017 annual survey from the American Psychological Association, 63 percent of Americans said “the future of our nation” was a “very” or “somewhat” significant source of stress, followed closely by 62 percent citing “money” and 61 percent citing “work.”1

  If you’re like me, you’ve spent huge amounts of your time and energy, throughout your life, trying to maximize your income and optimize your career.

  How can I graduate from a good school? How can I get a good job? How can I do well at work and be promoted? How can I be a good manager? Maybe I should start my own business?

  And if you’re like me, you may also ask: How can I afford to drive a nice car and live in a decent home? How should I furnish my home? Am I into craft beers or artisanal gin? Should I wear collector tennis shoes? Am I into hip-hop or jazz? Do I like to go clubbing in Las Vegas, or do I prefer cycling in Vermont?

  In short, what is my “lifestyle”?

  It’s easy to become seduced and obsessed with your lifestyle. After all, the advertisements that are bombarding you all day — online and in the real world — tell you what sort of lifestyle you should have, so you consume whatever sandals, SUVs, and sectional sofas that Madison Avenue is trying to sell to you. (I confess that I worked for many years in online advertising and e-commerce, for reasons that I describe in Chapter Three.)

  So when we’re pounded by materialist, consumerist propaganda, all day, every day, for all of our lives, it’s easy to lose sight of what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has found in his research: “We are happy when we have family. We are happy when we have friends. And almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.”2

  I love this quote, because it’s funny and profound at the same time. When you think about all the effort that you put into your career, it’s helpful to ask, “Why am I doing this in the first place?” If the answer is, “So I can improve my relationships with family, friends, and community,” then you’re on a skillful path. But if your decisions are distancing you from the ones you love and who will bring you happiness, then you might want to reconsider.

  For example, your manager comes into your office tomorrow and says, “Great news! I have an awesome opportunity for you! You’ll have to start traveling about 30 percent of every month, but you have the opportunity to earn a $5,000 bonus every quarter. Sounds great, huh? Can you start on Monday?”

  Now, you and your family might genuinely need the extra money, so you make the trade-off of earning $20,000 more per year, in exchange for 30 percent travel (though often what is promised as 30 percent travel turns out to be 50 percent travel!).

  Or, in an alternate scenario, that $20,000 is not really going to make your life or your family’s life much better. But you do know that traveling so much will harm the relationships you have with your partner, children, neighbors, and friends.

  In my master class, when I first created a PowerPoint slide to address this topic, I wanted to show a nice image of a happy family. I looked online and found a picture of a lovely-looking group — photogenic parents, sage grandparents, adorably cute grandchildren.

  The picture was perfect. In fact, it was too perfect. And I realized that I was contributing to the kind of ongoing advertising propaganda that hammers us every day. We see images of what “the perfect family” is supposed to look like. And then we feel inadequate, because we know that our own families are very imperfect.

  So instead, in my presentation I use a snapshot of some members of my own family, which we took at a family reunion in Florida a few years ago. My brothers are not perfect. Neither are my parents, nor my wife. Our relationships are not perfect. And I’m certainly not perfect — as anyone who knows me will gladly tell you!

  But since I got my cancer diagnosis, I realized that this is the only family I have. Getting a cancer diagnosis was like a jolt of electricity, forcing me to return to the most basic, enduring relationships I’ve had: Mom. Dad. Brother. Sister. Brother.

  So now I focus more on family, friends, and community — even if that means I work less and earn less. In the past, if I was working at 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon and my brother Dan called, I would probably ignore the call because I was busy at work. But these days, I’ll much more likely pick up the phone to talk. I have the luxury of working for myself, which makes this easy to do. But that basic decision to work for myself, and not work for others, was part of the lifestyle change I made so that I could do work that I cherish, and at the same time be able to prioritize my loved ones.

  Similarly, I now force myself to have relationships that are as positive as possible. I don’t claim to be at perfect peace with everyone in my family. But I know that I try a lot harder today than I used to. For example, quite recently I had a fairly unpleasant argument with my brother Mike. We were actually arguing about when we should interact with each other, and how. In the past, I might have simply fumed and let this dispute linger and become a long-standing “falling out.” But instead, I realized, “Wow, I have a cancer diagnosis. And just like anybody else, I could die at any time, really. I don’t want to have my last interaction with Mike be a fight.” So the next day I swallowed my pride, spoke to Mike on the phone, and apologized. We were able to make our relationship stronger than it was before the disagreement — thanks to a simple realization that family is precious.

  All You Need Is … Kindness

  Do you want to get high?

  OK, let me rephrase that — do you want to get high in a way that is immediate and legal across the United States, costs you nothing, and does not require inhaling or swallowing?

  Then be kind.

  In an interview with Yoga Journal, Buddhist author and scholar Thupten Jinpa says, “When we help someone out of our genuine concern for her well-being, our levels of endorphins, which are associated with euphoric feelings, surge in the brain, a phenomenon that we call the ‘helper’s high.’”3

  If you want to get this emotional high, then be compassionate — which is defined as “concern for the suffering of others,”4 or the empathy we have for others and the desire we have for their suffering to end.

  In other words, be “loving” — a word that has become so overused and clichéd that today we’re much more comfortable using words like “kind” and “compassionate.” I suppose John Lennon could have written “All You Need Is Kindness,” but he probably knew that we’d love the title “All You Need Is Love” more.

  Being kind has been proven to not only make you happier, but to help your romantic life as well. Early in his career, University of Texas at Austin Psychology Professor David Buss conducted a global study asking, “What is most important to you in a mate?” His finding: “Not only was there agreement across cultures on the top few [universally desired mate characteristics], men and women were statistically identical in nearly all of the 37 cultures on these most valued attributes.” What quality ranked highest? A partner being “Kind and Understanding.”5

  Martin Seligman is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylva
nia, and is considered one of the key leaders in the positive psychology movement. He has spent his lifetime studying happiness, and says, “Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”6

  Other research draws the same conclusion. Greater Good Magazine from the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, notes “Compassionate action (e.g., giving to charity) activates pleasure circuits in the brain. Compassion training programs, even very brief ones, strengthen brain circuits for pleasure and reward and lead to lasting increases in self-reported happiness.”7 Compassion benefits include lower risk of heart disease, reduced stress hormones in the blood, a stronger immune system, and many aspects of improved mental health.8

  How to Practice Compassion

  The good news is that we’re naturally hardwired to be compassionate. This makes evolutionary sense. As Dacher Keltner, psychology professor and founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, explains, “our babies are the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth. And that simple fact changed everything. It rearranged our social structures, building cooperative networks of caretaking, and it rearranged our nervous systems. We became the super caregiving species, to the point where acts of care improve our physical health and lengthen our lives. We are born to be good to each other.”9

  No matter how hardwired for compassion we might be, having a daily compassion practice can help us return to our best natural selves in the face of anxiety, fear, threats, and confusion.