“Believe me, it’s better to produce the balance-sheet of your own life than that of the grain market.”
SENECA, ON THE BREVITY OF LIFE, 18.3b
Our lives are short. Often I stop and ponder how brief our existence is. And then I wonder if I’m spending my energy on the right things, pursuing what’s actually important, trying to expand my knowledge and expertise on what matters.
Because a lot of the things I spend my time on don’t really matter, and won’t be worth anything when I’m lying on my deathbed. When I’m close to passing from this world, I won’t care anymore about my hometown Seattle Seahawks and who their quarterback is this year. My knowledge of web hosting and digital advertising won’t be worth a whit at the end of my days, and it won’t help any of my loved ones either.
These are the points that Ryan Holiday makes in his book The Daily Stoic today, too. That we often spend too much time on becoming experts in things that have no real permanent importance in the grand scheme of things, when we should instead use our energy to more deeply understand what matters — ourselves, how our minds work, how to heal, what our habits are and how to improve them.
There’s a real trend and encouragement in our modern society today to become a master-of-everything and to somehow “know all the things”. The truth is that we can’t know everything, nor can we become an expert in a lot of disparate topics. In the end, we become “a jack-of-all-trades, but master-of-none,” as the saying goes. We don’t go deep on anything, and I see that in myself as well: I’m often pursuing too much knowledge in too many different areas. It doesn’t work.
In the end (and hopefully not too late), we realize that it’s better to practice mastery over a few things, rather than trying to do too much. And that we should focus our energy on what truly matters in our lives — personal growth and self-improvement, and relationships with other people and ourselves. Not which direction the stock market will head later this year, and not whether the latest iPhone has enough features.
Failure to recognize this fundamental truth means that we may find that we’ve simultaneously won and lost at life; that we’ve succeeded at the unimportant and failed miserably at what was important. Don’t be that person. Know the difference.
