One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin.

How to distinguish stuff that matters

If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.

Prune bullshit.

Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. Just don't wait.

Cultivate impatience

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is "bullshit."If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that is bullshit, you probably already know the answer.Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

We spend a lot of time on "bullshit"

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something.

Continuous vs. discrete perception

If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone.You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too.

Life takes us by surprise

I think that we tend to take many things for granted and one of them is time. Our life is way shorter than we might think, thus we should try to get the most out of it.

Cultivate impatience

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