Hi friend –

It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. Well, since I wrote, to be more precise…

I just finished the second season of the TV show Beef. It’s good. Not as good as season 1, but different and interesting enough to make it worth the time investment. In the last episode, during the story’s climax, one of the characters reminds the other one that life is short – so short, in fact, that the average person only lives for 960 months. 960. Sounds short – but do the math and you’ll see it: 80 years times 12 months equals 960.

Oliver Burkeman wrote a lovely book five years ago, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” It’s an insight you have, likely, heard of and seen before – map your life on a weekly schedule and you realize that your precious life equates to about 4,000 weeks. There are apps to track your passage through time, calendars you can mark, and TED Talks to be watched.

But 4,000 weeks, despite its absurd shortness (yes, life is, indeed, short), always felt… long? Expansive? Incomprehensible to me. The problem is the thousands. Thousands is the drawer my brain files anything too big to actually picture – likes on a popular Instagram post, steps on my fitness tracker, the unread count on some people’s inboxes. Hundreds, I can hold. I know what a few hundred of something looks like – pages in a book, songs on my summer hits playlist, people at an event. A number in the hundreds stays human-sized. A number in the thousands turns into a feeling – “a lot” – and a feeling is exactly the thing you can’t plan against. So 4,000 weeks never landed as time for me. It landed as “plenty.”

It also lulls you into a false sense of safety. Four thousand is a big enough number that even at retirement – the age when a lot of the wild, hard, strange things you still meant to do start quietly slipping off the table (our bodies failing us in the predictable ways, and a few unpredictable ones) – you can tell yourself you’ve got the better part of a thousand weeks left. Plenty. But count those same years in months and it’s barely 180 – and 180 is a number I can see the bottom of.

And lastly, I always found weeks a very weird measure of time – often too short for measuring actual progress, too easy to dismiss (“I had a bad week, next week will be better”, “I didn’t get to it this week, I’ll do it next week”, …). A month is different – it is a unit of measure I have control over. A month is long enough for me to feel accountable to it; it comes in seasons, and I not only know but feel that there are only twelve of them in a given year. And each month is different enough from the month which comes before and after that it feels different. June is different from May and will be different from July. Unlike calendar week 23 – which is largely the same as the week before it and the week after.

Which brings us back to Beef and the 960 months. Even if you are in your twenties and thirties, you don’t actually have 960 months left. You have 600-700. If you are, like me, in your (gulp) fifties, that number is a precariously small 360. I have more random notes in my Apple Notes notebook than months left to live… which is, quite frankly, a scary thought.

I don’t need to tell you that life is freakin’ short. Most of us know this – but can you actually feel it? And if you can – are you making sure you live your life accordingly?

Here’s something I started doing. I could never make daily journaling stick – tried it for years, never took. So I went monthly: one text file per month, and I add to it whenever I feel like it. Then I did the thing that sounds dark and, frankly, morbid – and turned out to be the opposite: I made an empty file for every month I’ve got left. What’s left of my life is less than 350 files. Fewer than the photos on my phone from my last vacation.

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There’s a moment that happens in every conference room, every strategy meeting, every product review. Someone asks a question. A hard one. About the market, the customer, the problem you’re actually solving. And everyone in the room does the same thing: They perform expertise.

“Well, based on our research…”“The data suggests…”“Industry best practices indicate…”

They build elaborate structures on foundations of air. They protect their credibility. They sound smart. And the question never gets answered.

Legendary climber Reinhold Messner lost his toes on Nanga Parbat in 1970.

Not all of them – just enough. Enough that technical rock climbing, the discipline he’d mastered, became impossible. His brother Günther died on that mountain. Messner barely made it down alive, frostbitten and broken.

Most people would have called it quits. Hung up the boots. Found a “real job.”

Messner did the opposite.

Unable to rock climb, he pivoted to alpine climbing – big mountains, high altitude, pure suffering. And then he did something nobody thought possible: He climbed all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks on Earth. Without supplemental oxygen. The first person ever to do it.

You’d be forgiven if you thought the title of this post was a typo. Or some weird, butchered Russian word. Or, as a friend of mine, who recently introduced me to the term, said: “I always thought it was some kind of Yiddish thing…”

YCDBSOYA is an acronym. You can get it on tie pins from the 1950s. It stands for “You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your A$$”.

Before we had productivity apps, life hacks, and 12-step frameworks for success, we had this. A simple, powerful, and slightly abrasive kick in the pants. A reminder that creation, innovation, and success are not passive activities. They are contact sports.

And we are back… I mentioned this a few weeks ago – time to unveil the new, updated, better, bigger, bolder GYSHIDO manifesto! And I need your help (read to the end…)

As a quick reminder: GYSHIDO (which, of course, stands for “Getting Your Shit Done”), a term originally coined by Will Butler and introduced to me by Daniel Epstein from the amazing Unreasonable Group, started out as a single webpage with seven little principles a dozen years ago. Since then, it has grown into a global movement – the original manifesto was translated into seventeen languages by our community, people have made videos enacting the principles, a university in Germany has created a course teaching the principles to …

Walt Disney went bankrupt. At just 20 years old, Walt’s first company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, brought together some of the most talented animators in the world, laid the groundwork for the creation of Mickey Mouse – and was a financial disaster. Before the company went out of business just two short years later, cash was so tight that Walt lived in his office and survived on cold beans from a can and bathed at Union Station because he couldn’t afford hot water. He even resorted to catching mice in his office – one of which inspired Mickey Mouse.

Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.

It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. I didn’t disappear; I just got busy… Busy with radical✦, my advisory firm, busy with building out our bi-weekly Briefing (which you absolutely should subscribe to – two times a week you will get our latest research and insights on the future of technology and business), our free resources (check it out – we make a bunch of our best tools available for free for you), and busy with working on GYSHIDO. Yes, GYSHIDO – the brutally honest, no-BS productivity movement we launched some dozen years ago.

On a sunny, cloudless day in the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in one of the classically uncomfortable seats at Denver International Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to depart. At 6 feet 4 inches (or 1.96 meters), I am, by most measures, tall. I am also fairly skinny – back in 2012, while training for a series of ultramarathon races, my body fat was down to around 5%, and I weighed around 165 lbs / 75 kilograms. This means that when I encounter people who are as tall as I am, they tend to be heavier – think basketball players, rather than super tall, skinny runners.

There once was a startup. The founders, plagued by a problem they encountered in their own lives, went out into the world to seek a solution. They spoke to countless others who shared their plight, listening intently to their woes and wishes.

With determination in their hearts and fire in their eyes, they returned to their humble garage and began to craft a magical device. Day and night they toiled, fueled by the stories of those they’d met. Their creation grew more wondrous with each passing moon, for it was born from the very essence of the people’s needs.

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