Don't just exist but live - maximise life's most precious commodity- Find out How in Seneca's book - 'On the shortness of Life'

On The Shortness of Life

This was written almost 2000 years ago (around ad 49) by the great stoic philosopher Seneca the younger and it has great lessons for everyone on what is important and what is not. 

You should definitely read it. It is not long. I have put a put interesting points and links to summaries and the full text below. Enjoy!

Don't just exist but live - maximise  life's most precious commodity

'You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that'

You think you will live for ever and waste time

'You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply - though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire. You will hear many people saying: 'When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties.' And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived! '

Most people waste life with no direction. They are just tossed about by external events and end up going nowhere

,For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about,.

You have control of your life, don't blame your parents or your environment. You can change who you are and how you respond.

'We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be'

Guard your time

'Be careful of others who sabotage your time.How many days are left to you and not taken by others?

How many days has that defendant stolen from you? Or that candidate?....Or that influential friend who keeps people like you not for friendship but for display? Mark off, I tell you, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few - the useless remnants - have been left to you.'

Don't waste time on useless tasks

'dedication to useless tasks'

Have goals

'Many pursue no fixed goal, but are tossed about in everchanging designs by a fickleness which is shifting, inconstant and never satisfied with itself. Some have no aims at all for their life's course, but death takes them unawares as they yawn languidly'

Organise and plan your day. A good way to do this is a daily journal

'But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day'

  

Live in  the moment

'But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours'

Summary

Value your time and don't waste it. Most people know this but don't do this. Common sense is not common practice

Don't put things off. Live in the present.

Do not waste time on trivial worries.

Plan and organise your time.

LInks 

Link to summary: https://dailystoic.com/on-the-shortness-of-life-seneca/

Link to summary: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/on-the-shortness-of-life

Link to full book:  https://epdf.tips/on-the-shortness-of-life-penguin-great-ideas.html

Link to full book: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_shortness_of_life

IF - HOW TO HAVE EVERYTHING

Would you like to have the Earth and everything that's in  it? Here is the ultimate guide for success!

    This is an amazing poem. "If—" is a poem by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling,  The poem, first published in Rewards and  Fairies (1910), is written in the form of paternal advice to the poet's son, John

If you can keep your head when all about you
 Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
 But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
 Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
 And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
 If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
 And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
 Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
 And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
 And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
 And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
 To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
 Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
 Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
 If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
 And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!