Greatest Achievement?

In January, Tony Robbins tweeted, “What if enjoying your life became your greatest achievement?” I’ve thought about this idea on a daily basis ever since reading this tweet. Why? Well, because I believe it changed my entire perspective about life.

Up until reading this, I thought differently about achievement. I, like everyone else, equated productivity and success with achievement. However, after spending a lot of time thinking about enjoying life as our greatest achievement, I believe it might just be the best life philosophy.

When you really stop and think about it, nothing is as important as we make it. This includes work, business, money, legacy, and just about everything else. Since this is so, why do we spend so much of our precious time worrying about shit that really doesn’t matter?

As far as I know, we only have one life to live.

Why not enjoy the hell out of this life? What do we have to lose?

Tim Ferris recently released a podcast titled, “Naval Ravikant on Happiness Hacks and the 5 Chimps Theory.” Naval is a pretty cool guy and something he said seems to flow with Tony’s tweet. In this podcast, Naval said…

“I’m not afraid of death anymore. A lot of the struggle we have in life comes from a deep, deep fear of death and it can take form in many ways. Maybe we want to write the great American novel, or maybe we want to achieve something, or build a great piece of technology, or start an amazing business, or we want to run for office and make a difference. A lot of this comes from this fear that we’re going to die, so we have to build something that lasts beyond us…. I don’t have this quest for immortality anymore.

I came to this fundamental conclusion that the universe has been around for a very long time. For all practical purposes, we are nothing. We are amoeba. We’re like bacteria to the universe. We are monkeys on a small rock. We live on a small stone in this gigantic universe and this universe has been around for billions of years and will be around for billions of years after us. Your existence and my existence is infinitesimal. We’re not really here that long and we really don’t matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts so eventually we will fade, our work will fade, our children will fade, our thoughts will fade, this planet will fade, the sun will fade. It will all be gone. There are entire civilizations that have faded. We’re here for an extremely short period of time and things aren’t that consequential.

This is such a short and precious life that its really important that you don’t spend it unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. We only have 70 years out of the 50 billion. So when I think about the world that way, you realize it is just kind of a game. You realize how precious life is. You realize how important it is to enjoy yourself. You can’t take things too seriously. You can’t make yourself miserable, or unhappy. Nothing we do matters very much in the long run.”

Considering life as Naval has shared takes so much damn pressure off, doesn’t it? Most of the things we’ve been brainwashed to chase don’t matter and we trade our short lives away trying to be successful.

You don’t have to worry about all the stuff you’re worrying about because none of it really matters.

Relax.
Slow down.
Stop worrying.
Enjoy yourself.