Michalewicz - Life in half a second: how to achieve success before its too late

Published by Hybrid Publishers

Melbourne Victoria Australia

Matthew Michalewicz 2013

This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted
under the Copyright Act 1968 , no part may be reproduced
by any process without prior written permission from the
publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction
should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers,
PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria 3204, Australia.

www.hybridpublishers.com.au

First edition 2013; reprinted with corrections 2014
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Michalewicz, Matthew, author.

Life in half a second: how to achieve success before
its too late / Matthew Michalewicz.

ISBN: 9781925000207 (paperback)

Includes bibliographical references.

Subjects: Success; Conduct of life; Life
skills.

Dewey Number: 158

Cover design by Rachael Harding / Ennovative
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

To my incredible, unbelievable family:

Babi, Didi, Lula, Krecik, Guinea-Rabbit, Boo-Boo, and Pixie.

And with heartfelt thanks to:

Constantin Chiriac, Larisa Stamova, Darryl Schafferius,
James Balzary, Polly McGee, Stuart Snyder,
Kishen Vijayadass, Mike Richards, Susan Andrews,
Doug Misener, Nanette Moulton, Winston Broadbent,
and Colin Pearce.

Continue the journey at:
www.Facebook.com/LifeinHalfaSecond

Sign up for the Life in Half a Second challenge:
www.LifeinHalfaSecond.com/challenge

Contents

Index

www.LifeinHalfaSecond.com/toc

Continue the journey at:
www.Facebook.com/LifeinHalfaSecond

Sign up for the Life in Half a Second challenge:
www.LifeinHalfaSecond.com/challenge

M y six-year-old son asks, Dad, why do you have to write this book?

I dont have to, I explain. I want to. But why ?

Because it gives me pleasure to write it.

But how ?

Because this book is everything that I am. And in a hundred years, Ill be long gone, but this book will still be here and your childrens grandchildren can read it and be with me.

I dont understand.

I pause; rethink my strategy. Okay, let me explain it another way. How do you feel when youre skateboarding?

Happy, he replies, the corners of his mouth turning upwards.

Well, thats how I feel when Im writing this book.

Silence, contemplation. His eyes widen and he stares deeply into my soul. Dad, are you writing a book about skateboards?

Life is short and death is long.
Fritz Shoulder

The Countdown

E veryone knows that life is short its the most over-preached truth on earth. But how short is it, exactly? Planet Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. The species you and I belong to, Homo sapiens, did not emerge until some 200,000 years ago. The oldest known fossils of modern humans are only 160,000 years old, discovered in Herto, Ethiopia. So out of the four-and-a-half billion years that this planet has been floating through the nothingness of space, weve been around some .0044% of that time. Put another way, if our planet was exactly one year old, then modern humans would have only been around for the last 23 minutes . Measured on the same scale, if our planet was a year old, then your entire life would amount to half a second .

In planet-time, thats all you have: half a second.

We dont appreciate this as kids. Time seems unlimited and goes by ever so slowly. Were impatient to grow up, become adults, and enter the real world. We imagine all the freedom well have, all the things well get to do. But when adulthood finally arrives, we discover that well be spending the vast majority of our freedom at work, paying bills, surviving, often in jobs we dont like or dont care about. Life is not how we imagined it and disillusionment sets in. We spend our half second doing everything except what we really want, dreaming of the future, of some distant, faraway day when life will be different, better, when we can finally do the things we want. But as we grow older, time begins moving faster and faster, and our long-awaited day never seems to come.

The tragedy of life isnt that we only have half a second. The tragedy is that we waste it . In my travels across continents, countries, and cultures, first as a serial immigrant and later as a businessman, I met people from every walk of life imaginable. And throughout all these journeys in different parts of the globe, I became obsessed by a single question:

What would you do if you only had one year to live?

Im not sure where the question came from, what prompted it or why, but it quickly became my favorite topic of conversation. And the more I asked the question to people of varying backgrounds, skin color, religion, and education the more obsessed I became. Why? Because I always received the same answer. With only a year to live, most people would quit work, spend time with family, see the world, and do everything they always dreamed of doing before its too late . Their answers would be thick with emotion not sadness or regret, but enthusiasm, eagerness. I felt they were about to set sail on some journey they often fantasized about but never actually took. With heat and fervour, eyes flashing, gleeing almost, they spoke of the many things they would do before death claimed them. And after the hundredth question and hundredth answer, I finally thought, Good God! Can we only live when were dying?

My impression of the world is that we spend life doing what we have to rather than what we want to. This comes across in many psychology and happiness studies, especially those related to work. Harvard studies show that worker happiness is at an all-time low, What can we make of all these studies and statistics?

One thing: we would rather be doing something else .

And that, right there, is the great tragedy of human existence. While this planet has been spinning and forming and cooling for billions of years, nature has been busy making you . From scraps of living matter from bacteria, microbes, fermenting cells fighting for the right to exist, squirming and striving, growing in complexity through millions of generations, learning to breathe, mutating, spawning life on land and sea and air against the backdrop of centuries and millennia passing the first genus Homo emerged. Somehow only God knows how he rose from the mess of biology and creation, covered in slime, ignorant and animalistic, and learned to stand, walk, stare at the sky, marvelling at the dark voids and cosmic dust above. And then he embarked upon the journey of all journeys, the hundred-thousand-generation epic of survival, of hunting and being hunted, overcoming frost, famine, struggling with tools made of wood and stone, discovering fire, migrating tens of thousands of miles to colonize the world, living by the law of fist and club, coping with violence, rape, conquest, disease without cures, starvation enduring unthinkable pain and suffering so that the species could survive living with the sole intent to mate, procreate, pass genes on to the next generation of survivors, over and over, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, until finally, at the very end of that endless ladder, one sperm out of 300 million attached itself to an egg, creating you , only you .

The point of it all, since the planet cooled and nature first put her hand to work, was to produce