The year I outlived my father

This morning I rewatched Steve Job’s Stanford commencement address. It’s as good as I remember, and even hits better as I get older.

If you’ve never seen it, today’s your lucky day. I’d highly encourage you to pause and watch it. If it’s been a while, you’ll appreciate it just as much.

For me it hit differently this time. The ending lands perfectly with the hindsight of years gone by.

Steve weaves a narrative in three parts. As soon as he starts you’re able to sit back and follow the stories. I’ve heard the examples he uses many times before. But when he tells them, they carry extra weight. He’s speaking like a person who is looking back at his past from a distance, and acknowledging his parts in the successes and failures he’s experienced. ¹

Toward the end he reminds of us a simple truth: we’re all going to die. And that truth should impact the decisions we make each day.

Coming from a person who didn’t get to keep doing what he loved for decades to come, it hits much harder after his death.

Knowing, truly deep in our guts, that our time on this earth is limited doesn’t have to be a negative. It can help fuel us forward into new possibilities. It can bring out the best in the unrealized potential of our lives.

I love his idea to look into the mirror each day.

Look at your reflection and ask, “If today was my last day, would I want to keep doing what I’m doing?”

Even for those of us who believe there is a life to come, it’s still just that—a belief.

It’s not a known fact, but rather hope combined with faith.

Even believing there’s more beyond this, the time we spend here shouldn’t be wasted.

Growing up, I carried an unspoken assumption—barely conscious in the back of my mind. I didn’t believe I’d outlive my dad. He died of Leukemia at 31. I was five at the time, and hold only a few isolated memories.

As I neared my 30s, that idea weighed heavily on me—this sense that I wasn’t meant to be older than my father.

It pushed me. Drove me forward to get things done. I didn’t have a lot of time left.

On the one hand, I used that energy to propel forward. But it also left scars. Therapy helped. My wife helped. Family and friends helped.

Then a funny thing happened.

As my biological clocked approached 32, the weight began to lift.

I crossed a line my dad never could. And somehow, that unlocked new possibilities for my future.

It’s not fair that he was robbed of life so early, and it’s not fair I carried my own baggage for decades after.

But there was an unexpected gift inside all that pain.

I spent much of my early adulthood exactly the way Jobs described. I believed my time was short. That idea motivated me forward each and every day. Cue my second-favorite song from Hamilton.

Why do you write like you're running out of time?
Write day and night like you're running out of time?
Every day you fight like you're running out of time

I still feel the tension pulling at me. Years of expecting the worst just around the corner doesn’t disappear overnight. But something has changed. I’ve shifted.

I no longer have the question in my mind of whether I’ll reach an arbitrary age. I no longer believe against all rationality that 31 would be my last year as well.

Now I hope to have many decades to come.

Still, Job’s address reminds me to not waste the life we've been given.

Don’t spend our days on things of little consequence. Don’t drift through time pursuing life without meaning.

We’re here, now. Our life is real, and the time we have left is limited.

If we waste away, not living up to what could be, mucking around in the proverbial rat race, then we’re missing out on so much beauty. We’re not living the full potential of our beautiful selves.

Death is coming.

So what are we going to do with the life ahead of us?

What will each moment be? To spend our time in mediocrity, without ever dreaming of more—it wastes what could be.

Now, this isn’t to say people don’t have baggage to deal with. Life is hard. We get knocked down, we feel the burden of so much around us. And sometimes we just don’t have it in us to keep pushing against gravity. When that happens know that you’re not alone, that you’re worth it and have value, and each step forward in your life is beautiful for the rest of us.

^{1. Reading from the notes in the Steve Job’s archive, I find it surprising that he was so nervous during his speech. This from a person used to speaking to the world year after year. He read from written notes, which is odd when I’ve watched him give perfect keynote addresses from memory with the aid of slides. It does give some inspiration that in the absense of memorizing, if you have a good thing to say, sometimes just reading it is fine.}