16 Jul One piece of advice for a lazy guy to get off his butt

If you could give one piece of advice for a very smart but lazy guy to get off his butt and do … by Leigh Louey-Gung

Answer by Leigh Louey-Gung:

Become consciously aware of the fact that you're going to die.

Yes, you. You're going to die. One day, your heart will stop beating, your blood will come to a stand still, the neurons in your brain will stop firing, and you'll become an empty, useless lump of decomposing flesh.

All the knowledge you have acquired will be gone. All the dreams you have will be unfulfilled. All the skills you have will be wasted. Your voice will be unheard and you will fade away into the emptiness of time until the only thing that's left of you is your unfulfilled desire to be remembered.

And the scariest thing about this is that this could happen at any moment.

Thousands of people drop dead every day without any warning or notification. You could have brain cancer. Your heart could be cycling through it's last beats. You could be in the wrong spot at the wrong time and everything could come crashing down in a screaming heap.

Your life could literally end tomorrow, and then what would be left?

Worse than this, your life could not end, but you could be left trapped in a world where you can't do any of the things you want to.

You could develop muscular dystrophy and lose control of your body. You could be paralysed and become a quadriplegic. You could have a stroke and lose half your brain.

You're comfortable right now because you believe you have all the time in the world. But you don't. You don't have all the time.

From the minute you were born, you started to die. Every second you spend watching the world tick by is one less second you have to enjoy life – to do what you want, to see everything you've always wanted to see, to touch and taste and experience everything that life has to offer.

And you're wasting them, one second at a time.

So go somewhere quiet and still and contemplate the fact that every time a second ticks by on your watch, it's one less second you'll have to do everything you've been telling yourself you'll eventually get to. It's literally your life, wasting away in front of you.

You don't know when you're going to die, but it's going to happen, and when it does, you're going to wish you had all these seconds back.

So when you fully realise that your life could end in any second and you feel the urgency to try and taste and experience everything you can, get up off your arse and start doing it.

Before it's too late…

UPDATE: I'm blown away by the response to this. So great to see it's helping so many people get up and start living the life they know they could be.

Thanks for the Quora love.

If you could give one piece of advice for a very smart but lazy guy to get off his butt and do something with his life, what would it be?