I’m 94 years old. I’ve outlived my wife Eleanor, almost every friend I ever had, and truth be told, even my enemies. I’m standing at the edge of the cliff now, and before I take that last step, I need to turn around and tell you something I wish someone had told me decades ago. Most of you walk around with this arrogant delusion that you have all the time in the world.
You treat your days like they’re cheap pieces of paper you can toss in the trash. But you’re flat broke. We are all going to die. You might understand that intellectually, but you don’t feel the cold weight of it against your skin.
If you did, you wouldn’t be wasting your life the way you are right now. Let me tell you about the first thing that changed how I see every breath I take. I call it the law of the last time. Every single time you do something in this life, no matter how mundane, remind yourself that there will come a day when you do that exact thing for the very last time.
When my kids were little, I came home tired from work, and they’d run to the door asking me to pick them up. I’d do it automatically, sometimes grumpily because my back ached. But there was a specific calendar day when I picked my daughter up, set her down, and I never picked her up again. She grew too big.
I didn’t know it was the last time back then. Nobody rings a bell to tell you a chapter is closing forever. One day you’ll kiss your spouse for the last time. One day you’ll drink a hot cup of coffee for the last time.
One day you’ll look at a beautiful sunset, and it will be your final view. You never know when that day will arrive. It could be ten years from now, or before the sun goes down tonight. If you can truly embed that knowledge into your soul, you’ll never take a single moment for granted again.
You’ll taste the food you eat. You’ll hold onto a hug a little longer. You’ll look into the eyes of the people you love and actually see them, instead of looking past them toward the next thing on your to-do list. Now, the second thing you need to understand.
Stop numbing yourself to the gift of existence. I look at the world today and see everyone completely hypnotized, spending hours scrolling through glowing phones, completely dead to the physical reality around them. Look at me. I’m 94 years old.
My knees ache when the weather changes. My eyesight is getting dimmer by the week. My energy fades before the afternoon is over. But you, so many of you watching this right now, you still have the golden ticket in your hands.
You have your health. You have the remnants of your youth. Yet you’re willingly throwing those priceless treasures away by shutting out the world. Put the device down.
Walk outside and feel the cold wind hit your face. Look up at the vastness of the sky. Do the things that actually matter before it’s too late. Call your aging mother while she can still answer.
Buy that plane ticket you’ve been putting off. Eat the good food. And for heaven’s sake, forgive your enemies right now. You don’t forgive them to do them a favor.
You forgive them because you don’t have the time or the emotional energy to carry the heavy, rotting luggage of hatred and resentment into your final years. Take my best friend Jack, a man I think about every single day, especially now that I’m the only one left to remember him. Back in 1968, Jack was the star of our circle. Smarter than me.
Better looking. Making money hand over fist as a corporate shark. I remember sitting with him in a dimly lit bar one evening, celebrating a massive business deal. He was leaning back in an expensive leather chair, puffing on a Cuban cigar, and he looked across the table and said, “Frank, five more years.
That’s the grand strategy. I grind it out for five more years, hit my financial target, and then I’m done. Then I finally take my wife Mary to Italy, buy my paints, learn to be an artist. Then, Frank, then I finally start living my life.
”
Jack had it all figured out. The five-year plan. The road map. But life doesn’t care about your spreadsheets.
Three days after that conversation, Jack walked out of his high-rise office building, suddenly grabbed his chest, and hit the concrete sidewalk before he even realized his body was failing him. Massive catastrophic heart attack. He was 42 years old. He never saw the canals of Venice.
He never touched a paintbrush. As I stood over his casket at the funeral, the overwhelming tragedy wasn’t that Jack died. We all have to face that curtain call. The real tragedy was that Jack spent his entire fleeting existence on earth waiting to live.
He treated his present days like a miserable waiting room for a beautiful future that never arrived. A week later, I went up to his office to help his widow clear out his desk. I opened his planner and saw his calendar booked solid with urgent meetings for the next six months. Yet the world didn’t stop for even a second because Jack was gone.
His company posted a job listing to replace him within two weeks. His clients forgot his name within a year. When I look at the world today, I see millions of people acting exactly like Jack. Telling themselves the same lie.
They’ll finally be happy once they get that next promotion. They’ll take that dream trip when the kids are older. They’ll mend that broken family relationship once the other person apologizes first. Let me give you a hard, unvarnished fact from a man who has lived nearly a century.
There is no such thing as later. There is only the space you are standing in right now. If you’re constantly trading your guaranteed now for a hypothetical later, you’re making the worst bet in human history. Now, the third thing, and this one might sting a bit.
Let’s talk about your stuff. Look at the world today. Everyone’s caught up in a mad race to buy things they don’t need, using money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t even like. Look at where I am right now.
I live in one small room. A basic bed, a sturdy chair, and a framed picture of my beautiful Eleanor on the nightstand. That’s it. Decades ago, I had the massive house.
The luxury cars. A garage so packed with expensive toys I could barely walk through it. Sitting here at 94, with the terrifying clarity of the endgame, I’m telling you it’s all garbage. I’ve attended more funerals than I can count, and I have never, not one single time, seen a U-Haul trailer following behind a hearse.
When you breathe your last, your kids aren’t going to cherish all that plastic and leather. They’re going to hire a stranger to toss 90% of your precious belongings into a dumpster. The other 10% will get sold on the front lawn for quarters. That is the true sum total of your materialism.
Future trash. So why are you breaking your back working sixty hours a week to pay for it? Why are you missing your daughter’s childhood just to afford a fancy car that spends its days sitting in gridlock traffic? Utter madness.
And the tragedy is you won’t realize it’s madness until you’re sitting exactly where I’m sitting. And by then, it’s too late to return the merchandise. I learned this the hard way in 1979, the night I won Businessman of the Year in my city. Massive black-tie banquet.
When they called my name, I walked up to that podium with the crowd roaring. I felt like an absolute god. Like I had officially won the game of life. But when I drove home that night, clutching the heavy polished glass trophy, the house was completely dark.
Eleanor was fast asleep upstairs. The kids were dead to the world in their beds. I sat all by myself at the kitchen table, pouring a glass of scotch, staring at that piece of glass. The silence hit me.
The applause had stopped completely. The people who clapped for me at that dinner didn’t actually care about me. They cared about what my success could do for them. Meanwhile, the people upstairs who loved me for who I was?
The ones I’d neglected for months just to win that stupid prize. I skipped my son’s varsity games to stay late at the office. I canceled my anniversary dinner to close a corporate merger. For what?
That trophy is sitting in a dusty box in a basement somewhere right now, and I honestly couldn’t tell you where it is. But the memory of my wife’s sad, disappointed eyes when I told her I couldn’t make it home for dinner? That memory is here in my head, as clear as day. It stays with you.
You think your career is your legacy, but it’s not. It’s just a transaction. You’re selling the finite hours of your life to build someone else’s castle. If you drop dead tonight, your job opening will be posted online before your obituary hits the paper.
Don’t worship at the altar of your career. It will never love you back, and it certainly won’t hold your hand when the lights finally go out. So if the money is fake, the career is a trap, and the stuff is just garbage, what’s left? The only things you truly get to keep in this life are the things you gave away.
The love you shared. The time you invested. The genuine connections you made. When I sit here today, I don’t replay my successful business deals.
I don’t count up old bank balances. I replay the quiet Sunday morning spent drinking coffee with Eleanor. I replay the sound of my daughter’s belly laugh when she was three years old. I replay the freezing winter evening I helped a complete stranger push his broken-down car out of a snowbank.
That’s the only wealth that actually matters. So let me leave you with one final challenge. First, kill your ego. You’re so terrified of looking foolish that you let fear paralyze you.
You don’t take the risk. You don’t start the business. You don’t tell people how you truly feel because you’re worried about what they might think. Let me liberate you from that burden.
Nobody is watching you. They’re far too busy worrying about themselves. You’re the main character only inside your own head. To everyone else, you’re just background noise.
Stop letting the fear of judgment ruin your life. Second, practice the law of the last time. Let it remind you to hold your loved ones tighter today. Finally, wake up.
Put the phones away. Live your life before the clock runs out. Don’t end up like Jack, waiting on a five-year plan that might never come. My eyes are getting tired now.
I’ll sign off and get some rest. Thank you for sitting with me tonight and listening to an old man ramble. Take care of yourselves. Look out for each other.
Please, go live.