They say life is short, carpe diem. They say life is short so there is an implication that you have to maximize speed, to find ways to bring fast results, move fast, be time-effective.

Life is short and never repeats, so on the one hand all this is correct. Life is short, you procrastinate it, and now you are in your 50s, and you didn’t even start. You were waiting for the right people, perfect conditions, to know more, and these perfect conditions never came, and now you’re old and it’s too late.

But I think that this “life is short” paradigm is partly what holds us from living our life to its fullest.

Life is long. Yes, some people die very young (but that’s not you obviously). You can die any moment because of some weird accident, you can die slowly from some disease, but in general even a short life is quite long.

It means that it’s almost never too late to start something, you still have some time to get better at it, to learn new things and to have fun.

What else does it mean? Maybe it’s right to maximize the overall output of life, not local maximums of fast results.

It means that you probably will live through times when you are not in your peak form and you’d better care for your future self.

It means you usually have time for compound interest - and I don’t mean money, I mean habits, skills, small everyday things that can build into something significant.

It means life is bigger than you, and there will be other days, maybe better days, and tomorrow all your troubles might seem so far away, and there is no need to spend all your resources on fixing them today.

Life is long, and maybe some of today’s hottest things are not worth it, and you can spend your time living your very own life which is priceless because life is short.