I was listening to Kevin Kelly (co-founder of WIRED magazine) being interviewed on Tim Ferriss’ podcast recently and he told this fascinating story of an experiment he conducted in his 20’s.

One day he decided to take on a challenge. That challenge was to spend the next 6 months living as if those 6 months were going to be his last.

Now I admit, sounds kind of corny doesn’t it? But if you think about it it’s not corny at all if you take it seriously. If you re-program your conscious state of mind to truly believe it, it’s actually an incredibly powerful tool.

Why? Because reframing the assumptions by which one lives her life fundamentally crystallises a new way of seeing the world and the decisions she makes in it.

Inaction and uncertainty are merely a result of not testing your assumptions and asking better questions to elicit certainty.

Faced with taking on a similar experiment, what decisions would it crystallise in your mind? All of a sudden it feels like the ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding every important decision in your life starts to dissolve away.

I’m not saying this is the best or only way you should make decisions (that would be delusional). But questioning assumptions and asking better questions is always a useful exercise to undertake.

Try it on for size.

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