If I could sum this year up in one word, it’d be impermanence.
More than ever, I’ve begun to feel how temporary everything is.
It sounds morbid, but it’s had the opposite effect: I’ve never felt more alive.
I look at my dogs and hear the clock ticking louder than it used to. Their lives move faster than ours, and that awareness changes everything. I love them more consciously now, fully aware that every touch counts. I close my eyes and listen to the rhythm of their paws drumming down the hallway. I let them interrupt my work because I know one day they won’t.
That awareness shifts the texture of everyday life—and the way I make decisions. Earlier this month, I dramatically increased my keynote fee because I want to spend more time on the ground and less in the air—more ordinary mornings with my wife and our dogs, fewer nights in hotels that all look the same.
That’s the power of impermanence: It’s not just a fact—it’s a filter.
Once you see through it, you can’t unsee it.
You speak the truth faster.
You stop giving polite yeses when your gut is screaming no.
You stop spending entire years in relationships, roles, and identities that drain you—because you know they’re costing you time you can’t earn back.
We fear impermanence—death by another name—because we think it’s the opposite of life. But death is what gives life its edge, its focus, its meaning. Death isn’t the opposite of life. It’s what makes life feel alive.
There’s a strange freedom in accepting that. When you stop trying to make things permanent, you start participating in life instead of trying to preserve it.
You taste your coffee like it’s the last cup. You tell people how you really feel. You stop waiting for the “right time” to make changes—because there is no right time. There’s just time, and it’s moving.
We do our best to avoid that truth. We scale ourselves, brand ourselves, slap our names on buildings—all in an effort to preserve the illusion of permanence.
People call it legacy. I think it’s just fear. Even the whole memento mori idea—“remember you’ll die”—gets twisted into an immortality project. Every second counts. Hustle harder. Stay productive.
But this isn’t about being remembered. It’s about remembering to live while you’re here.
All that optimizing doesn’t save us from impermanence—it just distracts us from it. While we’re busy trying to outrun time, life is happening right under our feet, quietly, vividly, waiting to be lived.
Impermanence makes ordinary moments extraordinary. It amplifies the small joys that don’t perform well on social media but mean everything when you’re actually in them.
The laugh you shared last night? Gone, but beautiful because it ended.
That sunset outside your window? It’s never coming back in quite those colors.
The dog curled up next to you? A short life, but an incredible one.
When you stop treating impermanence as a threat and start seeing it as an invitation, something shifts. You begin to wake up. You become more alive.
Not in the manic pursuit of “more.” Not in the performative glow of “living your best life.” But in the grounded, ordinary aliveness of being here, now, for what actually is.
So when life feels fragile, that’s not a flaw in the design—it’s the invitation.
To look closer.
To love harder.
To live like it’s all temporary—because it is.
P.S. Since I’ve been doing fewer keynotes, I’ve taken everything I share on those stages—and built something that goes far deeper. Moonshot Thinking is the next evolution of that work: the frameworks I’ve taught to teams at Disney, Google X, Verizon, and Lululemon, expanded into a program that embeds them into your company’s DNA.
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