Live fully, die empty

Few things are as tragic as death. Yet many sayings and clichés trivialise it: “Being scared to death is still dying”, “Standing still means certain death”, and so on. We encounter death repeatedly, recently in the tragedy involving David Lama, Hansjörg Auer and Jess Roskelley in the Canadian Rockies. I hope — no, I am certain — that these exceptional climbers lived passionately and did not leave in fear and doubt.

“Every species, including humans, wants more than survival. It wants to explore, grow, expand and experience. Purely reactive survival may be a prerequisite, but it is not the goal or purpose. Nobody writes on a gravestone: ‘He survived until 12 July 2015!’” writes Stefan Merath in “Dein Wille geschehe”. Movement therefore has a double meaning: experiencing something new and staying alive. Anyone who spends long periods moving outdoors may have felt how changing weather, cold, exhaustion or injury can make movement essential: to get down to the valley, keep warm or simply survive.

Had we stopped moving in the snowstorm on our Khan Tengri expedition, the consequences would surely have been fatal.

Merath adds, in essence, that a company’s gravestone should not simply say it reactively survived until a certain date either. That touches me personally. About two years ago, I felt that if we did not get moving and fundamentally change my company, its death was certain. Its gravestone would not list the ideas and projects that failed, but carry an accusation of failure, perhaps decorated with the debt balance.

Fear of failure must not determine your actions!

Unfortunately, fear of failure is still a driving force in my life, and I have to fight it almost daily. For my mental well-being, it helps to listen to people such as Thaddaeus Koroma. I warmly recommend GEDANKENtanken. Koroma is a former competitive basketball player whose untreated injuries prevented him from fulfilling his NBA dream. He found another calling and became a highly successful performance coach and speaker.

Koroma has “Die empty” tattooed on his body. The phrase and its story occupied me for an entire long training run. The question behind it — “What is the richest place in the world?” — and Les Brown’s words moved me in every sense:

The cemetery is the richest place on earth. It holds hopes and dreams never fulfilled, books never written, songs never sung, inventions never shared and cures never discovered, because someone was too afraid to take the first step, persist with a problem or commit to making a dream real.

I do not know whether this perfectly answers why I run so much or try so many business ideas. But I know I do not want my gravestone to say “Survived until…” I would much rather it read “Lived his #lifeworktrailbalance to the full until…” And naturally, there should never be a company gravestone!

Dying empty means having lived life fully. That is simply smarter.

DIE EMPTY!