Unlock A Richer Life By Contemplating Death

Jodi Wellman shares 5 key insights from You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets.

Photo by Ahmed Adly on Unsplash

How many Mondays do you have left to live? It’s a sobering question, even a morbid one, but it’s at the heart of the new book You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets by

Jodi Wellman

. Jodi is a corporate executive turned executive coach and a trainer in the Penn Resilience Program, which uses the principles of positive psychology to guide participants toward a life of intention. Our curator

Daniel Pink

says "This book will jolt you out of complacency and redirect your limited time toward joyful, meaningful pursuits.” Here’s Jodi to share 5 of her big ideas.

1. Death has a real knack for making life seem more valuable; scarcity can be a good thing.

We love the idea of “living like we mean it.” We drink coffee out of “seize the day” mugs, nod in earnest agreement that “you only live once,” and create fantastical bucket lists. We have such good intentions to make the most of our precious time! And yet, we often take our lives for granted. We think we’ll have time later, slip into autopilot, go through the motions, and suddenly another month has flown by. We’re often left feeling like we’ve missed out on our lives.

Paradoxically, chumming up with the Grim Reaper can wake us up and breathe more life into our lives. Reminding ourselves of our inevitable, no-way-out-alive, possibly imminent (but hopefully not immediate) death—well, that tends to snap people to attention.