Live Each Day Page 2

  At the same time, they asked for a lot more scientific research, so they could believe my claims about what makes people happier in relationships and at work. Understandably, they wanted a solid, credible framework for defining and achieving happiness.

  I’m glad I received that feedback from the skeptics, because I tend to be a skeptic as well. I raise an eyebrow whenever anybody makes big assertions with vague, undefined terms such as “attraction,” “energy,” and “laws.” For the purposes of this book, I leverage the wisdom from various spiritual traditions, but I have no religious agenda. My emphasis is on verifiable methods that people can apply to their daily lives. I’ve spent years tracking down and confirming a wealth of rigorous research to support the practices in this book.

  Based on user feedback, the master classes I teach have evolved to follow variations on this process:

  •I share scientific research, anecdotes, observations, and frameworks with you.

  •I distribute a handout, with questions.

  •You think.

  •You write on the handout. I usually give a very short period of time, such as four minutes or seven minutes. This gives you no time to procrastinate. The best answers often come when you have no time to filter, edit, or censor your thoughts and feelings.

  •I ask you to pair up — one-on-one, with another person — and share what you wrote. It’s a bit like speed dating.

  •I bring the whole group together, so you can ask questions, share epiphanies or insights, and discuss.

  •I give you a few more minutes to write out your individual action items.

  •If you want, you can make a public commitment as to what you plan on doing next to improve your life.

  This is serious emotional work.

  I always bring tissues to my workshops, because many times someone ends up crying. The tears are a positive sign that people are going deep and getting real. My master class participants often tell me that they’re amazed at how quickly we are able to explore fundamental life issues — and gain actionable insights. In other words, they realize what important changes they need to make. It may not be easy, but it’s worth it.

  I’ve tried to take the best aspects of my Happiness Workshop and replicate them in this book. Better yet, because a book is not the same as a workshop or a keynote address, we’re able to delve deeper into many topics.

  On the other hand, what I can’t do is force you to do the writing activities. In a master class, if I look around the room and see that someone is frozen with writer’s block, I can gently nudge or encourage them. But I can’t do that with you.

  Instead, I have to persuade you right here that you will definitely get the most out of this book when you actually do the writing activities, share your responses with others, and follow through on your action items. Couples who’ve been married 25 years have told me that after my workshop, they went out, had a glass of wine, and talked about life-and-death matters they’d never addressed before. With my corporate clients, people have said they got to know their colleagues on a deeper, more personal level thanks to the master class. One of the many benefits was that they developed trust within their team.

  So here are some ways to get the most out of the writing activities:

  Do them by yourself.

  •Write them in the easiest way possible. Open a document and just start writing. Send yourself an email. Or grab a pen and a piece of paper.

  •Do them quickly, if that helps. Set the timer on your smartphone for five minutes and see how much you can write. (When the timer rings, you’ll probably have built so much momentum that you won’t want to stop — which is great! Just keep going.)

  •Give yourself a full hour, if not more, to ruminate and explore your feelings while doing the exercise.

  •Do them when you tend to feel more contemplative, such as first thing on a weekend morning. Or before you go to bed on a Sunday night, as you reflect on the week ahead. Or while watching the orange sunset on a beach, when you’re feeling relaxed and inspired. (I like fireplaces and snow outside.)

  Do them with a loved one.

  •Tell your husband, wife, or partner that you’d like to have fun doing an activity that could help you think about life and get to know each other better. (Yes, even if you’ve been together 30 years, you have room to get to know each other better.) Whether you have a partner or not, you might get a lot out of doing the writing with a parent, child, sibling, or trusted friend.

  •You can take one question at a time, once per week, or do several at a time. Ideally, both of you can formally write out your answers. But it’s also worthwhile if you simply discuss the answers — say, while you’re on a long car ride or flight. Or as part of your “pillow talk” at the end of the day.

  Do them in a group.

  •Your family might enjoy doing the writing activities together. Or the questions could simply be a springboard for conversation around the dinner table, or over drinks at the neighborhood bar.

  •When you’re having lunch with your colleagues, ask them how they’d answer some of these questions. You might be surprised at their answers, and all of you might feel a lot closer to each other afterwards.

  •If you’d like me to conduct my master class or deliver a keynote for an event, please contact me and we can discuss (jim@jimmccarthy.com). I’ve found that the writing activities and discussion work exceptionally well, even in settings where the audience is used to just sitting and listening.

  Execute your action items.

  •Insights are most powerful when you put them into action. As part of your writing, I ask you to come up with specific things you are going to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing.

  •To help you make sure this happens, I’ve written a short chapter at the end of this book on how to create and stick with useful habits. It was tempting to not include it in the book, but then I realized how important it is that you implement what you’ve learned, so that you benefit the most.

  Revisit your writings from time to time.

  •Put a reminder in your calendar for every three or six months, to review what you originally wrote. Feel free to revise this document over time. This alone can be a very worthwhile exercise as you see how you are evolving — or how the world is changing around you.

  The Process:

  Practices

  Thinking, reflecting, writing, discussing, and implementing changes are all wonderful and useful. But so are a series of practices that, over time, have become a bigger part of my work.

  This development began when I started reading my workshop feedback forms. Participants said they loved the writing activities and action items, loved the interaction and discussion, and loved the inspiration. But they sought more specific, daily practices that they could start doing right now.

  When I once mentioned in passing that forgiveness was essential for being able to enjoy one’s life journey, people wanted to know how to forgive. They were stressed, and I said that mindfulness meditation can help. “How do you do that?” they asked. Others said they knew what they wanted to do, but could not find the courage to take that first step. “Affirmations can help,” I replied, and they asked, “What’s that?” Many workshop participants reported that they were always striving for more, and I suggested they’d be a lot happier with a gratitude practice.

  The good news is that I had already spent many years practicing forgiveness, meditation, affirmations, and gratitude, and I gradually incorporated all of these activities into my workshops.

  This book will show you how to do a forgiveness practice, how to meditate, how to affirm yourself, and how to be grateful. You will learn why these practices work, and you will be able to incorporate them into your life — immediately.

  Getting the Most

  Out of This Book

  You can view this bo
ok as an organized collection of anecdotes and research, with some writing activities and practices as optional add-ons. You can simply read and look for best practices and inspiration, without ever doing any deep introspection, without any writing, without any action plans, without changing any of your routines or practices. In fact, most “motivational” books don’t ask you to do any more than that.

  Yet I’m asking you to do more.

  I’d like you to view this book as a how-to guide to change your life. It’s a compact, crystallized, high-octane, practical workbook, with step-by-step suggestions and activities — each of which is surprisingly simple to do.

  My goal is not to make your growth and transformation amazingly hard.

  My goal is to make it ridiculously easy.

  But that means you have to do it, one baby step at a time. I’d like to suggest how much you could benefit — more or less — from doing the following:

  •20% benefit — if you just read this book, but never do the writing activities or action items, talk to anyone else, or do any of the practices.

  •40% benefit — if you just read this book, do the writing activities and action items, but never talk to anyone else, or do any of the practices.

  •60% benefit — if you just read this book, do the writing activities and action items, talk to someone else, but never do any of the practices.

  •80% benefit — if you just read this book, do the writing activities and action items, talk to someone else, and do all of the practices daily.

  •100% benefit — if you do all of the above, but also keep learning by following me on social media and getting my latest email newsletter updates.

  (Learn more at www.jimmccarthy.com.) Besides, I’d love to hear from you.

  The more deeply you use this book, the more you will benefit. It’s up to you how far you want to or need to take these recommendations.

  I’m honored that we’re spending this time together. I’m delighted to share the absolute best of what I have learned. So that you can live the life you want right now and leave a legacy with no regrets.

  Next, I’m going to tell you a bit about my story.

  JIM McCARTHY

  San Francisco, California

  PART ONE

  Purpose — Decide What

  You Want to Do

  Chapter One:

  Live Like You Have Cancer

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. McCarthy?”

  “Yes?”

  It’s 12:40 p.m. on Tuesday, February 5, 2013. My doctor calls me up and tells me that I have cancer.

  I’m in a strip mall parking lot in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google’s headquarters is a mile away. To my right is a Starbucks. To my left is a burrito joint. I’ve just picked up my dry cleaning. I’m sitting in my shiny blue BMW convertible. And I hear the voice at the other end of my iPhone talking about surgery, radiation, and survival rates.

  I drive home, lie down in bed, and cry for a couple of hours. This is the first time in my life that I truly feel my own mortality. I mean, we all know that we’re going to die, on an intellectual level. But this is the first time that I realize — on a visceral level — that my skin will someday be as cold as my bathroom’s granite countertop.

  I call my mom and dad in Omaha, Nebraska. I call my brother Mike in New Jersey. Then my sister Kathy in Omaha. Then my brother Dan in Virginia. It’s hard to get out the words. I feel horrible for myself, but even worse for them. They’re all really shocked. The conversations are short.

  Then, I drink almost an entire bottle of cheap chardonnay wine. I don’t normally drink that much, but this time I feel justified.

  Next, I do what I almost always do in times of crisis — I start writing in my journal. And out of me flow all sorts of questions I have about my relationships, my career, my legacy, and my regrets.

  “How much time do I still have?”

  “What do I still want to do?”

  “What do I need to repair?”

  “What, after all, would make me happy?”

  There is never a good moment to get a cancer diagnosis, but the timing of this seemed especially bad. You see, most people would say that I’ve been very fortunate: I grow up in Omaha, supported by a loving family. I study political science at the University of Iowa. I spend my junior year in Vienna, then win a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Tübingen, Germany. After teaching English to bankers in Frankfurt for two years, I move to Madrid, where I work as a business journalist. I don’t have much money, but I have a lot of fun.

  In 1991, I move to the San Francisco Bay Area to be with a woman I had fallen in love with. After a few years struggling in sales jobs, I’m lucky enough to get into Stanford for business school, and I earn my MBA there in 1996. Then, I’m fortunate enough to be hired at Yahoo in 1997 as employee number 258. Being part of the Dot-Com Boom is fascinating, exhausting, competitive, and lucrative.

  In 2000, I get married and have a daughter. I’m a stay-at-home dad for a year. I have another daughter and then go on to work at other successful internet companies.

  So it’s fair to say that I’m an ambitious Silicon Valley business guy. My life has been built on privilege, hard work, good timing, risk-taking … and a lot of luck.

  In late 2012, I leave the start-up I’m at and start doing leadership consulting — teaching companies how to hire great people and build high-performance teams. At age 49, I am really excited to jumpstart this next phase of my career, playing to my strengths.

  And then I get the cancer diagnosis.

  About a week after getting the call from my doctor at Kaiser Permanente, I go to their cancer treatment center in nearby Santa Clara. Part of the health provider’s protocol is that I speak with various doctors to get their opinions.

  I am accompanied by my friend, Gerald, who’s there to give me emotional support. I figure that the stress of the situation will make it hard for me to listen accurately.

  It turns out I have very early stage prostate cancer. The disease kills about 29,000 men in the United States every year.1

  My original urologist — the one who called me on February 5 — has already urged me to have surgery.

  But today a different urologist explains that this surgery has a 40–50 percent chance of making me impotent for the rest of my life. I’ve always liked sex. And I don’t like those odds at all.

  A different doctor — this time a radiation oncologist — mentions that they can place small “radiation seeds” inside my prostate gland. The good news: it should kill the cancer. The bad news: it might trigger a different cancer in my internal organs.

  Fortunately, both of these doctors agree that I can do what’s called “active surveillance,” which means no surgery or radiation yet — just regular blood tests and biopsies to make sure the cancer is not spreading quickly.

  We have caught the cancer early. It turns out that I’m lucky, yet again.

  Now, you can say, “Hang on, Jim. You have a common form of cancer. You’ve caught it so early on that you haven’t even had to treat it yet. Why all the drama? Why all the talk about life and death?”

  These are good questions.

  A couple of weeks after I get my cancer diagnosis, I meet with a friend, Diane. Diane was the first head of public relations at Yahoo in the late ’90s. She’s a very nice, smart, successful Silicon Valley executive.

  She also has advanced lung cancer that has spread to the walls of her chest. Sitting in the sunshine around an outdoor table, at an Italian restaurant in Los Gatos, I say, “Diane, I don’t even feel like I’m in the same league with you. You’ve had a lot of chemotherapy. You’ve lost all of your hair. You have a very serious situation.”

  Diane looks me in the eye and says, “Jim, it’s not about whether you have two months to live, or 20 years. W
hen you get a cancer diagnosis, it changes your life. But when I go to my son’s lacrosse games, and I see the blue in the sky, the green in the leaves, and I hear the laugher of the boys running, there are tears running down my face. Tears are streaming down my face, because I’m just savoring the pure simple beauty of the moment …

  “And I wish we all could live like we have cancer.”

  Now, when Diane says, “I wish we all could live like we have cancer,” clearly she doesn’t wish on any of us the pain of having cancer. The fear from having cancer. The many losses of having cancer.

  But she wishes that each of us cherish today. Not hung up on something that happened a week ago, which we can’t change. And not freaked out about something that may or may not happen tomorrow. But living as deeply and richly as possible … right now.

  Diane taught me the importance of practicing mindfulness, facing life’s biggest challenges with courage, and still enjoying the journey. When every moment was precious, that’s how she chose to live each day.

  I’m sorry to say that Diane passed away, right before Christmas, in 2016. But she lives on in all the lucky people who knew her, as well as in this book and in the workshops that I conduct.

  So let me ask you this:

  How would you live if you had cancer?

  Every time I lead a master class, no matter how small the group, there is someone in the room who is a cancer survivor, or who has been touched by cancer in their family, or by some other disease, or some other tragedy. In doing my work, I’ve realized that you don’t have to look far to find real heartbreak in this world. Look out your window. Look around your office. Look around your home.