What's the Value of One Day?
The path to feeling rich may not be measured in years, but in 24 hours or less
In this edition:
What a single day is really worth
Why we get stuck in the past, worry about the future, and miss the present
Notes to my son—featuring Muhammad Ali, Dave Ramsey, Stan Lee, and a few life lessons along the way
If not death, what you get for years of planning and training, tens of thousands of dollars spent, and months estranged from family and friends is a deep chill within your bones, severe fatigue, lungs that feel on fire, a nagging threat of harm that doesn’t go away until you’re back home safely in bed, and one day on top of the world with a priceless view that only around 0.0000008% of people have seen in person.
That one day is a summit of Mount Everest.
Climbers must reach the peak from the last camp in a matter of hours. The summit sits in the “death zone,” where oxygen is scarce and the weather is unpredictable. Most spend only 15–30 minutes there (just enough time for a few photos and cheers) before the race is on to get back down, which is when the majority of deaths actually occur.
But the hardest challenge may be between both ears — one’s ability to focus — as one elite climber told us:
Climbing a mountain is one step at a time. You definitely want to be focused on summiting, but you really need to focus on the day to day, and that is the key to being successful.
Well, truthfully, this is all just what my oldest son and I have read. He’s been reading a novel about a boy who climbs Everest, piquing his interest enough to learn what it actually takes. So, we researched the real-life demands — significant amounts of time, energy and money — to have that one day when you’re taller than everyone else on the planet.
“Is it worth it?” I asked my son, expecting a strong negative response. But to my surprise and deligtht, with the seriousness of a 29,000-foot climb, he replied: “Yeah, one day.”
I could tell in his head, he was planning. No, imagining. He was imagining himself braving the ice and rock and the challenges of acclimatization, imagining himself reaching the top, only to return and enthrall his friends (and hopefully his parents) with stories of adventure.
Seeing my son think this way, it struck me that this is how much of life is experienced and what our decisions revolve around. It comes down to those two words rolling out of our mouths.
There is so much to do in life that it can put us in a suspended state of anticipation for what we’ll do one day, when it just isn’t possible to do it all.
As one Aesop fable goes:
“Our mere anticipations of life outrun its realities.”
In other words, so many wants with so little time, which can lead to a lot of financial mischief.
Still, financial planning is essentially the perpetual completion of the sentence: “One day…”
How many times have you said it? One day, I would like to… One day, I hope to… One day, I plan to…
Maybe, then, financial success isn’t so much a number of accumulated dollars, but the days lived as dreamed. It’s the attempt at creating — and funding — the days that make a good life, however we define good.
If only it were easy. Alas, no good adventure story exists without conflict, and that conflict is less a mathematical challenge on a spreadsheet than the colliding neurons in our minds.
Seeing life from a higher altitude
Just as few of us will summit Everest, few will be told with high certainty when we will die.
Which, in a way, may be too bad, since both offer a greater view of life.
Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist and author, was experienced in hiking mountains and exploring the workings of the mind. In his professional life, he diagnosed the conditions his patients faced. Then, one day, the tables were reversed when he received a terminal diagnosis of cancer. He had only months to live.
In a column for the New York Times, Sacks announced the diagnosis to the world and wrote about how the experience changed his perspective on life:
“Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”
The way I read this is that he saw all that had happened in his life as connected, and yet even with death near there was still space to do more, as if everything were happening as one.
It’s human nature to think of time as marching in one direction, a kind of tunnel vision that can mask the interconnection of all we’ve done and will do, the meeting point being the present.
The way Sacks describes it is almost poetic, which brought to mind T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where he eloquently puts it:
“Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
Of course, the connection of life is more easily appreciated when death is near, brought on by an odd comfort in knowing there’s less future to worry about.
In the swing of one’s life, it’s much different.
The director Kevin Smith once talked about a useful piece of information he learned while visiting a psychiatric hospital that could save people money is that we spend our lives in three places. I’ll paraphrase here with far fewer swear words:
Our bodies exist only in the present, but our minds live in two places: the past, where we agonize over what’s been said and done, and the future, where we worry about what might happen, often imagining bad outcomes we can’t predict.
To take a page from the Clerks screenplay, you could think of past regrets and future worries as annoying customers while you work this job called life. “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the f’n customers.”
Look at your financial life and you might find a similar three-dimensional tension with time.
Worries about the future are why people panic with investments, envisioning events that never come to pass. But when you flip the story and imagine a positive future, things can change, as one study found that those who have clearer, more thoughtful, vivid, detailed mental pictures of their future save more.
And like ghost stories, interactions with money from as early as childhood shape the way we act as adults. Watch your parents struggle to pay the bills and you may grow up to become overly frugal or obsessed with wealth. Here, too, one of the best things you can do is first get a clear, honest appraisal of your own relationship with money.
Smith’s key point is that it all converges in the present, because it’s here where you can effect real change, which can rearrange the meaning of the past and determine the future.
Which brings us back to one day. The value of one day is anything we strive for and all that we have in front of us now.
The view from the top is determined by the position of your feet today.
Turning one day into day one
A funny thing about being a parent is the painfully clumsy and insufficient way you give advice. I’d imagined myself being like some kind of family sitcom dad, where I delivered neat, eloquent monologues that generated tears and laughter and confidence and admiration and all sorts of hokey feelings.
Instead, what I say in the moment is often generic (“keep your eye on the ball”) or woefully underwhelming (“well, try your best”). Only later do I think of something great I could have said.
So, when my son imagined one day of climbing atop the world, there was so much more I would have liked to say about what it means to reach a summit, about the meaning of the days leading up to it and any that mercifully follow. Every one of those days is valuable.
The reality is that I couldn’t guide him up a mountain any more than I can perfectly guide him through life. All I can do is try my best (see, there I go again), to tell him what some days may be like.
As our feelings rise and fall, moved by circumstances, so much of feeling rich depends on a single day. What’s more, some of the best days will be unplanned.
With a little more time to think, I wanted to tell him…
One day, you’re not going to give up. And the next day. And the day after that, until one day, the fruit of not giving up reveals itself. It could take the form of wealth, as Dave Ramsey surveys suggest most millionaires never made $100,000 in a year, only reaching seven figures through diligent saving. Or it could be a craft, as Hemingway wrote “500 good words a day,” every day. Whatever you want to achieve is the result of the consistency of your days.
One day you will leave home. You might be marching toward a goal, or feel like you’re lost, or just searching and exploring, or feel like you’ve already failed. And none of it will matter, because we change. No job is a death sentence; no age is a finish line. Comic artist Stan Lee didn’t get his big break until nearly 40, Julia Child nearly 50, the artist Grandma Moses until almost 80. It’s up to you to believe in yourself. Similarly…
One day you will realize there is never a “right time.” Human behavior is always searching for the right moment, but the moment is always with us. You can choose between waiting for “one day” or starting “day one” right now.
One day you will have the courage to tell a friend you love them. Not romantically —though it can be — but when the formality falls away and you can say how much they mean to you, when time and money spent with them becomes an expression of love. Research shows that strong friendships are essential to well-being and matter more as we grow older. Some of the best money you’ll ever spend is on friends.
One day misfortune will redirect you to a life you didn’t imagine. As a boy, Muhammad Ali had his bike stolen and went looking for it, which led him to a boxing gym. Any moment could be just a moment that redirects you to a better path. This is a day to detach from events, whether bad or good.
One day you will wish to return to this day. The Washington Post analyzed a survey asking Americans to identify the best decade since the 1930s and found that their answers were basically “whenever they were a kid.” Think of it this way: as you read this, there are people on this very day who will wish they could have what you have now, a greater chance to see tomorrow. So, try not to complain and try to appreciate what you have, because you’ll wish for it again.
One day something unexpected will happen that will cost a lot of money. Sorry, it’s just a fact of life. All I can say is that what you start doing today will determine whether you hang your head or simply shrug.
One day you’ll begin to see that many opinions and beliefs are shaped by incentives. Much of what is presented as fact is said because someone benefits from others believing it. You don’t have to be distrusting, but it never hurts to ask what they gain by you believing what they say. As Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
One day you might want to blow it all up. The desire to pursue the thing you can’t stop thinking about becomes stronger than the fear of failure. Jeff Bezos had a comfortable job but chose to leave it all for an “internet” idea, saying: “I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried… that would haunt me every day.”
One day you’ll stop caring about validation. Yes, you might even stop caring about money. It’s a time when doing what you want is on you, no matter what anyone says is purposeful or meaningful. As researcher Laura Carstensen has found, older adults are often happier than younger people because they prioritize emotional meaning and positive experiences over trivial matters. So maybe don’t sweat the small stuff.
One day you might have a you, and from that day forward you will need to point your resources toward this other you. That day, your money, your time and your energy are no longer yours alone but the world becomes larger and deeper because of it.
One day you’ll find that love is the point of it all. If money doesn’t serve the things you love, then what good is it? Identify what gives you love and where you can create it. Everything else you want becomes the byproduct. Take it from philosopher Erich Fromm: “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
One day you will bury your father. And your mother. And one day, your children will bury you. And maybe that day will be the most meaningful of all. If you’ve lived most of your days right, then you will have made life and the world more valuable than before.
I could probably go on. I know there will be something I wish I wrote only after I hit publish.
But the point is:
One day is rich with so much wealth, in what we care for and what we spend. Days are to be prepared for, to be cherished.
Focus on the days that will win the life.
But like some kind of twisted joke on us, death — as Sacks found with his cancer diagnosis — has a way of putting it into perspective more than anything else.
As Viktor Frankl wrote:
“Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place.
Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance.
But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility!”
Maybe, son, one day you’ll learn that your dad doesn’t know everything. I’ve been thinking too large, as the value of a day may pale in comparison to the value of moments — the moment you step onto the summit, or a child is placed in your arms, or the split second before you take that chance, or a head suddenly falls upon your shoulder, or your eyes adjust to a truly dark sky and, in the next instant, you feel oh so small, or the sigh of acceptance that things will never be the same again.
The poet Emily Dickinson put it more succinctly:
“Forever is composed of nows.”
What’s money for, if not for creating beautiful nows?
Not years. Not decades. Just accumulated days, moments, instants.
Every moment is capable of being some kind of summit, so plan accordingly.
And to you readers who’ve trekked this far, as I close out this post, what does “one day” mean to you?
Notes to my future self:
Maybe financial success isn’t so much a number of accumulated dollars, but the days lived as dreamed.
One day is rich with so much wealth, in what we care for and what we spend.
The view from the top is determined by the position of your feet today.
With gratitude,
J.S.
Great post. This is weirdly the third time today I've had a chance to say that the book 4000 weeks: time management for mortals is a great way to step into the idea that being more aware of death brings us more to life.