Life Don’t Miss It. I Almost Did

Life Don’t Miss it. I Almost Did.

After reading this book, I have learned lots of important lessons from it. The author, Kunath discusses many impressive examples and uses his own personal experiences, to illustrate something that he wants to tell us. I have found that this book really resonates with me.

Firstly, understanding the difference between life worth and net worth is significant. What the author means by “life worth” is the joy and contentment you get from life. Life is fun and fun is good. The example that is given is the farewell speech of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. What the man took away from his job is that he knew nothing about his family members and the time he missed with them. Even if he had tremendous net worth, he had no life worth. For most people, it is easy to get into an intoxicating spin cycle when acquiring net worth. Money itself doesn’t make us rich but it is a thing used to give us life worth, and helps us gain happiness. People work hard for gaining happiness but they may easily forget their original purpose during this process.

Secondly, adversity is a gift and we need to believe in something bigger than us. Just like the author said: I am convinced that we all truly need adversity in our lives because it is the only way you can discover who you truly are. He used his own miserable childhood experience to demonstrate this principle. His father died of cancer and his brother went to rehab and he went through divorce. Everything the author suffered did not extinguish him but made him become stronger in the face of other difficulties in the future. I completely agree with his opinion and every time, when I meet obstacles, I try to “enjoy” this challenging process and turn them into nutrition for my life’s tree.

Thirdly, the other important lessons I learned from this book are: the power of “NO” and the power of perspective. When most people have been in business for a while, they do not dare to say “NO” as they tend to believe that company cannot continue without them. The author provides examples of saying NO to his company because of his son’s birthday. Instead of blaming the author, the company reworked its schedule. Furthermore, we often tend to lose perspective about good things happening to us and we underestimate other’s loss and pain. When we encounter things that upset us, we need to ask ourselves questions: is this really a problem? If I had one month to live, would this even be on my radar screen? If we try to change our perspectives and use rational analysis of our problems, they are so minor and insignificant actually. Personally, I always try to be optimistic and have a positive attitude towards my life.