I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for motivational quotes and affirmations. I find inspiration in sourcing words of wisdom, copying them, and pasting them into my scrapbook which I keep on top of my desk. I also have a lot of little yellow Post-Its with scribbles of sensible sayings stuck all around.

I have three daily affirmations that I faithfully read every morning. They remind me of my overall place in existence and how fast time goes by. They’re words from the Stoics or at least those who have Stoic-like attitudes. Allow me to open my book and share some of what I’ve collected.

“Contempt for failure.”

“Did I show up dressed today?”

“Memento Mori” ~Marcus Aurelius

“Ya gotta wanna.” ~Jimmy Pattison

“To understand is to know what to do.”

“Focus. Cut the noise. Double the results.”

“Invest the Time. Do the work. Tell the truth.”

“This, too, shall pass away.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Overcome resistance. Trust the muse.” ~Stephen King

“Three common traits of winners. Desire. Determination. Confidence.”

“You don’t really understand something until you can build it.” ~Richard Feynman

“If you do what everyone else is doing, you shouldn’t be surprised to get the same results. Different outcomes come from doing things differently.”

“The long game wins come from repeatedly doing hard things today that make tomorrow easier.”

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life…the one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” ~Seneca

“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. It’s the dogged, incremental, constant progress over a very long time.” ~Albert Einstein

“There are those who watch things happen, those who wonder what happened, and those who make things happen. Strive to be one of those who make things happen. If you show others what you can do, they will respect you far more than if you had simply told them what you’d done. Anyone can quarrel with words, but actions speak for themselves.” ~Tommy Lasorda

“Failure seems to be nature’s plan for preparing us for great responsibilities. If everything we attempted in life were achieved with a minimum of effort and came out exactly as planned, how little we would learn—and how boring life would be! And how arrogant we would become if we succeeded at everything we attempted. Failure allows us to develop the essential quality of humility. It is not easy—when you are the person experiencing failure—to accept it philosophically, serene in the knowledge that this is one of life’s great learning experiences. But it is. Nature’s ways are not always easily understood, but they are repetitive and therefore predictable. You can be absolutely certain that when you feel you are being most unfairly tested, you are being prepared for great achievement.”” ~Napoleon Hill

“I believe that life operates at two levels. The higher level if the muse level—the level of your calling. The lower level is our material plane. On that plane is the force I call Resistance with a capital R. That’s there to stop us from reaching the higher level. The purpose of discipline is that discipline is what takes you to that higher level. That’s why you have to have it—discipline. You can’t wish your way to it. You can’t chant your way there. You can’t—that book The Secret—vibe or manifest your way there. The law of attraction is bullshit. It’s not going to get you there. The only way you get there is through hard and disciplined work. You got to punch your ticket and pay the price.” ~Steven Pressfield

“Doing your best isn’t about the result. You know you did your best before you show up. Over the long term, the long game, the average person who constantly puts themselves in a good position beats the genius who puts themselves in a poor position. And the best way to put yourself in a good position is with good preparation.”

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” ~Muhammad Ali

“One of the biggest keys to success at anything is believing you can figure it out as you go along. A lot of people won’t start until they figure it out. And because most hard things can’t be figured out in advance, they never start.” ~Richard Feynman

“Any dominating idea, plan, or purpose held in the conscious mind through constant repetitive thought and emotionalized by the subconscious and acted upon by whatever natural and logical means may be available.” ~Napoleon Hill

“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.”

“The Formula: The courage to start. The discipline to focus. The confidence to figure it out. The patience to know progress is not always visible. The persistence to keep going, even on the bad days.”

“Success is that place in the road where preparation and opportunity meet, but too few people recognize it because too often it comes disguised as hard work.”

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” ~Jordan Peterson

“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”

“Pro golfers have learned to miss their shots by narrower margins than amateurs.”

“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.” ~Charlie Munger

“Being successful is easy. Staying successful is hard.”

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

What about you Kill Zoners? Do any of these clips resonate with you? How about sharing one, two, three, or more of your own?

Kill Zoners – Please welcome a most-helpful guest post from my good friend and long-time writing colleague, C.S. (Susanne) Lakin, who hosts the popular craft site Live, Write, Thrive.

_   _   _

Settings in fiction are often a mere mention. Characters are talking and doing things, but often readers get a glimpse of the setting via a few lines of description and a dash of sensory detail on the side—and call it good.

A character enters a building in some unidentified place (town, countryside, the Moon?) and goes into a room that has no description whatsoever. Or, if there is some description, it’s more like a laundry list than a place personally experienced by the character and colored by their perspective and mood.

The character walks outside, where there is no notice of weather or time of day or season. The reader can’t see the neighborhood or the environment. The character doesn’t seem to notice or react to where he is.

Truth is, if a writer doesn’t care much about setting, the reader won’t either.

Is that a problem? Maybe not for some readers. But most people will agree that the task of a fiction writer is to immerse her readers into her story. And story is setting. Characters have to be somewhere while they are talking, thinking, and engaging in action.

Setting can be functional and boring. Or it can be powerful in the hands of a master. It behooves fiction writers to become masterful wordsmiths in order to build compelling worlds.

Chances are, you’ve heard of deep point of view. Imagine a camera lens that zooms in for a close-up. Deep POV is when the description filters directly through the point-of-view character on an emotional level in real time.

When readers see what the character sees and feel what he feels, it allows for intimate interaction and creates a shared experience in which the story comes alive through the character’s senses, thoughts, beliefs, emotional focus, and judgments.

Not every story uses deep POV, but all writers need to work to create a level of closeness between the character and reader, which requires a deft hand to bring about. The setting is the story element that facilitates this.

Experiencing details about the setting through the protagonist’s emotions and senses makes the reader feel truly part of the story. This means that choosing the right setting for each scene is important to not only help events unfold but increase reader-character connection.

Don’t Opt for Blah Settings

Settings work best when they include an emotional quotient. This is where the setting has a specific emotional resonance to the protagonist and possibly other characters. It holds meaning in some way, or acts as a symbol, charging up the scene. I call these powerful types of settings “connected settings.”

For example, it may be that the setting is connected to some past life event and serves as a reminder of what happened as well as triggers feelings associated with it. Imagine a character being asked to an important business lunch in the same restaurant where his girlfriend turned down his marriage proposal. Even though time has passed, maybe years, an echo of that hurt and rejection will affect him while he’s there and, in turn, will influence his behavior.

Choosing a setting that evokes an emotional response is important since a character’s feelings about his environment add realism and tension to the scene while drawing readers in.

Does your protagonist, for example, have a strong emotional connection to one or both parents (who may still be living or have died before your story starts)? By having your character visit a place that holds powerful memories of that parent, positive or negative or both, those emotions can drive a scene, and the memories triggered there can induce conflict.

Let’s say your protagonist has just had a huge fight with her mother over the man she plans to marry. She might drive back to her childhood home or go sit in the bedroom in her parents’ house in which she spent her childhood. There, she might remember the vicious fights her parents had before they divorced and how painful they were to listen to. She might, at that moment, feel a strong determination to never be like her mother. Or, she may suddenly be afraid to commit to marriage, fearing her marriage may end up just like her parents’.

How to Create Connected Settings

So how do we go about creating connected settings? The first step is to brainstorm the best setting match for a particular scene. This is achieved by looking at what will happen in the scene and which emotions are at play.

Think of a scene you need to write. Then follow these steps:

• Identify your hero’s scene goal—what must he do, learn, or achieve? What do you want him and the other characters involved to feel at the start of the scene.
• Once you know the answers to these questions, brainstorm different types of settings where this scene might take place, ones that fit the story and are logical locations for your character to visit. Consider what issues your character is dealing with and what kind of environment might escalate inner and outer conflict.
• Make a list of the scenes with the most potential. Often the settings that pop immediately to mind are the most obvious, but with a bit of digging, some more creative and interesting choices can be unearthed.
• Once you have a few options, look at each possible setting in turn and think of how you can describe the location to evoke a specific mood that will make your character’s emotional reactions more potent. Tension can be a factor too. Depending on what is about to happen in the scene, you might want your character to feel off-balance. Or maybe you wish to lull him into a false sense of security so he doesn’t see what’s coming. Either way, the details you pick to describe the setting will help steer his emotions.
• Think about what the character will learn, decide, or do as a result of what happens in the scene. The setting can act as an amplifier for this end result simply by surrounding the character with emotional triggers that will lead him to that high moment at the end of the scene.
• Think of how your character will change by the end of the scene and if this means a shift in mood or perspective. Consider how the setting can play a part in that mood shift.

Choosing a strong setting for the scene and then seeding it with triggers creates a push-pull effect, one that amplifies a character’s internal struggle. Through his interaction with the setting, we can home in on the needs, desires, moral beliefs, fears, and personal biases that drive his behavior. How the protagonist reacts to these triggers can allude to past experiences that may still have power over him in the form of emotional wounds.

Go through all your scenes and consider the setting. Consider how you might change or alter your setting to give it more emotional quotient, to impact your characters more strongly. Then dig in and rewrite. You and your readers will be glad you did.

Have you chosen a powerful connected setting for one of your scenes? Share about it in the comments.

_   _   _

C.S. Lakin is an award-winning author of more than 30 books, fiction and nonfiction (which includes more than 10 books in her Writer’s Toolbox series). Her online video courses at Writing for Life Workshops have helped more than 5,000 fiction writers improve their craft. To go deep into creating great settings and evoking emotions in your characters, and to learn essential technique, enroll in Lakin’s courses Crafting Powerful Settings and Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers. Her blog Live Write Thrive has more than 1 million words of instruction for writers, so hop on over and level-up your writing!

I’ve stumbled upon a writing resource that needs to be shared on the Kill Zone. It’s called the Ultimate Story Checklist, and it’s on a website called Cockeyed Caravan hosted by Matt Bird. If the names aren’t familiar, Matt Bird is an A-List screenwriter who recently published a book titled The Secrets of Story.

While the website and book are aimed at the screenwriting market, there’s a lot of value here for regular storytellers. Matt Bird delivers many great takeaways, one being, “Audiences purchase your work because of its concept but embrace it because of the characters”. I put that quote on my daily affirmation board.

You can download the Ultimate Story Checklist here. However, I’ll list the highlights so you’ll get an idea where this craft book and blog are coming from. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of over 200 sub-points to check off:

Part 1: Concept

The Pitch — Does the concept excite everyone who hears it?

Story Fundamentals — Wil this concept generate a strong story?

The Hook — Will this be marketable and generate word of mouth?

Part 2: Character

Believe — Do we recognize the hero as a human being?

Care — Do we feel for the hero?

Invest — Can we trust the hero to tackle the challenge?

Part 3: Structure

1^st Quarter — Is the challenge laid out in the first quarter?

2^nd Quarter — Does the hero try the easy way in the second quarter?

3^rd Quarter — Does the hero try the hard way in the third quarter?

4^th Quarter — Does the challenge climax in the fourth quarter?

Part 4: Scenework

The Set-Up — Does this scene begin with the essential elements it needs?

The Conflict — Is this a compelling collision of competing agendas?

The Outcome — Does the scene change the story going forward?

Part 5: Dialogue

Empathetic — Is the dialogue true to human nature?

Specific — Is the dialogue specific to this world and each personality?

Heightened — Is the dialogue more pointed and dynamic than real talk?

Strategic — Are certain dialogue scenes withheld until necessary?

Part 6: Tone

Genre — Does the story tap into pre-established expectations?

Framing — Does the story set, reset, upset, and ultimately exceed its own expectations?

Part 7: Theme

Difficult — Is the meaning of the story derived from a fundamental moral dilemma?

Grounded — Do the stakes ring true to the world of the audience?

Subtle — Is the theme interwoven throughout so that it need not be discussed often?

Untidy — Is the dilemma ultimately unsolvable?

As mentioned, there are well over two hundred sub-questions in the parts and categories. I plugged my WIP netstream series City Of Danger into the Ultimate Story Checklist. It’s a well-worthwhile exercise that brings clarity and gives guidance.

Kill Zoners — Has anyone heard of this resource or of Matt Bird? Do you use any sort of checklist or guideline for your storytelling? Please share what works for you and any recommendations you have.

They say, whoever they is, that even the most verbose writers know only 25 percent of the English language. Given that the latest edition of the Oxford dictionary lists 171,476 words, that means guys like Stephen King have only 42,000 in their gray matter data bank. So, the average scribe like me probably draws on maybe 10,000, not including slang, jargon, and swear.

They also say that 3,000 words covers 95 percent of daily writing—emails, blogs, and books. And English, of the 6,909 distinct languages in the world, is far from wordy. Apparently, the Inuit have over 100 words for “snow”.

I stumbled on a trivial piece the other day on a site called The Morning Brew. It’s a regular stop in my daily routine. I got a kick out of it, and I hope you will, too. It’s a list of long forgotten (but cool) medieval English words.

PEEKGOOSE (english, noun) someone who is silly or a simpleton

MEROBIBA (latin, noun) a woman who enjoys very strong wine

SCORTOR (latin, verb) to spend time in the company of harlots

CUCURBITARIUS (latin, noun) a lover of gourds and squash

GILEYSPEKE (english, noun) a cunning trick or illusion

NOUMBLES (english, noun) the entrails of a beast, especially a deer

STERILIS AMATOR (latin, noun) a lover who has no money

GADELING (english, noun) a comrade, fellow, or vagabond

GRAVILOQUUS (latin, noun) a man who speaks gravely and seriously

LINGULACA (latin, noun) a woman who speaks excessively

ORGULOUS (english, adj.) proud or haughty to excess

DEARWORTH (english, adj.) precious or very valuable

MAGNALIA (latin, noun) great things to be wondered at

LIVERSOON (english, noun) food or sustenance

PROSERPERE (latin, verb) to creep about like a serpent

AGAINWEND (english, verb) to retreat

BESMUT (english, verb)to defile

OVERWERP (english, verb) to boil over, as a pot

WREKER (english, noun) one who avenged

WRAKEFUL (english, adj.) wicked

MALEFICUS (latin, noun) one who does harm to others

OBIURGATRIX (latin, noun) a woman who loves to chide or rebuke

METHFUL (english, adj) peaceful, quiet, or modest

Kill Zoners — Do you have any cool words to add? If you don’t, just go ahead and make something up. Sorry for not responding to comments today, folks. I’m off the internet grid and hunkered in place of tranquility. +48.869 North -123.316 West

Is this title a bit condescending? After all, one thing we’ve in common at the Kill Zone is we’re avid readers. We enthusiastically read books, ergo: All writers are readers, but not all readers are writers. Right? (said in a mock-condescending tone) “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the tools to write. Simple as that.”  ~Stephen King in On Writing.

I’m not sure where, but I recently stumbled across a book titled How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was published in 1940 and remained in print ever since. That speaks for itself, so I bought a Kindle version to see what the fuss was all about. Here’s Amazon’s blurb:

With half a million copies in print, How to Read a Book is the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension for the general reader, completely rewritten and updated with new material.

A CNN Book of the Week: “Explains not just why we should read books, but how we should read them. It’s masterfully done.” –Farheed Zakaria

Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them—from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. Readers will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text.

Also included is instruction in the different techniques that work best for reading particular genres, such as practical books, imaginative literature, plays, poetry, history, science and mathematics, philosophy and social science works.

Finally, the authors offer a recommended reading list and supply reading tests you can use measure your own progress in reading skills, comprehension, and speed.

What I found was a compressed guide to improving reading skills and getting maximum value from any publication, whether that be fiction or non-fiction. It’s a timeless resource for anyone seeking efficiency and thoughtfulness in their reading approach. The authors emphasize reading should be an active process that demands full engagement and critical thinking where a reader should be aware of their methodology which they break into these four categories:

Elementary Reading — This level is the most basic skill where readers grasp the primary surface content and simple meaning of the book. (Fun)

Inspectional Reading — This level allows readers to scan the material, particularly the preface, index, and chapter openings/closings to assess the book’s structure and main ideas. (Curiosity)

Analytical Reading — This level engages a deeper examination of the book’s core content such as the author’s arguments, key concepts, and presented evidence to support the book’s point. (Research)

Syntopical Reading — This level is the highest reading form where multiple books are read so the reader can fully understand the entire subject matter delivered from multiple sources across the knowledgeable spectrum. (Eggheadism)

So far, I’ve done a Level One go-over on How to Read a Book. It intrigues me enough that I’m going straight to Level Three and understand this information, but I thought I’d share my new find with folks at the Kill Zone. So, let’s discuss how we read books. Fiction and non-fiction.

Do you have a process that’s similar to these four methods, maybe a combination, or possibly an entirely novel approach (don’t excuse the novel pun) to reading? What’s your way of enjoying, comprehending, and retaining stuff in the books you read?

Kenora is a small town of about 15,000 on the Lake of the Woods at the west edge of Ontario, a prominent province in Canada. Normally, Canadian towns are pretty quiet and orderly but on May 10, 1973, a masked gunman robbed a Kenora bank and then blew himself to smithereens with a bomb strapped to his chest. I call it a bombery.

You’d think this was something on a movie set, but it’s a true crime story with no ending. The bombed robber has never been identified. That’s beside having a full set of fingerprints, some twisted teeth, and a beautiful DNA profile available. Briefly, here’s what happened.

At opening time, the robber entered the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce on Kenora’s main drag. He wore a black balaclava and was armed with a pistol, a rifle, and packing a homemade bomb built with six dynamite sticks. The detonator was a clothespin device which he could operate through his mouth.

Instead of just “grab the money and run”, the robber made a huge spectacle He took the bank employees hostage and began negotiation with the police. This resulted in a plainclothes officer exchanging himself for the hostages. The robber demanded a get-away truck be supplied and for the vault to be opened. About $100,000 in bills were stuffed into three duffle bags the robber brought with him.

This ordeal lasted two hours. During that time, word quickly spread, and a large crowd assembled outside the bank with the police holding them back. The media arrived, and the outside scene was reported live on radio and filmed for TV.

When the robber and the officer came out of the bank, a police sharpshooter shot him— the bad guy, not the cop. He went down and the bomb went off, with blood and body bits and bills flying everywhere. It was chaos. The officer was injured—no doubt saved from death by being shielded with the money-filled bags strung on his back. Remarkably, most of the $100,000 was recovered and not scooped by frenzied folks.

To this day, no one knows the robber’s identity. His description was a while male about 45-years-old, 5’6” to 5’8”, and around 160 lbs. Despite his fingerprints being circulated through Interpol, dental records checked, and when DNA came along in the 1990s – there was no lead. Today, his body lies in a Kenora graveyard, and the case of the Great Canadian Bombery is closed.

Now, this case hits home for me. I grew up near Kenora and was in a Grade 12 class when it happened. My girl-friend-at-the-time (now known as she-whose-name-must-not-be-mentioned)—her mother’s car was parked outside that bank. Rosie’s Impala got splattered with the blood and the bits and the bills.

Watch the explosion on film as it happened.

Listen to the live radio broadcast.

Kill Zoners — Have you ever experienced a close-to-home crazy crime? Do you know anyone who has? Or can you think of a crime that can top this? Tell us about it in the comments.

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” ~The Red Queen to Alice in Through the Looking Glass.

The Red Queen effect means that staying in the same place is falling behind. Surviving to write another day means we have to co-evolve with the systems we interact with. And the systems in our writing world are evolving in a fast-paced race.

Think about the changes in writing and publishing over the past decade. We’ve moved from the Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE) submissions to digital rejections. Most of us write electronically—maybe a few die-hards still draft in cursive longhand—and most use some form of app to help with spelling and grammar.

And now we have Artificial Intelligence (AI) coming at us in the high-speed lane. We’ve had tools like Google and Word for some time, but this ChatGPT thing is about to rewrite the rule book. When you get on this bus, there is no stop and you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

I suppose all writers (being human) tire of running fast. However, to be “successful” in today’s writing world—success being defined as “they with the biggest backlist win”—it’s vital to accept change and work with it, not against change. Here’s a quote I dug up while researching this piece and, no, I didn’t prompt it through Chat:

Applied to our careers, we might think about adaptation and evolution as embracing change and pursuing continuous learning and development. In this realm, the imperative to evolve comes not from aspirational pursuits, such as a promotion, but from the need to continue providing value in an environment where even running our fastest as per the Red Queen effect might not be enough.

Adaptation. Continuous learning. Development. Embracing change. Providing value.

Given that change can affect a writer’s sense of value and belonging, why is it that so many of us are resistant to the community’s natural flow of evolution and are content to run with the Red Queen? Maybe these bullet points from the Journal of Applied Psychology sum it up:

• Reluctance to lose control.
• Unwillingness to think differently.
• Lack of psychological resilience when coping with change.
• Intolerance of the adjustment period involved in change.
• Tendency to perform poorly outside familiar framework.
• Reluctance to give up old habits.

Now, I admit to being an old dog trying to learn new tricks. But I also plead (somewhat) guilty to all the above. What’s really driving me forward, though, is the concept of value. Creating something from nothing and repeating as necessary.

I look at writing and publishing evolution not as a linear process but rather as a dynamic and ongoing race. It’s like an infinite game that never ends and whose purpose isn’t to win, but to keep playing as long as possible. The key to surviving in this game is proactive evolution where you anticipate future changes to fundamentally transform your products and/or strategy before you’re forced to do so. And by doing so, you don’t just survive—you also benefit from it.

So, all this “Blah” is fine and dandy. The question is how to beat the Red Queen. Here are some practical Queen-beating tips I sourced.

Continuous Learning — Committing to life-long learning is essential to staying ahead of the Red Queen. Fortunately for writers, there’s a pleasantly overwhelming amount of material to learn from.

Adaptability — The Red Queen effect highlights adapting to perpetual change. It’s the core survival principle in the evolution of every species, including the writer.

Persistent Practice — Developing routines, setting goals, and meeting deadlines are part of the business. Missing these is a sure sign of falling behind the Red Queen.

Networking and Collaboration — The saying “we’re all in this together” definitely applies to writers. The Kill Zone is a good example of collaboration and networking where we regularly discuss changes and advances in the writing world.

Embracing Feedback and Criticism — Can anyone say “Arc” and “Beta”? Ask these guys how you can better your work and stay ahead of the Queen.

Resilience and Perseverance — This isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. Pace yourself, accordingly, but do not get behind the Red Queen.

Embrace Technology — This part of the game is moving faster than the sum of all the parts. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

Personal Brand — There’s a lot of misconception about what a “brand” really is. I think it’s simply how others see you and, in this race, it’s critical to be seen.

Innovation and Experimentation — Have some fun during your evolution. Try new things. Explore other writing forms and see what you can work into your WIF (Work In Future)

Standing Out — Do you know how Alice beat the Red Queen? She teamed up with the Queen and used the combined momentum to push ahead. Alice made up her mind—took the mindset—to stand out. And she won.

Kill Zoners: Where do you run in the race with the Red Queen? Please share some thoughts and some tips! BTW, what changes in writing and publishing do you foresee on the horizon?

Time is our most precious commodity. Regardless of inequities in life, each day we have equality—exactly the same amount of time allotted to all. 24 hours. 1,440 minutes. 86,400 seconds.

In many ways, it’s not about the amount of time we have. It’s how we use our time. Time being the ultimate tool; a finite and non-renewable resource.

I’m short of time today (so to speak). I have little time to deliver a meaningful piece, and by meaningful, I mean something of value that folks following The Kill Zone can take away. So, I’m writing a short, meaningful piece about time value.

I’m short of time because I’ve created a writing monster that’s frothed like a sack of Mentos dunked into a Diet Coke vat. I’m enjoying the fizz but, man, is it ever sucking time. There’s no foreseeable end in sight.

So, I’m tapping an article I recently read on The Free Press (Bari Weiss—hate her or love her). It was titled The Time Billionaires and went like this:

A million seconds is 11 and 1/2 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. In our western culture, we’re so, so obsessed with money. We deify dollar billionaires when we really should be fan girls and fan boys of time billionaires. For instance, most 20-year-olds have two billion or better seconds left in their lives. But few look at it that way and don’t relate to themselves as being time billionaires. Many people fail to realize this asset’s value until it’s gone.

The piece had a nice quote from Stoic philosopher Seneca that read, “We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”

The article also linked a “Life Calendar”. It exposes a blank 90-year lifespan by each year listed vertically with 52 squares across the horizontal representing weeks in a year. It’s downloadable, and you can print it as an 8 ½ x 11 worksheet. See the pic below.

I drew out, or charted, my life calendar. It was an interesting exercise that made me reflect on where I’d spent the last 2 billion seconds of my life and where I’m going. I’m 66 now and, if my genes are predictive, I might have a billion seconds remaining.

Yes, still time to be a time billionaire. It’s what I do with forthcoming seconds that count. But if it goes like my Coke & Mento project is going, I might never get done.

How about you, Kill Zoners? Have you looked at your Life Calendar and worked on it? Also, if anyone has time management tips, I’d love to hear them. God knows, I need some.