Living Against the Number

Years ago, at Singularity University, I brought Guy Kawasaki in to speak to our summer program. Guy was one of Apple’s original evangelists, and he was exactly the hit you’d expect – the room was on fire (yes, Guy is that good!), and the students didn’t stop talking about it for days.

So the next year I asked him back. We had a date that fit the calendar, I sent it over, and Guy said no. Which was completely fine – but I was curious, so I asked why. He had a hockey game that night. He plays, amateur level, with a group of friends, and he takes it seriously.

Then he said a thing I just can’t forget. “Here’s the thing, Pascal. I might, years from now, remember hanging out with my friends at that hockey game. I’ll almost certainly never remember giving one more keynote to your people. No offense – it’s just how it is.”

None taken. He was right.

What Guy was doing, without a shred of morbid math, was running the filter the number hands you. Not “is this a good opportunity?” – almost everything is a good opportunity. The question underneath is narrower and harder: does this earn its place in one of your months? Guy has a finite number of Tuesday nights on the ice with those particular friends, at the age he is now, and some part of him can feel it. So the trade was obvious in the half-second it takes to answer an email. A keynote is fungible. There’s always another keynote. That hockey game was not.

That’s what the count gives you. Not a rule and not a system – a filter that runs at the moment of the decision, while it can still change the answer. Is this worth one of my three hundred and sixty?

I run it on work now without much drama. A speaking gig, a board seat, a project that mostly smells like prestige – does it genuinely add to a month, or just fill one? If it only fills one, I pass. I’ll say plainly that I can do this because I work for myself, and plenty of people can’t turn down the meeting so easily – I’m not going to pretend that away. But the filter doesn’t need you to quit your job. It only needs the question asked in months instead of days and hours. A day or an hour is cheap, and you’ll trade it for almost anything. A month is not.

The filter cuts the other way too, and this is the half people miss. Finitude isn’t only a reason to say no – it’s a reason to spend.

Once a month, Jane and I go out to dinner – somewhere genuinely good, not the place around the corner – and we talk about the month that just ended. How did it actually feel? Not the calendar, not what got crossed off – the feel of it. We tried this with weeks once and it went nowhere; a week is too short to have a shape. It’s a good week or a rough one, and either way it’s gone before you can say anything true about it. A month holds still long enough to look at.

And here’s the part I’d underline: a month is the smallest unit you have any real agency over. You can’t rescue a bad week – it’s spent by the time you notice it. And it’s fine. Weeks come and go. But you can look at a month that went sideways – too much work, not enough of what you actually love – and decide, out loud, over dinner, that the next one will be different. The month is short enough to feel and long enough to steer. That combination is rare, and it’s the whole reason the unit works.

So we steer. We build a couple of small highlights into each month on purpose – a long weekend somewhere, a day trip, one good thing that has nothing to do with work – because those are what tip a month from neutral to good when we sit down to weigh it. It doesn’t take a grand gesture. It takes the month netting out positive, and a few deliberate sprinkles will do it.

None of this is a bucket list. I’m not trying to cram three hundred and sixty extraordinary experiences in before the lights go out – that’s just “a lot” wearing a nicer outfit, the drawer with better branding. It’s smaller and steadier than that. It’s that the unit makes the cost visible at the instant you’re paying it. Ask “do I want to do this?” and almost everything wins. Ask “is this worth one of the months I can still feel?” and the answer tends to arrive on its own – and it’s usually honest.

That’s living against the number. Not counting down. Just keeping the count in the room while you decide.