How can I figure out what really matters to me?

Rabbi Landau explains that you can find your real priorities by asking the questions a deadline would force on you: “If you knew you had much less time than you think, what would suddenly become important? Who would you call? What would you stop wasting time on? What would you finally do?”

Those questions work, he explains, because the answers are already inside you. Pressure doesn't invent priorities: “The deadline didn't create priorities. The deadline exposed them.” Asking the questions now lets you see what a crisis would otherwise have to show you.

That is why “we sometimes need moments when the clock becomes real to wake us up.” The goal is to let the clock become real without waiting for the emergency, because “maybe the problem is not that we don't know what matters. Maybe we live like we have forever.”

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau adds that the next time pressure comes, don't rush to lower it. Stop and ask what it is showing you: what truly matters, and what your soul knows it needs that you have not let it have.

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Asking what you would do with much less time reveals your real priorities.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Living as if there were forever lets the nonsense crowd out what matters.

Deepest human truth

The day is short and the work is great. Time is real, and knowing it wakes us up.

More questions from this teaching

• Why do I work better under pressure?