Steve Irwin Died Right on Time

Shortly after his death, everyone who had ever heard him speak or watched his shows mourned the untimely death of Steve Irwin.

That is, everyone except for the ruthless comedian Norm Macdonald.

Just two weeks after Irwin suffered a fatal stingray wound, Macdonald appeared on The Daily Show and gave his funny yet profound thoughts on the “tragedy”:

No matter what your feelings for Steve Irwin are, it’s fair to conclude that while his death was a tragedy, it wasn’t unreasonable. It was an occupational hazard.

As Norm Macdonald said, 44 years on Earth is a lot to ask for when you spend your days wrestling crocodiles and running around swamps.

And according to his wife, Steve Irwin himself knew this to be true and often meditated on his mortality:

“That’s a ripe old age for a Crocodile Hunter” turned out to be more true than it was funny.

Ultimately, Steve Irwin had no regrets about his short life. It was so packed with purpose and progress that it could only have been achieved exactly the way he did it. 

But the lesson isn’t that you need to be reckless, adventurous, or a Crocodile Hunter. 

Instead, it’s that you should know exactly where your actions are taking you.

If you workout every day and take care of your body, your chances of longevity and a high quality of life decades from now increase substantially.

If you work all day and ignore your friends and family, you will not only become unable to show your affection for them now, but you will also become someone no one wants to see or check in with later in life.

Everything that you do (or don’t do) today is a choice for who you want to be tomorrow.

Your habits and addictions dictate your fate.

And while you don’t need to be as adventurous or risk-taking as the Irwins, it's important to extract another key lesson from their lifestyle: 

Accepting your mortality is liberating.

The people who think about death the most often are the happiest people I know.

I myself can mark the major turning point in my enthusiasm and optimism for life to the day I “felt” and fully understood the fact that I would die one day.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of all time, was also no stranger to action. He served in wars, frequented the jungles of Africa, and fished and hunted to world renown.

So it only makes sense that he had come close to death many times before he finally passed, and the news was quick to exploit the accidents to report fake news of his death to sell more newspapers.

And rather than be sad or upset about it, his friends marveled at how he responded so playfully to the fake obituaries:

“Ernest said that he greatly enjoyed reading his obituaries and that his newest vice was a regular morning ritual of a glass of cold champagne and a couple of pages of obituaries.”

You are fighting Death every day, and as long as you are alive you are beating it! 

But time is undefeated, and it will win the war, so you make sure you know what kind of life you’re creating for yourself.

If you’re a person who regrets bad decisions you’ve made, you may be more inclined to play it safe and take fewer risks. Build a home and local environment you feel comfortable in daily.

If you’re someone whose regrets all come from the choices not made, then it’s probably wise to take more risks and become comfortable with failure. Force yourself out of the house even when you don’t want to go, and you’ll find the hardest part about making plans and keeping commitments is just getting there.

When his last wife, Mary, lectured him about his reckless habits of lion-baiting or reckless hunting, Ernest Hemingway acknowledged his reckless lifestyle but also made it clear that it was the only way he could live:

“It is wicked, I guess, to lay it on the line just for fun. But [I] know no other place as good to lay it as on the line.”

That should be your life. Know all the flaws and the benefits to the way you live, and if it’s what you enjoy, then accept it. 

You should know no other place as good to lay it as where you’re currently laying it. 

It does not have to be pretty or conventional, it just has to be you.