You Thought There Were Seven. There Are Eight.

You have heard of the seven deadly sins. Pride. Greed. Wrath. Envy. Gluttony. Sloth. Lust. They cover a lot of ground. But I want to add one more to the list, and it is the one that I think quietly ruins more lives than all the others combined.

The eighth deadly sin is unfinished business.

Not failure. Not imperfection. Not even quitting. The eighth deadly sin is leaving something inside of you sitting dormant, untried, undone, on a shelf in the back of your mind where it collects dust until you retire, or until the next big crisis hits, or until you run out of time entirely.

That is the only thing you can do wrong.

Why I Think About This Every Single Day

My father passed away at the age of fifty. He lived his life the best way he knew how. He was a good man. But I believe he had unfinished business. Things he wanted to do, say, build, experience, that he never got around to. And the tragedy is not that he died young. The tragedy is that he may not have known, right up until the end, that it was already time to start.

I am fifty-four now. My father died at fifty of a heart attack related to newly discovered type two diabetes. That means I am already four years into what I privately call my bonus time. Every year matters. Every experiment I run, every step I take toward something that lights me up, is an act of honoring him.

That is where the eighth deadly sin becomes personal for me. Because I can see in others what I believe I saw in him: that little energy inside, that thing that is not finished yet, that wants to come out and be tried and explored before it is too late. And the saddest version of life I can imagine is that energy sitting there untouched.

Screw Your Bucket List

I am going to say something that might make you uncomfortable. I do not believe in bucket lists.

If someone hands me a personality survey with a "what is on your bucket list?" question, my answer is always the same: screw your bucket list. I do not want a list. I want a life.

Bucket lists, as most people use them, are a permission slip to defer. They are a way of saying: this thing matters to me, and I am going to get around to it when I retire, when the kids grow up, when the mortgage is paid off, when the next pandemic ends, when some outside person or circumstance finally tells me it is time.

That is exactly the problem. You are waiting for permission to use your own minutes.

The future is the one thing you genuinely cannot know anything about. What you can do is right now. Today. With the life and energy you have in this moment. So when you put something on a bucket list and park it for later, you are betting your one life on a future that is not guaranteed.

What to Do Instead: Build It In

I am not telling you to quit your job, move to a beach, and work four hours a week. That is not the point, and for most people it is not even what they want. The real goal is not to escape your life. It is to make your life include the things that matter.

That means mapping it out in a way that is sustainable. It means asking not just "what do I want?" but "how do I make what I want dovetail with the reality I am actually living?" It means stacking your weeks and months deliberately so that the things feeding your soul are not perpetually postponed.

If your passion is travel, travel is part of your sustainable life now, not a reward for surviving the next twenty years. If your dream is to start a business, you give that dream real time and real energy today, not someday. If there is something you have always wanted to build, write, create, climb, say, or try, you find a version of that thing you can begin this week.

This is not about the fantasy of overnight transformation. It is about momentum. It is about giving your unfinished business oxygen, right now, with the intention of letting it breathe and grow.

The Only Real Mistake

You might start something and screw it up. You might spend money on something that does not work out. You might launch a business that fails, train for a race you do not finish, or spend a year chasing a goal that turns into something completely different from what you imagined.

None of that is the eighth deadly sin.

The eighth deadly sin is not trying it at all. It is leaving the thing inside you sit dormant until retirement, or until the next bout of chaos takes over, or until you simply run out of runway.

Big life change does not have to mean blowing up everything you have built. It can mean changing a relationship. Changing an employment situation. Choosing different people to spend your time with. Diving into a big goal you have been circling for years. Climbing a mountain. Becoming a musician. Writing a movie. The specific shape does not matter. What matters is that the thing that wants oxygen in you gets it.

That thing needs oxygen today.

This Is Your Permission Slip

I built KindEdge because I kept getting inspired, genuinely inspired, by books and retreats and other people's stories of transformation. And then I kept getting hijacked by real life the moment I tried to move. Inspired and stuck. Inspired and stuck. On repeat.

What I discovered is that inspiration without structure just evaporates. What you need is not more motivation. You need a concrete, real-world, doable next step. And then another one tethered to the first. And then another one after that. That chain of connected steps is how a dormant dream becomes a lived life.

So consider this your permission slip. Not to blow up your whole life. Not to do anything reckless or dramatic. Just to do something today, one real concrete thing, that moves you one step closer to the alternate ending you have been imagining.

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