About a year ago, my friend Lisa Hope Tilstra asked me what I planned to do with “my one wild and precious life.” I knew I had to have a great answer for her.
Lisa hosts a podcast called Make Life Less Difficult, where she invites people from every corner of life to share their stories and their hard-won wisdom. And for some reason she asked me to be a guest on one of her episodes.
She’s a phenomenal storyteller, the kind of person who can make a story about a butter knife sound like a parable. Lisa and I go back to high school, so sitting down with her felt less like an interview and more like catching up over coffee. But there’s a tradition on her show, and every guest knows it’s coming. Lisa starts the podcast by reading a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” first published in Oliver’s 1992 collection New and Selected Poems:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Then she just waits.
I’d listened to enough episodes to know what was coming, and it was, without question, the scariest part of the whole recording. Not the microphone, not the mild dread of hearing my own voice played back to me (I got over that long again), just that one line. Everything else about the conversation was easy. That question required an actual answer, not a clever dodge.
You can go listen to the episode to hear what I said in the moment. But here’s what I can tell you a year later: I have not stopped thinking about that line since.
Your One Wild and Precious Life Has a Deadline
Here’s the uncomfortable math. If you’re lucky, you get somewhere between 80 and 90 years on this planet. Subtract childhood, subtract the years you spend figuring out who you even are, subtract sleep, and what’s left is a surprisingly small runway for actually doing the things you dream about.
Life does not care about your dreams. I want to say that gently but also honestly: life isn’t plotting against you, but it isn’t rooting for you either. It doesn’t pause so you can catch up. It doesn’t nudge you toward your goals out of the goodness of its heart. Left completely unmanaged, life will happily carry you along like a sailboat with no rudder, mostly at the mercy of whatever wind happens to blow through that particular week.
That’s the part Mary Oliver’s line captures so well, and it’s easy to miss on the first read. It doesn’t ask what you hope to do with your life. It asks what you plan to do. Hope is lovely. Hope also doesn’t show up to the meeting, write the check, or set the alarm clock. Plans do that.
This Is Wholistic Productivity in One Sentence
If you’ve been around here for a while, you know Wholistic Productivity exists because I got tired of watching capable, ambitious people treat their lives like a single overloaded to-do list. We chase professional wins while our personal relationships quietly go hungry. We finally get the personal side of life in order only to realize we never left room for the purpose-driven work that actually makes us feel alive.
Your one wild and precious life isn’t just your career. It’s not just your family, either, or just that passion project you keep meaning to start. It’s all three, running at the same time, competing for the same 24 hours you got today and will get tomorrow. A real plan has to hold space for all of it, or it isn’t really a plan for your life. It’s a plan for one slice of it, and sooner or later the other parts of you notice they’re being left out.
That’s the whole philosophy in a nutshell: dream big enough to be worth chasing, plan smart enough to actually get there, and live fully enough that when someone finally asks you Lisa’s question, you’re not scrambling for an answer.
So, What’s the Plan?
I’m not going to pretend I have this fully figured out. Nobody does, no matter what they post on Instagram. But I’ve stopped treating “someday” as a plan, and I’ve started treating my calendar like it actually matters…because it does.
So here’s my question for you, the one Lisa asked me, the one I still think about most weeks while I’m doing my Sunday Strategy: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Not what you hope. What you plan.
Grab a notebook, open your planner, do whatever it is you do when you’re ready to get honest with yourself. Your life is wild. It’s precious. And it is absolutely worth a plan.