Anthony Burgess was 40 when he learned he had a brain tumor that would kill him within a year. He knew he had a battle on his hands. He was completely broke at the time, and he had nothing to leave to his soon-to-be widowed wife, Lynne.
Burgess had never been a professional novelist in his early life, but he had always known the potential in himself to be a writer. So, with the sole purpose of leaving his wife some royalties, he put a piece of paper into a typewriter and began to write. He had no certainty that he would even be published, but he could think of nothing else to do. “It was January 1960,” he says, “and according to the prophecy, I had winter and spring and summer to live, and would die with the fall of a leaf.”
By this time Burgess was writing furiously, completing five and a half novels before the year was out—(nearly the entire lifetime output of E.M. Forster, and almost twice that of J.D. Salinger.) But Burgess did not die. His cancer had gone into remission and then disappeared altogether. In his long and full life as a novelist (he is best known for A Clockwork Orange ), he wrote more than 70 books, but without his death sentence from cancer, he might not have written at all. Many of us are like Anthony Burgess, hiding greatness within, waiting for some external emergency to bring it out. I believe that is why my father and many of his generation spoke so fondly of World War II. During the war, they lived in an emergency that brought out the best in them.
If we don’t pay attention to this phenomenon—how crises inspire our best efforts—we tend to mindlessly create lives based on comfort. We try to design easier and easier ways of living, so that we won’t be surprised or challenged by anything. People who have a gift for self-motivation can reverse this process and inject a remarkable sense of “World War II” vitality into their lives. Athletes do it all the time.
“How do you feel about tonight’s game with the Trail Blazers?” Porter once asked basketball star Kobe Bryant. “There’s a war out there,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. We don’t have to wait for something tragic or dangerous to attack us from the outside. We can find the same vitality by challenging ourselves from the inside. A useful self-motivational exercise is to ask yourself what you would do if you were experiencing Anthony Burgess’s early struggles. “If I had one year to live, how would I live differently? What exactly would I do?”