Live Deliberately: Life Has No Dress Rehearsal
Created at: September 1, 2025
You must never behave as if the life you are living is a practice run. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From Dress Rehearsal to Opening Night
Adichie’s admonition abolishes the comforting fiction that today doesn’t count. The metaphor of a “practice run” implies low stakes, a chance to reset the stage before the audience arrives; yet life offers no such curtain call. Every choice, from the messages we send to the causes we ignore, becomes part of the premiere. Thus, instead of hoarding courage for a later date, the line urges us to act with the gravitas of opening night—imperfect but present, visible, and accountable.
Owning Your Narrative
This urgency aligns with Adichie’s wider preoccupation with stories. In her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009), she shows how partial narratives can shrink a life. If we behave as though we are merely rehearsing, we risk living under someone else’s script—deferred ambitions, inherited expectations, and muted identities. By stepping into authorship now, we broaden the plot: not a tidy fable for later, but a complex arc that unfolds because we choose to tell it in the present tense.
Mortality as Clarifying Lens
Seen another way, the absence of a practice run is simply the presence of finitude. Stoic writers like Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, pressed “memento mori” not to depress but to focus. Likewise, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973) argues that confronting mortality can sharpen meaning. This perspective doesn’t demand frantic bucket lists; rather, it invites a deliberate calibration of attention: spend hours where your values live, not where your anxieties hide.
Why We Postpone: Cognitive Traps
Still, we procrastinate—often for reasons that feel rational. Research on the planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 1994) shows we reliably underestimate how long meaningful work will take. Present bias nudges us toward small, immediate comforts while our larger aims wait. And the end-of-history illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson, 2013) tempts us to believe the future will be the right moment to start. Yet regret studies suggest otherwise: Gilovich and Medvec (1995) found that, over time, people mourn the roads not taken more than the missteps attempted. Deferral poses the steeper psychic cost.
Choose Courage Over Perfection
If life isn’t a rehearsal, perfectionism loses its alibi. We cannot keep polishing backstage while the audience grows restless. Rather than waiting to be unafraid, we can act alongside fear—what Brené Brown calls “daring greatly” (2012), a posture of engaged vulnerability. Imperfect motion compounds; immaculate intentions do not. This shift reframes mistakes as tuition: costly at times, but cheaper than the silent accumulation of untaken chances.
Translate Values into Daily Design
Urgency needs architecture. Implementation intentions—if-then plans identified by Peter Gollwitzer (1999)—help convert values into concrete actions (“If it’s 7 a.m., then I write 300 words”). Small systems lower the activation energy of meaning. Likewise, aligning time with identity (e.g., scheduling calls to distant relatives, or weekly civic volunteering) turns purpose into habit. Over weeks, these modest, repeatable moves become the evidence that our days are not placeholders but the substance of a life.
The Communal Stakes of Showing Up
Living as if it counts also matters to others. In Americanah (2013), Adichie’s characters take risks—migration, love, public writing—that ripple through communities. Our choices likewise transmit norms: what we speak up about, whom we mentor, how we vote or build. By refusing the rehearsal mindset, we model agency, thereby enlarging what seems possible to those watching from the wings. In this sense, personal decisiveness becomes civic oxygen.
A Practical Rehearsal Worth Keeping
Ironically, the only rehearsal that helps is reflection. A weekly review, a short letter to your future self, or a premortem (Gary Klein, 2007)—imagining a project’s failure in advance—offers feedback without postponement. Thus we learn mid-performance rather than delaying the show. Ultimately, Adichie’s line invites a gentle, steady audacity: make the scene you’re in count, revise as you go, and remember that today is not preparation for life—it is life.