Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success. – Pablo Picasso
As we now enter the last quarter of 2018, many businesses, business people and organizations have or will soon begin the process of strategic planning and goal setting for the coming year. Certainly in the entrepreneurial world, it is well accepted that an intelligent plan is the first step to success. Simply put, the person who plans knows where he or she is going, knows what progress has been made toward that destination, and has a pretty good idea of when they will arrive. Planning is the road map to your destination. If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that setting, having, and working toward goals, while essential to our success in any endeavor, is not a process we naturally gravitate to or embrace with fervor. That’s true in business, but even more so in our personal and spiritual lives. Without proper planning we kind of flounder around like the clichéd, “ship without a rudder.” We might still go a long way, but we could just as well end up going in circles too. That leads me to the point of this week’s Inspiration – If planning is such a crucial component to success, why is it that so many of us don’t put that same effort and frequency into planning and goal setting for our personal and spiritual lives?
Some years back, while attending a weekly Bible study that was primarily made up of businessmen, we deviated from our norm of Biblical scholarship and began studying a book entitled One Month to Live. It was authored by Kerry and Chris Shook and is published by Waterbrook Press (www.onemonthtolive.com).
The guiding premise of the book is this simply question: If you had one month to live, would you do or change anything?
Like it or not, each of us will not get out of this world alive. We are mortal and none of us knows exactly when our final moment will arrive.
[We] have no idea what our life will be like tomorrow. [We] are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears. – James 4:14.
So, assuming you had only one month to live, and assuming all of your faculties would remain intact for that period of time, would you do or change anything? Some, perhaps would engage in a quantum effort to make massive changes while for others there might only be a desire to change a few things on the periphery of their life experience. Maybe others wouldn’t change a thing. Whatever our answer might be, undertaking the exercises detailed in the book is an extremely valid contemplation for all of us.
Once we begin considering that pivotal question of what we would do if we knew we only had thirty days to live, the next step propounded by the authors is for us to begin applying a thirty-day challenge. As they put it: “Your time on earth is limited. Shouldn’t you start making the most of it? If you knew you had only one month to live, you would likely look at everything from a different perspective. Many of the things that you do now that seem so important would immediately become meaningless. You would have total clarity about what matters most, and you wouldn’t hesitate to be spontaneous and risk your heart. You wouldn’t wait until tomorrow to do what you need to do today. The way you lived your last month would very likely be the way you wished you had lived your whole life. If that is so, it begs two questions: Why? and What are you waiting for?”
Adopting a One Month to Live philosophy challenges us all to start living our lives earnestly. The book offers four universal principles that we should adopt right now such that we create a one-month-to-live lifestyle that will guide us to live life abundantly for the rest of our worldly days, however many those may be. Those principles are:
- to live passionately,
- to love completely,
- to learn humbly,
- to leave boldly.
The remainder of One Month to Live concentrates on each of these principles. The book is divided up into four sections or “weeks” allowing the reader to digest, imprint, formulate, personalize, and implement each of the four principles over a one month period. I encourage you to consider taking this four week journey yourself. Time is precious.
What are you waiting for?
Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it, I say! Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows. – Pope Paul VI
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
Bill