The four corners of the room

Your Primary Aim

I’d like you to imagine that you are about to attend one of the most important occasions of your life. It will be held in a room sufficiently large to seat all of your friends, family, and business associates – anyone and everyone to whom you are important and who is important to you. The walls are draped with lovely muted tapestries. The lighting is subdued, soft, casting a warm glow on the faces of your expectant guests. Their chairs are handsomely upholstered in a fabric that matches the tapestries. At the front of the room is a beautifully decorated table with candles burning at either end. On the table, in the center, is the object of everyone’s attention. A large, shinning, ornate box. A coffin.

And in the coffin is you.

Now, listen. From the four corners of the room comes a tape recording of your voice. You’re addressing your guests. You’re telling them the story of your life.

How would you like that story to go?

What would you like to able to say about your life after it’s too late to do anything about it?

If you were to write a script for the tape to be played for the mourners at your funeral, what would you want it to say? That’s your Primary Aim. 

After you actually think about what you would want the script to say, all you need to do is make it come true. All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.

With no clear picture of how you want your life to be, how on earth could you begin to live it?
Great people have a vision of their lives which they practice emulating each and every day. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future in the present. And each and every day they compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.

I believe it’s true that the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between fully living and just existing.