Living the Significant Life (18 page)

1.
What things do I value most in my life?
Think about this question for as long and as hard as necessary to feel clear and secure with your answers. They should determine where you want to go, who you want to be, what you want to do, and what you want to have.

2.
What have I always wanted to do but have been afraid to try?
This one provides valuable clues to parts of you that you may have buried away or filed under
N
for “no possibility.” It puts you in touch with essentials: your values and your life purpose. Children are often asked a wonderfully simple question that gets to the heart of this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Sometimes that’s a good question to ask ourselves!

“I don’t understand. I talked to him on Sunday, and he seemed fine.”

David Morgan sat on the bed in his dorm room, talking with his father on the phone.

“He was fine,” his father, Patrick, said. “The doctor said it was a brain aneurysm that burst. He didn’t even know he had it. He was dead by the time he hit the floor, so at least he didn’t have to suffer a long illness. We can be grateful for that.”

“OK. I just—you’ll let me know when you get a flight scheduled for me? I can leave anytime, so just tell me when,” David said.

“Sure, either your mother or I will call you back in a bit.”

David sat on the bed for a long time after ending the call. Grandpa was dead. It was so hard to believe.

David and his grandfather, Dan Morgan, had been close from the beginning. David was the first grandchild; Dan had doted on him from the day he was born, and the boy had adored his grandfather just as much. Dan had taught him to fish, patiently helping him bait the hook and showing him how to remove the fish without getting finned. He’d attended David’s baseball and basketball games, cheering louder than anyone else in the stands. When David became a teenager, Dan sometimes took him for weekend trips, and David had reveled in the individual attention now that his younger sister and brother were demanding more of his parents’ time. When Patrick had driven David to college, Dan had come along for the five-hundred-mile trip—just the three guys. Now Dan was gone.

David remembered the last conversation he’d had with his grandfather. After the usual rundown of what each of them had done recently, Dan had said, “So your dad says you declared a business major. I’m glad you made a decision.”

“Yeah, well, I pretty much had to do something. If I didn’t declare a major this semester, I wouldn’t be on track to graduate on time, so I had to pick something.”

“Are you not happy with your decision?”

“I don’t know. It’s fine, I guess.”

“What are you thinking you’ll do after graduation? Go to grad school and get an MBA? Maybe go to law school? Do you have a field in mind?”

“No, I haven’t really thought about it. I’ve got time.”

“Yes, but not as much as you think. It’s easy to let time slip by. You’re going to need to get a grip on this pretty soon.”

David hated these conversations. He’d had a few of them before when his parents had pressed him about declaring a major, and again with his academic adviser. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He made good grades. He had a B average without trying all that hard, and he even worked twenty hours a week. He was doing fine, and he’d figure out the future when it got here.

Dan had dropped the subject when he noticed that David was getting a little testy, but not before making one final comment: “All I’m saying is that if you don’t take time to think about what you want out of life, it’s awfully easy to wake up one day and find that you’ve just drifted along and you’re someplace you don’t want to be. That’s what happens when you don’t set goals.”

David replayed the conversation in his head while flying home the next day. It made him feel uncomfortable, so he picked up the magazine from his lap and went back to reading it.

The next two days went by quickly. Family members arrived, there were long hours of greeting friends and acquaintances at the funeral home, and finally the funeral service took place on Friday. David felt at loose ends when all the activity died down, so he was happy to accept when Patrick asked him to help go through some of Dan’s belongings on Saturday. He wasn’t scheduled to fly back to school until the next day, and he had the feeling his dad would like the company as he sorted through so many memories.

They decided to tackle Dan’s home office first. It was David’s favorite room in the house. As a child, he’d often looked in amazement at the important-looking books that lined the walls. Once he asked his grandfather if he’d read all of them. “Yep, every one. Some of them twice,” Dan had replied. It felt strange to be in that room without him.

“There sure were a lot of people at the funeral home,” David said. “I didn’t realize Grandpa knew so many people.”

“Well, he lived here for more than forty years,” Patrick responded. “He moved here right after law school and set up his practice. I guess he had thousands of clients over the years, and of course he knew most of the other attorneys in town, so a lot of them came to pay their respects. Then there were people from church, people he’d worked with at Habitat for Humanity and other places where he volunteered, people from his Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. You’re right, he knew a lot of people.”

“That guy who did the eulogy was interesting. I liked the way he talked about all of Grandpa’s accomplishments without making him sound like some kind of saint. I didn’t realize Grandpa had done so much, or maybe I’d just forgotten a lot of things.”

“He never slowed down, that’s for sure.”

David paused for a moment. “I guess he had a good life.”

“I think so, and he seemed to think so. He always had a goal, and when he accomplished one, he’d move on to the next one. He said it kept him young,” Patrick said. “Hey, why don’t you go through the desk while I look through this file cabinet?”

David fell silent as he began sorting through the desk. It contained the usual items: pens, notepads, an address book, office supplies, and a financial ledger. When he got to the bottom drawer on the right, he pulled out a black leather-bound notebook that looked somewhat like the ledger he’d come across earlier.

“What do you want me to do with this, Dad?” he asked.

“What is it? More financial records?”

“I guess so,” David said as he flipped it open. “No, actually it’s something else.”

The volume turned out to be a notebook filled with page after page of his grandfather’s familiar handwriting. He turned to the first page. At the top, Dan had written “My Goals” with the date April 6, 1949, underneath. A list followed, numbered one through fifteen.

Next to the number one, Dan had written, “Graduate in the top 1 percent of my class.”

Number two read “Go to Notre Dame Law School and graduate with honors.”

The list went on.

“Read one book every week in addition to my school assignments.”

“Learn to play the saxophone.”

“Visit every continent.”

David flipped through the book quickly. “Look at this, Dad.”

“Oh, it’s his book of goals. We need to keep this. It’s a treasure.”

“You know about this?”

“Sure, I used to see him writing in it sometimes when I was growing up. I’d forgotten about it though.”

“The first page is dated 1949. How old was he then?”

“Let me think. He graduated from law school in 1958, so he must have finished college in 1955. I guess that would have put him in high school in 1949. A sophomore, maybe?”

“This is pretty amazing. He knew what he wanted to do way back then.”

David moved to the large wingback chair in the corner and began to read the book more carefully. There was a new entry in 1951, coinciding with Dan’s graduation from high school, and another two years later. The entries continued at intervals of three to five years, the last one dated the previous summer.

No items were crossed off any of the lists, but David noticed that there was a small, neat checkmark next to nearly all of them. That’s how he had noted his accomplishments, David thought. Once an item received its checkmark, it was dropped from the next list while goals not yet attained were carried over.

David was fascinated. Each goal was stated in concrete terms. Many had self-imposed deadlines. “Read the complete works of Shakespeare by Dec. 31, 1964.” “Complete five church mission trips before turning fifty.” “Go skydiving on sixtieth birthday.” Check, check, check.

Number twelve on the list dated 1972 was “Take an oil painting class.” David looked up at the framed painting that hung over the desk. “I painted that myself,” he remembered hearing his grandfather say with pride.

As he read through the list, David found himself remembering the eulogy he’d heard the day before. He’d been impressed with all that his grandfather had accomplished and all the people he’d touched. Now it was beginning to make sense. Offhand, David could match almost a dozen items on the various goals lists with accomplishments that had been mentioned during the eulogy. None of it had happened by accident. His grandfather had designed his own life by deciding what he wanted and making it happen.

“Is it okay if I keep this?” he asked.

“Sure,” Patrick answered. “Let me make a photocopy of it, and then it’s yours. I think he’d really like you to have it.”

Back at school, David was immediately consumed with work. He had an accounting test to make up, and he was behind on his reading for nearly every class, so he threw himself into catching up. But he kept his grandfather’s notebook on his desk, and every now and then, when he needed a break, he’d pick it up and thumb through it. “Take David to his first major league game.” Check. “Take Gail to Italy for our thirty-fifth anniversary.” Check. “Become president of the state bar association.” Check.

One night around midnight, three weeks after his grandfather’s death, David was about to turn out the light and get into bed when he had a thought. He rummaged through the small dormitory desk until he found a spiral-bound notebook from a class he’d taken last semester. Most of it was full, but there were several blank pages at the back. At the top of one page, he wrote “My Goals,” followed by the date. This would be okay until he could get to the store and buy a proper journal.

TIPS FROM PETER

Once I had to be in San Francisco for a 7 a.m. breakfast presentation to two hundred representatives of Primerica Financial Services. The meeting was two and a half hours away from where I was staying at the time. So up and off I went, arriving at the same time the sun came up—and there were twelve people in the room.

Not two hundred. Twelve.

Okay, I said to myself, what’s great about this? And my inner self began to grumble, “Well, up at four in the morning—pitch black, cold, damp—I drive two and a half hours. I expect two hundred people, and there are only twelve! Grumble, grumble . . . Hey! There is nothing great about this!”

But I knew from experience what this really meant. It meant that I had to ask the question again in a way that would get my attention. So I screamed it—inside my head, of course.

And then I realized that what was so great was the opportunity I had to inspire a dozen people to break through to new levels of passion, happiness, and success—which I would have slept through if I wasn’t there.

I had my answer, but then an interesting thing happened—and it happens ninety-nine times out of a hundred when we ask ourselves this question. The “What’s great about this?” answers kept coming.

Having only twelve people enabled me to be much more intimate with each person in the group. I could give each person individual attention, and we could all take more time on the points of my presentation, which would involve everyone more and make us more powerful as a group, because the quality of our relationships would raise the level of the work we were doing together two or three times what it would have been if the group were larger. We would be able to go deeper and higher, and the people would be able to interact more with me and among themselves, which always supercharges a group and results in bonding the individuals together as a team. I knew that when that happened, they would go back to their friends and families inspired and charged up, and that would cause a daisy-chain effect that would spread the word in a geometric way and eventually touch hundreds, even thousands of people, when all I did was meet with twelve. Wow!

TIPS FROM PETER

I was flying one day from Sacramento to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The flight took off at 9 a.m. from California, and by 9:20 the man in the seat next to me was on his second Bloody Mary! It looked like it was going to be an interesting trip.

When the plane touched down in Florida, my seatmate was, to say the least, sloshed. I was in Good Samaritan mode, so I helped navigate him off the plane down to baggage claim, where we soon discovered that his bags were not to be found. I escorted this fellow over to lost baggage, where he promptly went ballistic, heaping loud, slurred verbal abuse on the airline attendant.

She was a saint. Calm and composed, she listened intently, nodding her head and apologizing to this angry, obnoxious, drunk passenger.

When my seatmate walked away to gain strength for another assault, I said to the attendant, “How do you deal with people like this all the time?”

She replied, “He’s right. We shouldn’t have lost his bags. And besides, see the sign?” she pointed above our heads. “It says Lost Bags. People don’t come to me to thank us for their luggage arriving safely!”

The man returned and started in on her again. She calmly reached out her hand, put it on his arm, and said gently, yet with amazing strength, “Sir, currently there are two people in the world who care about your lost bags—and one of them is rapidly losing interest.” She was incredible.

She finally located his bags, informed him they were on a flight that would arrive in an hour, took all his information down, and promised that his luggage would be delivered the moment it arrived. She would see to it personally.

I got my new friend into a cab, went back into the airport, and took a moment to tell that woman what a contribution she had made to me, what a statement she made about the power of attitude, and what a living example she was of servant leadership. I’ve never forgotten it or her.