Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five interconnected sites.
How much time do you spend on your back up plan?
Is your future dream your backup plan? So like, when you retire, then are you planning to get cracking on the next stage of your life?
Too late!
Much too late.
As I was sharing the Mid Life Celebration vision with my banker two days ago, it simply came out of my mouth:
“People think balance is either/or, when actually, it’s all four. Too much focus in this one makes you a geek, too much here makes you a jock, here, a monk, and here, a king.”
How much is enough?
Was speaking with my Banker friend yesterday.
As he was listening to the vision of Mid Life Celebration, you could see and feel his interest in it’s long-term dream.
The Mid Life Celebration dream is so far out there, it seems impossible.
And yet, at it’s very core, it’s so ridiculously simple and painfully obvious.
It’s the solution to life.
The Banker reminded me that “wealth” in one area doesn’t mean overall wealth, doesn’t mean balanced wealth.
And without balanced wealth, what do you think you get out of life?
At what cost will we agree to make significant change?
This question is based on the painfully obvious assumption that most adults are searching for meaning in at least one, if not all, of these big life choices:
What makes this nearly impossible for well-intentioned adults is how overwhelming it feels to begin making life changing transformational changes.
Because of this, most give up, even though they never admit it.
“It is no simple matter to pause in the midst of one’s maturity, when life is full of function, to examine what are the principles which control that functioning.” — Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
We reap what we sow.
Blinding flash of the obvious, eh?
I caught up to him on Saturday morning, 14 minutes into it, at the two-mile mark. We still had 1.1 miles to go. He looked like a good runner, and probably in my age-group.
It would be about three more minutes before I made a calculated move. Up the hill. Not a big hill, but at the 2.5 mile mark, any hill seems big.
“When you ran up that hill, I knew there was no way I’d catch you”, he said.
Out of nowhere.
That’s where it came from.
After the race, we were just talking about running, getting in shape, and the reasons we do it and the common struggles to stay motivated.
He had lost 50 pounds. “Congratulations!”, I said.
Then.
Out of nowhere.
“After our son died, I gained a lot of weight. It was three years before I decided to lose the weight”, he said.
“What happened?”, I asked, hesitantly, but unafraid.
His son was in college, but home and riding in a friend’s car.
The friend crashed, and his son died tragically.
It happened near their home.