The video below is Steve Jobs’ Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005.  He says that every day he asks himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”  Whenever the answer is no for too many days in a row he says he knows he needs to change something.  WOW!  Talk about thinking differently!  The whole speech is amazing but I specifically love that quote regarding his daily mindset.  I recently came across the article below in Success Magazine and I thought about how we are often reminded of our own mortality after such a public death and funeral as what we recently saw with Michael Jackson’s.  Here are parts of that article by John C. Maxwell from the June edition of Success Magazine

People Will Summarize Your Life in One Sentence-Pick It Now
‘What do you want your legacy to be?  What would you do if you knew you only had a short amount of time left to make an impact?  Eventually our lives will be summarized in a single sentence.  What do you want yours to be?
Clare Boothe Luce cleverly called this your “life sentence.”  It’s the one sentence that you would like people to say about you when your life is over.  If you are intentional about creating your legacy, people at your funeral won’t have to wonder what your life sentence was.
What Do You Want to Be Known For?
I encourage you to begin the process of writing your life sentence.  Yes, this will take some time and thought on your part, and it will cause you to ask yourself what do I really want my life to be known for?  What do I want my legacy to be?
Sociologist Anthony Campolo tells about a study in which 50 people over the age of 95 were asked one question:  “If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?”  Three things consistently emerged:
• Reflect more
• Risk more
• Do more things that would live on after I am dead
If you want to create an intentional legacy, you need to rethink your priorities.
Live Life Fully
Too many people make their life an intermission.  Instead, you need to make it a mission.  John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, has been a close friend and mentor to me for some time, and he shared with me a lesson about living life to the fullest that has stuck with me for years.
Coach Wooden knew his players, and he could tell when they weren’t giving 100 percent at practice.  Instead of calling them out where everyone could hear, he would go over and put his arms around them and say, “I know you’re probably tired or you were up late studying for exams, and I know what you’re thinking.  You think tomorrow you’ll come back and you’ll give a little extra, and you’ll try to make up for what you didn’t do today.  I just want you to understand you can never give more than 100 percent.  So if you give me 60 percent today, you can’t give me 140 percent tomorrow.  If you give 60 percent today, you leave 40 percent on the table.  And you’ll never get it back.”’

All the best!

 
Tim Schmidt