I recently heard this story from a friend. She entered a guy’s office and stopped in her tracks when she eyed the massive jar of marbles sitting next to his desk.
“What’s the deal with the marbles?”, she asked. Naturally.
He told her he had filled the jar with 15,000 marbles, one for each estimated remaining day of his life. Each morning, he arrived at the office and removed one marble from the jar.
I find this physical representation of each passing day to be fascinating. I mean, where’s he put all the marbles? How’d he find such a big jar? Will he relocate the jar when he retires?
More importantly, what goes through his mind each morning when he removes a marble?
I guess the tangibility of one more day gone must be impactful. I suppose he lives with more intentionality, remembering that today will never come again. Perhaps he’s more choiceful in how he spends his time and where he invests his energy.
In my book, each chapter ends with a series of exercises. And specifically in Chapter Two, I suggest that we characterize our time like something concrete, say… cold, hard cash.
We’re careful about how we spend our money because we see it, and then we don’t. How might we treat all our intangible resources in the same way?
Because the reality is, they are precious gifts that we only get to exercise once. Once a marble is out of the jar, it never gets put back in again.
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#intentionalliving #sociallegacy #purposedriven