Time

Man is not created equal. The only thing that is equal is that we all have 1,440 minutes in a day.

Coach Paul Bryant kept an old poem in his wallet that he would read to his new players each fall. It goes like this:

“This is the beginning of a new day. God has given me this day to use as I will. I can waste it or use it for good. What I do today is very important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it. I want it to be a gain, not a loss-good, not evil. Success, not failure in order that I shall not forget the price I paid for it.”

I am of the belief that there are 3 ways to cause family friction: 1. Tell someone how to spend their time. 2. Tell someone how to spend their money. 3. Tell someone how to raise their children.

Think of family issues and see if I can get an “Amen” to that.

“Why don’t you spend more time with your kids instead of working late? That work can wait. Why don’t you do more traveling? Why don’t you do less traveling? Why don’t you take your kids to church every Sunday instead of just when it is convenient? When you get older, you will finally see that the things you thought were important years ago, really weren’t that important.”

“Why don’t you use your spare time doing something fun with your kids outdoors instead of using video games as a built-in babysitter?”

Want an instant powder keg? Tell someone how to spend their money. “Don’t tell me about your money problems. If your family didn’t go out to dinner every other night, you could afford to buy the necessities. Is it really that important that your son must have a pair of $200 Nike’s?”

“I’m just curious: how much have you put aside for your kid’s college education or your own retirement? Winning the lottery shouldn’t be part of your retirement plan.”

Always remember this: when someone asks you how they should raise their kid, they really don’t want an answer. They want you to agree with the way that they are doing it now, not a conflicting view.

TIME takes on different degrees of importance as we grow older. When we were young, we couldn’t wait to grow old. Now that we are old, we wish that time would slow down or even allow us to go back to when we were young.

Time is much like flying on a plane. The bad news is that it flies whether you like it or not. The good news is that you are the pilot. Your training manual is called experience.

There is a thought-provoking advertisement that is on television today: would you rather have lots of money but little time or little money and lots of time? This puts it in perspective. I think of time as a roll of toilet paper: the closer to the end of the roll, the faster it seems to disappear.

Coach John Wooten of UCLA fame said it best: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” His life lessons are reasons that the Bruins set records for the consecutive NCAA basketball titles.

Millionaires can buy all the clocks in the world, but they can’t buy time.

Years ago, I was a member of the Million Dollar Round Table which honors the world’s top producers in the financial industry field. Our convention was in Toronto. (Confession: I qualified but the real reason that I attended was because I was the upright bass player for the MDRT bluegrass band that performed there.)

One of the speakers pulled out a big jar and had a plastic tub of rocks, about the size of golf balls. He put as many rocks as possible in the jar. He put a lid on it and asked: “You would agree that the jar is full, right?” Everyone agreed.

He pulled out another small plastic box that had small pebbles in it. He started filling in the jar with the small pebbles until it was overflowing. “You would agree that the jar is full now, right?” Again, all of us agreed.

He pulled out another plastic tub that was full of sand. He slowly poured the sand in the jar until it would not hold another grain. “Now, surely you would agree that the jar is full now?” Again, we all shook our heads in unison. There is no way he could get anything else in the jar, we thought.

He took the top off the jar and slowly started to pour water from a pitcher into the jar. The water filled in around the sand and rocks. He screwed the lid on the jar. He turned it upside down and shook it. NOW, it was definitely full.

The speaker paused and said:” You see, this jar represents your life. The big rocks represent your family, children and friends. They should take up most of the room in the jar. The smaller pebbles represent your career and job path. They fill in around the big rocks. The sand represents material things that don’t really matter. The water represents everything else that is unimportant.”

“I could have filled the jar up in any order that I wanted to. Here is the problem: if I had started filling the jar with water, there would have been no room for anything else. The same would be true by filling it with only sand.”

“I could have put the small pebbles in next.”

He paused to make a point and he DID: “put the Big Rocks in first, then fill in with the other items if there is room. Don’t ever lose sight of the correct order.”

I can still envision that jar and its meaning after all these years.

As we travel through this journey called life, remember the most important gift that we can give our family and friends can’t be bought at any store. It’s called:

Our TIME.