Crippled CEO Blog #127:
I do something weird on a fairly regular basis.
I mean, I do lots of weird things, but there is one in particular that I’m going to tell you about today.
I imagine a large room filled with all of my friends, my one family member, my employees, my former girlfriends, my former not-quite-girlfriends, my employees, my best customers, my other business associates, and so on.
And in the room is a casket.
I’m inside of it.
And I’m dead.
And this is obviously my funeral.
And in this funeral, one by one, people take turns recounting all of the amazing things that I did for them. They tell stories where I helped with no expectation of anything in return. One by one, they describe me as the most generous person they ever knew — someone who made the world a better place by existing in it.
Through their combined testimonies, bit by bit, they tell the story of my life, and everyone in attendance agrees that it was a life worth being envious of.
Sometimes, I imagine that a video of me plays on a projector, and I tell the story of my life. I imagine what that story would be if my life went just the way I would like it.
I know what a story of my life should be. I don’t know the specific details, because that kind of planning only leads to disappointment, but I know the broad strokes – I know the general themes. I know what I want to be remembered for.
Do you know this? Because if you do, the next step is getting to work on creating that life. If you do, the direction you should go in becomes simple. It doesn’t become easy, but it does become simple.
The story of your life is going to be told at your funeral. There will be a story regardless of whether or not you consciously decided what you wanted your life to be, regardless of whether you were the captain of the voyage, or if you let the winds send you in random directions. If there’s going to be a story either way, why not make it a great one?
What else do you have to do?
(Do you know who’s going to tell some crazy stories at my funeral? Your mom. She’s also going to outlive me because she’s indestructible. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)
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