By Greg Primm
I make lists.
A lot of them.
Right now, I know of a least 6 or 8 lists laying around, waiting to have each item checked off. There’s the list of things to do around the house. There’s the to-do list at work. My own personal “Bucket List”. The grocery list. “The Primm Family list of fun stuff to do”. You get the picture.
So, you can imagine that I was drawn to an article in Inc., a business magazine, about a guy name Joe Cirulli, a health club owner from Gainesville, FL. He’s the classic American entrepreneur who built several businesses starting with nothing. The interesting thing about Joe is the list he created for himself when, at age 21, we was flat broke working for a health club. He made a list of everything he wanted to accomplish in his life. He then read the list aloud every morning and every night.
You can probably figure out what happened next. He accomplished everything on his list in the next 12 years.
The interesting thing about the list to me? It’s only ten items long. When I first read the list, I thought – only 10? I’ve got a lot more things I want to accomplish in my life than 10. I can easily come up with a list of a hundred or more things I want to accomplish. Some are big, some are small. But I’ve got a lot of things I want to do.
After thinking about it for a while, I like Joe’s list better. Ten things. One lifetime. I can handle that.
Focus is the thing that’s lacking. I recall Rick Warren addressing this issue in the Purpose Driven Life:
If you want your life to have impact, focus it! Stop dabbling. Stop trying to do it all! Do less. Prune away even good activities and do only that which matters most. Never confuse activity with productivity. You can be busy without a purpose, but what’s the point?
You see, for too long, I’ve focused on getting the checklist of life completed. I’ve let the busyness of life get in the way of actually living life. When we worry more about getting to the next task and constantly thinking about tomorrow, we lose the most important part of the process – the journey. Warren goes on to say:
When our schedules become overloaded, we start skimming relationally, cutting back on giving the time, energy, and attention that loving relationships require. . . Busyness is a great enemy of relationships. We become preoccupied with making a living, doing our work, paying bills, and accomplishing goals as if these tasks are the point of life. They are not.
So if making a living, working, and accomplishing goals is not the point of life, what are we supposed to be doing? I take the perspective that Christ laid out in Matthew 22:37-40 (NIV)
Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
The point of life: love God and love people. Think about it. If we focus our lives on these two things, we can’t possibly end up unhappy. We may not be wealthy or successful as defined by the world. We may not retire to the beach when we’re 65. We may not have the fancy car, house, or clothes. But a life focused on the right things will inevitably lead to happiness. A life built on the two pillars of God and People will never go wrong.
So where does that leave us? What’s your list? It doesn’t have to be ten items long. Mine probably won’t be. It will consist of 4-5 things I want to accomplish, all centered around the two greatest goals of life: loving God and loving people. I don’t have everything figured out, but I can promise you that if we build our lives around these two things, our lives (and the lives of those around us) will never be the same.
photo credit: rachellake.
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