Imagine for a moment walking into a church to celebrate the life of someone close to you. You’re seated now and watching others stream in and be seated. You notice a good number mutual friends and acquaintances, but you’re astonished to see your family being unexpectedly seated on the front row. As you look down at your program, your hands start to shake as you notice your own picture above your birthdate and a date one week prior.
Once the shock dissipates, you’re able to read the names of your friends and family chosen to speak about you and the life you lived. Shock gives way to curiosity and then to a mild fear. You see your daughter & sons and your best friends listed to speak, and questions start to leap to the forefront of your mind.
What will they say? Who will they say I was? What will they say was most important to me? What moments will they remember most? What will they laugh at? What would they say was my most important investment? Would it be the time I spent with them?
If it really was your funeral, what would you WANT to be said?
Steven Covey starts chapter two of his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with this exact scenario. It’s a scenario I find extremely helpful to think through when working on a financial plan, my own plan or one of my clients’ plans.
Imagine starting with the celebration of life above when planning your financial future. If you could use the resources you’ve been entrusted with to make an incredible impact in the lives of those most important to you, would that be worth planning for? If you could start with the end of your life and plan backwards, what difference would it make in your life now? Would you change anything? How you spend your time? How you spend your money? How you save or what you give or what you invest in others?
Covey calls this the principle that “all things are created twice.” Whether it be a sandwich or a house or a life, everything is created once in the mind and a second time in reality.
Our family is currently working on plans to build a home with a mother-in-law suite attached. We’ve purchased a couple of acres of land near town and have started working with a builder and an architect on the look and features we’d like in our home. It has been quite a bit of work to create the home we’re hoping for, but it will ultimately be worth it. We started with the number of rooms we’d like and the purpose of each room. Once drawn, we cut the rooms and their dimensions out and started to arrange them into a layout we liked.
After our layout was finished, the architect to drew specific plans complete with windows, doors, walls, etc. Our builder and architect have been instrumental in turning our hand drawn floor plan into a real blueprint. We first created a plan in our mind, what we were ultimately hoping for, and then worked with professionals to bring our vision into reality.
Intentional planning won’t guarantee that nice things are said about you at your celebration of life, but it will allow you to make intentional investments of time in those people and causes most important to you. And that planning will allow to live the life you intend to live, on purpose.
What are you creating once or twice right now? We’d love to help if you’re looking for an architect.