This anecdote was taken from the late Jim Rohn’s Book “The Five Major Pieces to The Life Puzzle” and it is a great message on having a sense of urgency.
“It is interesting to watch football teams (American) on a Sunday afternoon. They spend the first fifty eight minutes routinely following the game plane they thought would result in victory. Then something rather remarkable happens. An official walks onto the center of the field and announces what has come to be known as the “two-minute warning.”
What happens in the following one hundred and twenty seconds is frequently awesome. We often witness more intensity, more cleverness, more expended energy, and more action compacted into those final two minutes than occurs in the previous fifty-eight. Why?
A sudden awareness of the sense of imminent defeat, and the birth of a new and sharpened sense of urgency. The participants know that the clock will show no favoritism. The clock will merely do what clocks are supposed to do: They will tick away the seconds until the game is finally over.
The team that finds itself on the threshold of defeat might have shown an extraordinary level of ingenuity and intensity at any time throughout the game. They had the potential and the opportunity to outscore their opponents early in the game. But sometimes, despite their intentions, the players make only an average effort until it is too late. Sometimes the blowing of the whistle announcing the two-minute warning is merely a formality signifying the probability of impending and irreversible defeat.
And so it is with the individual human life. The seconds slip into minutes, and the minutes into hours, and the hours into days until we awaken one morning to discover that the moments of opportunity are gone. We spend our final years reliving dreams that might have been, regretting all that never was and now never will be.
When the game of life is finally over, there is no second chance to correct our errors. The clock that is ticking away the moments of our lives does not care about winners and losers. It does not care about who succeeds or who fails. It does not care about excuses, fairness or equality. The only essential issue is how we played the game.
Regardless of a person’s current age, there is a sense of urgency that should drive them into action now-this very moment. We should be constantly aware of the value of each and every moment of our lives-moments that seem so insignificant that their loss often goes unnoticed.
We still have all the time we need. We still have lots of chances…lots of opportunities…lots of years to show what we can do. For most of us, there will be a tomorrow, a next week, a next month, a next year. But unless we develop a sense of urgency, those brief windows of time will be sadly wasted as were the weeks and months and years before them. There isn’t an endless supply.”
Good stuff Mr. Rohn. You are still influencing from Heaven.
