I received this among the Christmas  messages, and thought this is a great story.  This is a note that helps us get the proper perspective on what is important in our lives.

I guess it is always good, in life as in business, to quantify so that you can measure and improve!

I still have ( on my own counting and based on the averages he put down) over 1,700 marbles.  How many do you have, and what do you intend to do with it?   You don’t have to buy physical marbles. There are now lots of computer software that can do that virtually. But the thing is, it is good to be reminded constantly!

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“Let me tell you something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.”

And this is my theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average personlives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900 which is the numberof Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now stick with me , I’m getting to the important part.”

“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail. And by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.”

“So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round-up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.”

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away.”

“I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

What do you think?