Management and life-planning guru...
Illustration
Management and life-planning guru, Stephen Covey, wrote a book several years ago
called First Things First (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). It's a handbook
for living a joyful and productive life. Perhaps the best line in the book is its subtitle.
Covey declares that the purpose of a human life can be summed up in four essential
points, all of them beginning with the letter "L": "to live, to love, to learn, to leave a
legacy." It's this matter of leaving a legacy that arises out of Genesis 15, which speaks of
Abraham's legacy. Did you know that it's actually healthy to leave a legacy? So say a
group of psychologists who reported a couple years back on the results of a research
project they'd conducted. These researchers tracked 423 retired couples over the course of
five years. Over that time, they asked their subjects about their lives: how much they
typically took from life, and how much they gave back. When the five years were ended,
the researchers discovered that those who had been consistently generous in giving to
others of their time and money were half as likely to have died.
(From Marilyn Elias, "Generous spirit may yield generous life span," in USA Today, 11/2002)
(From Marilyn Elias, "Generous spirit may yield generous life span," in USA Today, 11/2002)
