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“Your greatest possession is the twenty-four hours you have directly ahead of you.”

A thought by John C. Maxwell from his book, Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (p. 14). Center Street. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

God creates every 24 hours for us to live and to make a difference and what he creates and gives to us is of extreme importance to him and needs to be to us.

John asks, “How will you spend it? Will you give in to pressure or focus on priorities? Will you allow pointless emails, unimportant tasks, telemarketers, interruptions, and other distractions to consume your day? Or will you take complete responsibility for how you spend your time, take control of the things you can, and make today yours? If you don’t decide how your day will be spent, someone else will.”

He goes on, “When I discovered that I needed to change my approach to my day and my career, I started by asking myself three critical questions:

“1. What is required of me? Any realistic assessment of priorities in any area of life must start with a realistic assessment of what a person must do. For you to be a good spouse or parent, what is required of you? To satisfy your employer, what must you do? (If you lead others, then the question should be, What must you personally do that cannot be delegated to anyone else?) When ordering priorities, always start with the requirement question and give it careful thought before moving on to the next question.

“2. What gives me the greatest return? As you progress in your career, you begin to discover that some activities yield a much higher return for the effort than others do. (Anyone who hasn’t discovered that probably isn’t progressing in his career!) The next place to focus your attention is on those high-return activities.

“3. What gives me the greatest reward? If you do only what you must and what is effective, you will be highly productive, but you may not be content. I think it’s also important to consider what gives you personal satisfaction. However, I find that some people want to start with the reward question and go no further than that. No one can be successful who doesn’t possess the discipline to take care of the first two areas before adding the third.”

He then says, “Philosopher William James said, ‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.’ If you bring your priorities into focus by answering those three questions, you will have a much better idea of what you should overlook.”

This is also very important for me as a retired man to see.  My life isn’t over and there is something that God has created this day for me to do.


So, how will we spend today, our greatest possession?
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