Who Will Cry When You Die\?: Life Lessons From The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari pdfdrive com

33.
See Your Children as Gifts
On Father’s Day, my son Colby brought home a handmade card from
school. On the front of it was his small handprint and inside the card, above
a little photograph of my child, were these words:
Sometimes you get discouraged because I am so small And always leave
my fingerprints on furniture and walls. But every day I’m growing—I’ll be
grown up someday And all those tiny handprints will surely fade away.
So here’s a final handprint, just so you can recall Exactly how my fingers
looked, when I was very small. Love, Colby
Children grow so very quickly. It seems like just yesterday that I stood in
the delivery room waiting for the birth of my son, and then two years later, for
the birth of my daughter, Bianca. It is easy to promise yourself you will spend
more time with your kids “when things slow down at work” or “when I get that
big promotion” or “next year when I get a little more time.” But if you don’t act
on life, life has a habit of acting on you. The weeks slip into months, the months
slip into years and before you know it, that little child is now an adult with a
family of her own. The greatest gift you can give to your children is the gift of
your time. And one of the greatest gifts you will ever give yourself is that of
enjoying your kids and seeing them for what they truly are: the small miracles of
life.
In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran makes the point far more eloquently than I
ever could when he writes, “Your children are not your children. They are the
sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

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34.
Enjoy the Path, Not Just the Reward
In my work, I am often asked to teach people how to set and achieve goals.
When I ask my audiences, “Why is it so important that you realize your goals?”
they often answer, “Because getting the things I want will make me happy.”
While there is an element of truth in this answer—getting the things we want
often does bring a measure of joy into our lives—it somehow misses the mark.
The real value of setting and achieving goals lies not in the rewards you receive
but in the person you become as a result of reaching your goals. This simple
distinction has helped me to enjoy the path of life while, at the same time,
staying focused on meeting my personal and professional objectives.
As one of my favorite philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, observed, “The
reward for a thing well done, is to have done it.” When you achieve a goal,
whether that goal was to be a wiser leader or to become a better parent, you will
have grown as a person in the process. Often, you will not be able to detect this
growth, but the growth will have occurred. So rather than savoring only the
rewards that have flowed from the achievement of that goal, celebrate the fact
that the process of reaching your destination has improved the person you are.
You have built self-discipline, discovered new things about your abilities and
manifested more of your human potential. These are reward in and of
themselves.

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