Last Lecture

Looking back on my life, the one thing that I wish I had done differently is making decisions.  Not the decisions that I made, but the way that I went about making decisions.  I would encourage all of you to learn how to make decisions and then stick to them.  This has been the single largest area of my life that I have lost time.  When we think about it, time is the most precious resource that anyone can have.  If I had learned to make decisions about what I wanted in life earlier, I would have had more time to pursue those goals.

All of the best things in my life have come from when I was decisive and went after what I wanted.  My biggest triumph was getting my wife to agree to marry me.  From the moment that I met her I realized that she was the one for me.  Because I made that decision, I was able to focus my attention on getting her hand.  We said our marriage vows nine months after meeting.

The next most important thing that happened in my life came from the decision that my wife and I made to have children.  I was married the day before I turned twenty-one and was a father by twenty-two and a half.

Among my biggest failures include things that I did not make a decision on for some time.  I could not decide what I wanted to get a degree in and so I put off my education until I had an abrupt change in my career.  Because I did not have a degree, it was difficult to reenter the work force in my previous position as a store general manager.

My wife and I made a decision after I had lost my job to look at moving away from Illinois.  We realized that living there had served a purpose, but we no longer needed to be in that part of the country.  We decided to move to Idaho and it has made a world of difference for my family.  When I compare the value set that people in our neighborhood have in Idaho as opposed to the values that our previous neighbors had in Illinois, it is like night and day. 

I realize that not everyone will make the same decisions as me, and that is OK.  The most important thing that they can do is to make decisions.  Don’t spend all of your time trying to analyze the outcomes.  Trust those that care about you to help you make good decisions.  Listen to your loved ones.  They can give you a perspective that you may have never considered before.  At the minimum you will have strengthened a relationship with someone important to you and that will help as you encounter difficulties in your life’s journey.  That is a good place to start.